Continental Airlines « SchemaLogic

Continental Airlines

How Continental Airlines Is Using Metapoint To Improve Information Governance And Compliance

An early adopter of new technology, Continental Airlines uses the latest information technology to keep the company on the cutting edge. By deploying MetaPoint, Continental greatly reduces the cost of eDiscovery inquiries by making information easier to find and govern across the enterprise

Continental Company profile
Continental Airlines is the world’s fifth largest airline. Continental, together with Continental Express and Continental Connection, has more than 2,750 daily departures throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, serving 133 domestic and 132 international destinations. More than 750 additional points are served via current alliance partners. Continental has hubs serving New York, Houston, Cleveland and Guam, and together with its regional partners, carries approximately 63 million passengers per year. Based in Houston, Texas, the airline must provide an IT infrastructure to support its global reach. Its IT department delivers services for internal operations as well as for its customer service and external Web applications.

Business Problem
The threat of expensive legal and electronic discovery costs is driving Continental to control the cost of managing unstructured content stored in emails and electronic documents such as Word and Excel. These litigation requests can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per inquiry.

Continental also wants to be able to more effectively leverage and reuse existing content. Current user „workflows. via e-mailed attachments to distribution lists results in uncontrolled growth of e-mail and file shares and users can.t find anything or collaborate. There is also no way to effectively enforce record re-tention policy, and the content is not searchable for compliance or security purposes.

Technical Overview
Continental has millions of electronic documents on file servers consuming many terabytes of disk space. This content grows in number and size by nearly 20% each year. Compounding this problem are electronic documents and emails kept on local PCs, which are estimated to consume additional terabytes of unma-naged data storage. At present, there are no capabilities on the network to scan, index and manage un-structured content. Furthermore, there are no practical solutions for controlling unstructured content stored on local PCs, which also runs the risk of data loss as content on local PCs is not backed up.

Solution Description
SharePoint was selected as the enterprise content management and collaboration system because of ease of deployment, scalability and cost benefits.

MetaPoint was selected to manage and synchronize the corporate-wide content metadata structure: Content Types, Site Columns, Choice Lists and Tagging Vocabularies. MetaPoint Desktop integrates with Microsoft Office applications to tag and classify documents automatically when they are created. Meta-Point Desktop also suggests to the user where documents should be stored on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and facilitates document filing, retrieval, and document retention management. MetaPoint Server allows top-down governance of corporate vocabularies and SharePoint metadata structures and synchro-nizes the metadata model to SharePoint sites and MetaPoint Desktops across the enterprise.

With MetaPoint users are able to tag their content consistently as it is uploaded to SharePoint, greatly improving content findability. Search filters can be applied based on Content Type, SharePoint Site Column entries, or Keywords, and the results of free-text search are narrowed from thousands to a handful based on one structured filter.

By ensuring that Content Type definitions and the associated metadata is applied consistently, record retention policies can be applied per Content Type and old documents that are no longer needed can be purged via user-approved workflows when the document has reached its useful term. Old content is purged, and the new content that is continuously added is more useful to the departments that are up-loading it and it enables the discovery process for compliance, security and governance.

Benefits
By deploying MetaPoint as a part of a comprehensive Information Management strategy, Continental greatly reduces the cost of eDiscovery inquiries by making information easier to find and govern across the enterprise.

Document tags are applied consistently without burdening the user, improving findability and re-ducing the cost of eDiscovery inquiries
SharePoint Content Type definitions are consistently applied ensuring consistent application of record retention policies
Content is stored in the “right” place, greatly improving collaboration and content reuse

By relying on MetaPoint to consistently manage and apply metadata across the organization, Continental is able to greatly increase the value and usability of information while reducing cost and improving information governance and eDiscovery compliance.