How to integrate 3rd party documents with sharepoint search?

Enterprise immigration and records management software for a corp?

• I work for a Fortune 500 company with global offices, and we need to switch to an enterprise-level immigration tracking and records management software that's global-friendly (supports foreign characters, data fields that are non-US specific). PROBLEM: We are not a law firm, and every immigration case management software I've seen caters to law firm needs and not our needs. We use outside counsel, so we do not use any of the tasks and forms-related features of an immigration case management software, but it looks like forms-related features make up the vast majority of offerings I've seen thus far. Our company's primary use for this software is to manage emails, store file attachments for employee records, and to track expiration dates in an easy-to-spot format. It seems everything is moving to cloud, which we've resisted for a very long time and are not looking forward to now, but it could work out if the functionality (and security) is good. Unfortunately, our IT policy does not allow in-house creation of enterprise applications. *sigh* We need: (1) Storage of Outlook unicode messages, preferably in original .MSG format for forensic purposes (Outlook plugin) (2) Ability to quickly preview stored Outlook messages to find necessary conversations (one cloud solution failed for us in that it required 4-5 clicks to preview each individual email, basically unusable for our work) (3) Ability to easily search stored email messages (4) Flexible employee name fields like alias that are fully searchable (5) Easily upload/download batches of files (PDF documents, image scans, etc.) (6) Ability to preview file uploads, if possible (PDF, JPG, etc.) (7) Front-loaded immigration expiration dates (easily found from employee record front page or a click) (8) Flexible and powerful reporting functionality; export to Excel (9) For international use, having 'work authorization' and 'residency permit' expiration date fields or allowing custom fields that are reportable. Current software is limited to US-only immigration document types in a drop-down list. (10) Full double-byte language support (11) Fee structure by user/time and NOT by file size stored on 3rd party server, as the latter will always be to our disadvantage unless we stay with our current local-server solution. (12) Secure to highest standards. I wish there was a private cloud option because I don't like the idea of sharing our private data, but it seems like everything these days requires storage on 3rd party servers. I had a thought at some point that maybe a generic email records management software would be more flexible, but there's probably no way to meaningfully track expiration dates in that. Agh.

• Answer:

  You're looking for a pretty niche product, which may not exist. Given that you work at a large company the best solution in these cases is usually to present a rigorous business case for your needs to your boss, your boss's boss, etc., up the line until someone with the power/authority to override corporate IT policies is convinced of the need for this. Then you get a custom-developed software package done by your internal team or else outside consultants.