Wine Australia

Wine Australia is a statutory authority of the Commonwealth Government dedicated to driving the success of Australia’s grape and wine sector by fostering innovation, expanding market opportunities, and upholding the industry’s reputation for excellence. Its functions include research coordination, market promotion, export regulation, and program administration, ensuring the sector remains at the forefront of innovation and global trade.

The content management maze

As an organisation that collaborates closely with industry and government agencies to provide insights, connections, and capability-building initiatives, it works with many documents, some containing sensitive business information. However, these files are stored in file shares or shared via email, which makes accessibility and version history challenging across various users.

Speaking to Karen Fairbrass, Chief Information Officer at Wine Australia, “We have members of staff who work in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada Japan and China. A significant amount of work happens in Australia that isn’t shared as a single source of truth because most of our employees attach a version to an email.”

“The business also didn’t have a location for securely sharing documents externally; hence, our employees stored information in Dropbox or Google Drive or any number of non-corporate supported systems, which posed a security risk,” said Fairbrass.

While Wine Australia has had Microsoft 365 since 2016, more significant IT projects prevented it from moving its content from file shares to SharePoint. However, in one of their recent security findings, they had a domain name controller and Exchange service, which they needed to start removing from their environment. But before they could do that, they needed to move away from their file shares. This provided enough business cases and IT drivers to lead a project to get everybody off the file shares and into SharePoint and Teams.

Breaking through the content chaos

“There was no other solution of choice other than SharePoint,” shared Fairbrass. As a Microsoft 365 subscriber since 2016, it made sense for Wine Australia to migrate its file shares to proven content management systems (CMS) and collaboration tools like SharePoint and Teams.

This not only maximises their existing software investment, but they can also leverage Microsoft 365’s built-in robust security tools and services. “We could take advantage of Microsoft Defender, Defender for Endpoint, and the data loss prevention (DLP) rule that comes as standard with the E5 license by utilising Microsoft 365,” said Fairbrass.

“When you have a very small IT support team, you don’t want to manage five systems when you can do it all under one integrated system with Microsoft 365, which is why we made the strategic decision to invest in the SharePoint platform,” continued Fairbrass.

With those things in mind, Wine Australia contacted its trusted Microsoft partner, Professional Advantage (PA), to bring order to its content chaos. PA was chosen for this project because of its 20+ years of experience implementing SharePoint, along with its stellar experience of working with PA since 2020 when PA migrated its legacy content management system to Azure and implemented Azure Virtual Desktop.

PA worked with the team at Wine Australia to:

1. Migrate over 6 terabytes of data from their file shares to SharePoint and Teams.
2. Deploy a modern SharePoint-based Intranet for content management and organisation-wide communication together with the introduction of Microsoft 365 Archive to manage legacy file content.
3. Enable better control, compliance, and governance over documents and records to ensure resilient, secure external sharing with non-Wine Australia parties via the planned implementation of such controls with Microsoft Purview.
4. Roll out effective virtual face-to-face change management to ensure effective user adoption of the new system.
5. Provide ongoing post-project support for their SharePoint environment, including continuous improvements, enhancements, and optimisations.

Getting content management right with SharePoint and Teams

“They don’t know how they lived without a fully integrated Intranet experience before.” That’s the general feedback from the users, according to Fairbrass, after successfully implementing SharePoint and Teams.

Today, Wine Australia enjoys:

Single source of truth.

Everyone across the organisation now access content from a single, well-governed repository through the SharePoint Intranet or Teams. Each business function has a dedicated SharePoint team site where they can access the most up-to-date content anytime, anywhere, on any device.

SharePoint’s built-in document version control allows users to access previous versions, compare changes, and restore to the previous state. “With Microsoft SharePoint and Teams, we can now identify the most recent document quickly and easily because it’s all date stamped and modified by version,” Fairbrass said.

Instant information retrieval.

Content findability and searchability are essential for an organisation like Wine Australia that constantly deals with information. It is one of the key success metrics of this project. With everything available and accessible in SharePoint and Teams (except for sensitive and confidential information) and enabling metadata tagging in SharePoint, their users can now:

1. Search based on custom attributes rather than just filenames.
2. Find documents quickly using filters, views, and search queries.
3. Easily discover relevant content across departments.

“We can now do a search, and we’ll find the answer!” beamed Fairbrass. “Our people can locate, share and collaborate on information more easily and securely now.” 

SharePoint’s easy-to-use, familiar, and intuitive user interface and PA’s proven change management strategy made user adoption at Wine Australia seamless.

Protect data from cyber threats.

“Security-wise, we can now see what people do with our content,” said Fairbrass. “Rather than people attaching everything to an email, we now have the tools to ensure control over who sees what, when, and where.”

Leveraging SharePoint’s robust access control and native DLP rules and sensitivity labels, Wine Australia is better positioned to mitigate information security risks.

“Once we start rolling out content sensitivity labels, which will happen shortly, we can apply some DLP rules to that content. This sets us up with the ability to overlay a good technology solution enabler for records management processing moving forward, so that we can start destroying records we no longer need to keep,” continued Fairbrass.

Pioneering the future

Wine Australia is considering using SharePoint to surface content on its website, create team portals for external partners, and use it for even better records management capabilities in the future.

“The Microsoft 365 ecosystem allows us to do so much more without going out and buying new products,” shared Fairbrass. “It gets us to a starting point for compliance ticks in the boxes that we need without having to do lots of manual processing, so it’s certainly a good basis for changing how our people work daily.”

Behind the scenes with Professional Advantage

Reflecting on Wine Australia’s overall experience working with Professional Advantage, Fairbrass shared, “It’s quite comforting to work with an organisation like Professional Advantage that is willing to be honest with you, because there are lots of vendors out there that will say ‘yeah, we can do that’ and then the experience is underwhelming. We needed a support partner we could work with, not play tennis with; someone that would do the bits of work we didn’t have the capacity to do.”

“Professional Advantage’s team delivered impressively in areas like working with us on processes that we thought were fundamental to the project’s success, like content migration execution run sheets or taking the burden off the internal team to migrate the documents. Their consultants, project managers, and account management team have been very accommodating in having one-on-one conversations with anyone in the team, especially with Microsoft Purview, which is quite new for us,” continued Fairbrass.

Fairbrass concluded, “Professional Advantage will always be one of my go-to vendors for advice or support”.  

"Professional Advantage will always be one of my go-to vendors for advice or support"

Karen Fairbrass, Chief Information Officer, Wine Australia