An intelligent filing system for patents and trademarks offers companies the possibility to centralize the management of intellectual property, reducing the risks related to violation of rights and compliance. A well-structured archive also offers the possibility of identifying potential areas of innovation and implementing new R&D strategies. A customer requested the development of this technology. Here's how it went.
Operating in the pharmaceutical sector, intellectual property is at the core of our client's business and competitive advantage.
Without an adequate management system, the company is therefore exposed to serious risks for its competitiveness. It is not only a matter of having a system for filing obtained patents and trademarks, but also and above all of obtaining a solution through which:
We then evaluated with the customer the right solution to adopt.
One of the main requests concerned the use of SharePoint Online to create the new intellectual property management system. The reason was the familiarity that the company's staff were familiar with SharePoint and with its advanced features for managing documents in Microsoft 365.
The use of a different product would have entailed additional costs for user training, making the transition to the new management system longer and more complex.
A second request, on the other hand, concerned the functionalities that should be made available. In fact, the SharePoint-based solution should have allowed:
We started by configuring a series of SharePoint lists to create a personalized archive enriched in terms of functionality thanks to the integration with Power Apps and Azure Function.
These integrations have made it possible to simplify the filing and management of documents related to patents and trademarks registered by the customer. The Azure Function is used in particular to manage the updating of the archive and the import of data from the history.
If the configuration of the archive was rather simple and fast, the real difficulty of this project consisted in creating the graphic for the geographical distribution of intellectual property.
By default, SharePoint does not offer useful tools for this purpose, so we dedicated ourselves to finding an alternative product that could have extended the functionality of our archive.
A third-party component was then integrated that made it possible to graphically display the patents and registered trademarks, based on their distribution in the countries where the company operates.
The chart is automatically updated as new information is added to the SharePoint archive and allows users to:
Our custom archive for SharePoint Online was adopted quickly and without the need for targeted training to ensure its adoption.
Together with the customer, we traced the interactions with the management system, to understand if it was really the right solution to improve the employee experience. The answer? Let's see some facts together:
Since the start of production, the company has not received any negative feedback from users.
The Modern Work team effectively and swiftly addresses IT needs, primarily focusing on software development. The technical staff is well-trained in implementing software projects using Microsoft technology stacks and is skilled in managing both agile and long-term projects.
