Digital Henka - Hughes & Hughes - SharePoint / Office 365 Document Management Flows

As part of the Pro Internacional (prointernacional.com) and Digital Henka (digitalhenka.com) teams, I collaborated with Hughes & Hughes (hughes.com.uy), a Uruguayan law firm, on a project to modernize their document management workflows on Office 365 and SharePoint.

The firm was incurring high operational costs managing documents with Worldox (worldox.com), which indexed and organized all their files. At the same time, they needed to upgrade their internal Office versions, but the new versions no longer supported the legacy plugins that Worldox relied on. This combination of license cost pressure and technical obsolescence made their existing setup unsustainable.

Together, Pro and Digital Henka proposed a migration to SharePoint, leveraging the firm's existing Microsoft 365 services. The challenge was not only moving documents, but also preserving and improving the way lawyers and staff create, save and find documents directly from Office applications.

In this project, I served as solution architect and design lead for the document flow:

• We designed and implemented an Office Web Add-in that integrates directly into Office applications (such as Word), guiding users through a standardized save process.
• The add-in forces documents to be saved into SharePoint, rather than local drives or ad-hoc locations, ensuring that every file has a single authoritative version.
• As part of the save flow, users are required to enter additional metadata (for example, matter-related information, document type or other firm-specific fields), so documents are properly classified and easier to retrieve.
• The solution was structured to respect confidentiality, ensuring documents are always stored within SharePoint locations and permissions aligned with the firm's access rules.

This approach allows Hughes & Hughes to:

• Move away from legacy Worldox plugins without losing control over how documents are organized.
• Use SharePoint as the central repository and source of truth for their legal documents.
• Ensure that every document created from Office follows a consistent, policy-compliant workflow, rather than relying on manual discipline.

My contribution focused on the architecture of the document lifecycle (from creation in Office to storage in SharePoint), the design of the Office Web Add-in flows, and the way metadata and storage rules are enforced so that the firm can confidently operate on modern Office 365 and SharePoint, while keeping its document confidentiality and structure under control.