Christchurch City Council has issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking vendors to deliver a Microsoft 365-based Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) to replace its existing on-premise TRIM platform.

The council is the second largest local government authority in New Zealand with over 3000 staff. The tender document specifies that the replacement solution must be "based on Microsoft 365" and leverage its ecosystem, explicitly citing SharePoint Online, Microsoft Purview, and Power Platform as core components.

The Council also expects Microsoft Purview to form "a major component of the governance, compliance, and insider risk controls," including monitoring for anomalous user behaviour, privileged access misuse, and data exfiltration prevention.

It describes the programme as a multi-year transformation. "The goal is to replace the legacy on-premise system with a modern, compliant, scalable solution based on Microsoft 365 that aligns with statutory obligations and strategic goals," the RFI states. The Council expects the solution to support scalable architecture for 10-plus years of projected growth.

The Records Management Policy cited in the tender documents identifies systemic record-keeping failures driving the project. "Council records are not consistently saved in the Council's records management system (TRIM)," the policy states. Poor document naming, information stored on individual PCs, flash drives and email inboxes, and hard-copy records not returned to storage are all flagged as systemic problems.

The policy warns these shortcomings lead to "less than ideal decision-making based on incomplete information and difficulties discovering the correct information when responding" to information requests.

Automated Metadata and Classification

A central objective of the tender is to automate metadata capture and record classification at scale. The functional requirements state that "record identification, classification, and retention should be automated as much as possible, minimizing human intervention to only exceptional cases."

The solution must automatically scan both on-premise and cloud repositories, identify and classify records based on file metadata and content, and assign sensitivity labels - such as In-Confidence, Sensitive, or Unclassified - based on content analysis. It must also detect duplicate records across repositories and identify critical records.

Automated capture of the minimum metadata fields mandated under the Archives NZ Information and Records Management Standard is a formal requirement. These fields include: unique identifier, name and title, date created, business activity, creator, software version, and a full log of any later actions carried out on the record, including the persons or systems involved and dates.

The tender specifies that manually editing system-generated metadata fields must be restricted to authorised users only, to preserve chain-of-custody integrity.

The Council requires full automation of its retention and disposal lifecycle. The system must automatically identify records that have reached their retention period and flag them for archiving or destruction in accordance with the retention schedule. Destruction of records requires approval from authorised users in the Information Management team, with the tender specifying the process must be "defensible, auditable, and compliant with Archives New Zealand standards."

Enterprise System Integrations

The tender identifies an extensive list of Council enterprise systems the new EDRMS must integrate with. The Council's current collaboration environment - Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive - forms the core daily work platform. Outlook and Exchange Online are flagged as critical for email records management, eDiscovery, and LGOIMA compliance, requiring retention and legal hold policy support.

The tender also specifies integration requirements with a range of systems including SAP – ERP, ArcGIS, and Pathway.

The tender includes a significant Digital Asset Management (DAM) requirement. The Council manages large volumes of images, video, field-capture photographs, CCTV and pipe condition footage, and high-resolution promotional assets across multiple repositories: Canto, file servers, SharePoint and Teams, ESRI, C4 and Hybris (website CMS), a data warehouse, and Azure cloud storage.

The new EDRMS must support governance, discoverability, integration, and lifecycle management of these assets, including upload, preview, retrieval, streaming, and lifecycle governance of high-resolution images and large video files without performance degradation. The system must also preserve digital asset metadata including EXIF data, GPS coordinates, device information, usage rights, and timestamps.

An AI-ready architecture is specified as a future-readiness requirement, supporting automated classification, semantic search, and predictive analytics. The tender states new capabilities such as AI utilisation are in the Council's future roadmap, with the current programme focused on delivering incremental value through a phased rollout.