Our customer, one of the leading companies in the target industry with over 50 years of experience and present in more than 70 countries worldwide, managed to unify, streamline and integrate several of its IT infrastructure systems (sparse intranet portals, file shares, human resources database, Active Directory) not only for headquarter but also for its many offices abroad. All this has been achieved with a portal and collaboration solution that we have developed for them.
Business needs for the new solution
The old portal
The old portal was purely content driven (news, announcements, events) and was mostly serving the headquarters, while remote offices abroad were left to fend for them self, which resulted in informational gap between headquarters’ employees and employees abroad, since content in the sparse portals aboard was not managed by headquarter, moreover some countries had its own partner to manage the portal content.
The new portal
We consolidated and upgraded these content driven portals to a single central public intranet portal that all employees in all customers’ companies abroad can use.
This public part is used:
- For corporate communication (news, events, announcements).
By the company’s management to share and reinforce its vision for today and the future, with all employees.
- By human resources staff for initiating internal job openings for employees to apply.
- For access to different resources, services and applications that our costumer offers to all its employees (phone book, workstation identification, help desk…).
- By the IT department to announce maintenances and know issues.
- By all employees to track events, announcements, news, search the internal phonebook containing enormous number of contact information of employees, part-timers, partners…
Collaboration, communication and security
In order to public portal could be accessed by all employees it had to be multilingual, had to support content approval and had to allow our customer to create, edit and manage its own content. With this portal our customer can deliver information to all employees faster and with lower costs.
To support collaboration between customers’ co-workers, we implemented different portals on the Microsoft SharePoint Server:
- For interdepartmental collaboration and information sharing we created department portals that reflects our customers organizational structure and bound the access rights to a particular department to the customer’s organizational hierarchy, by the means of our security module, removing the need for access management. This has been achieved by integration with the existing HR system.
- For projects and their collaboration needs (team members are from different departments, companies, countries and even outsourced companies – which should not have access to any other content) we created multilingual project site templates that can be used by our customer to create and manage these portals on their own, saving them time and money.
- Another big business need for our customer was related to product portals, where they wanted to have only one portal for every product. This presented challenges because such implementation required a tight security net so that users could only see what they are allowed to and nothing more or less. The security model for these sites consists of an MxN matrix where the most of security groups are also dynamically defined by either the products program line, the products name or both. This need was meet by designing a special site template that upon creation configured its own security for each building block. To remove the need for IT personnel to create and manage these numerous product groups we created a web application that specific users can use to either create new product groups or manage their membership. With this template our customer was able to have all its “eggs” in one basket but how many “eggs” particular user can see in that basket depends on who this user’s position within the company, saving them time and effort that managing multiple sites would take.
Our expertise
We focus on large scale solutions for medium and large companies. Therefore our potential customers are looking for long-term partners with competencies and know-how from various fields (in addition to Silver Portals and Collaboration competency we also have earned Gold Independent Software Vendor, Silver Software Development and Silver Web Development competencies and are a member of Microsoft’s SharePoint Deployment Planning Services program), that they can rely on and so reduce risks.
Non Silver Portals and Collaboration-competent competitors usually focus on simple out-of-the-box solutions and have problems on large scale solutions and cannot use SharePoint to the extent it could be used or simply cannot extend it to support some specific functionality and rather opt not to use it.
Large scale clients are looking for partners that won’t only tell them what you cannot do on out-of-the-box SharePoint installation, they are looking for partners that can take their specific wishes of what they want to do with SharePoint and expect that the partner will tell them how it can be done so that it doesn’t limit any of the out-of-the-box functionalities and still meets all of the customers’ requirements.
Having Silver Portals and Collaboration competency, among others, puts us in a group that doesn’t focus on what can’t be done with SharePoint, but rather what all could be done and that differentiates us from others.
What benefits do we bring to our customer?
Empowered content owners
Mainly content driven intranet sites on various locations with a different look and feel and managed by different partners. Content owners could now freely manage their content and frequently required IT or third party support.
Improved look and feel
Our solution unified the look and feel and empowered the content owners to take full charge of their content requiring no IT or third-party interventions. This reduced the customer’s costs of operating an intranet portal site, and allowed for more agile information sharing.
Reduce the gap between headquarters, subsidiaries and representative offices
Central headquarters, subsidiaries abroad and representative offices (in 70+ countries) had to rely on emails or postal services (for larger files) for information sharing and collaboration.
Our solutions collaboration portals (organizational unit portals, project portals, product portals) reduced the gap between headquarters, subsidiaries and representative offices abroad by allowing employees abroad to collaborate with HQ based employees in a single virtual site, removing the usual problems with emails being lost in someone’s inbox, being filtered as spam or even worse - being sent to the wrong person. The issue of large file sharing was solved with our IE plug-in that uses BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service – same as Microsoft Update) protocol to download these files, allowing users to continue working as while the file is being downloaded without impact on their network and supporting network connection drops or resuming after restarts.
These collaboration portals reduced the cost of internal information sharing, delays and removed the risk of using emails or postal services to share sensitive information.
Reduced IT support to minimum
Third-party and IT personnel involvement in operational maintenance of the new portal system (support, access rights…) needed to be reduced to minimum.
Using SharePoint enabled us to remove IT personnel from content specific tasks, however to reduce the IT support to minimum we also implemented a basic identity management solution that removed the need for access rights management and our web application which delegates some of our costumer’s Active Directory management to specific non-IT employees so they can assign correct rights to users without IT intervention.
Better and faster service to employees and customers
With all these goals met, our customer is able to provide a better and faster service to its employees and customers in 70 different countries worldwide. With less time spent on the process of sharing information internally, more time can be spent on sharing information with current and potential customers allowing both saving time and doing more business.
Customer satisfaction
We increased revenue with the customer by almost tenfold
The portal solution was so well received, that in the two years since implementation the customer significantly increased its orders with our company.
We’ve beaten competitors
Another display of customer satisfaction was when we were invited together with Microsoft Consulting Services to share our vision of how would we upgrade the HR database and Active Directory synchronization services (that were implemented during the initial portal project) to a full blown corporate wide Identity Management solution based on Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Management platform.