Document Management

Voyager + SharePoint

By Joel Nelson on Oct 25, 2017 in News

Longtime Yardi client Gary Shaw, president of Arizona-based commercial property manager Arcadia Management Group Inc., is a fan of doing business with a single connected solution. “Going with the single stack approach was a no-brainer,” he says, referring to Arcadia Management’s use of Yardi Voyager, Yardi Procure to Pay, Yardi Inspection and other products from the Yardi Commercial Suite. “It’s so much more efficient housing several business operations in one place rather than updating software in separate databases for finance, maintenance and other operations.”

Although highly successful as a third-party management company, “we are constantly looking for ways to improve our business processes,” Shaw says, which is why Arcadia Management Group frequently volunteers as a beta tester for new Yardi products.

Too Many Databases

An unresolved dilemma recently gave Arcadia Management a chance to go first again. The company kept some documents, such as invoices processed through Yardi Procure to Pay in the Yardi cloud. Other content, such as vendor management activities uploaded from VENDORCafé and various lease and property documents, were kept in Microsoft SharePoint.

“Maintaining security on multiple systems was hard on our users. I didn’t want to continue running multiple databases. That produces duplicate effort as well as inconsistent security permissions,” Shaw says. “I wanted our document management functionality to become completely integrated with our business the way our other Yardi products were.

“When Yardi approached me with a new solution that linked Voyager with SharePoint, it patched a huge hole in our document management system.”

Centralized Content Management

That solution is Yardi Document Management for SharePoint, which integrates Yardi Voyager business data with the Microsoft SharePoint platform to create a single, centralized content management solution. Arcadia Management Group became the first beta user in May 2017.

“Going between Voyager and SharePoint is now the seamless action that I wanted. We log in to Voyager and go straight to SharePoint. For example, we can open an attachment in Voyager and directly link to the appropriate content in SharePoint,” Shaw says.

Yardi Document Management applies Yardi Voyager security and user permissions to SharePoint, enabling a single login for accessing both platforms. Yardi Voyager data for properties, units, tenants, leases and other categories become available in SharePoint in real time. Automatic data synchronization occurs nightly. Automated bi-directional system integration allows user roles and security permissions to carry through from Yardi Voyager to SharePoint along with property, entity, lease, vendor, job and other objects and associated standard data.

“Knowing that we have the best of Yardi and Microsoft working for us gives all of us at Arcadia Management great peace of mind,” Shaw says.