Expanding Content Management Capabilities in SharePoint Search Portal

Customer

The Customer is an international consulting company that assists small and medium-sized enterprises in drawing up their business and commercial strategies. Additionally, the Customer provides end users with high-quality content, such as exclusive news, unique digests, event overviews and more.

Challenge

During the first stage of the project, ScienceSoft helped the Customer to create a SharePoint-based search portal that enabled end users to access a wide set of unique content, including important news and events overviews, and allowed centralizing numerous PDF documents located across multiple Customer’s storages.

To expand their offer, the Customer decided to upgrade the provided content with charts and data tables containing accurate statistics that reveals the latest facts and trends across 4 target industries: healthcare, real estate, education and hospitality.

Furthermore, the Customer aimed at improving the user experience within their search portal. Therefore, the Customer planned to enrich the search portal with personalization features allowing the end user to easily sort out the provided information and aggregate personalized content.

Solution

ScienceSoft ensured a smooth integration of new features into the search portal by extending the existing solution with new menu items, each of them corresponding to a relevant functionality, i.e. charts, data tables and personalization.

Charts and data tables sections offer users a rich set of data that can be either viewed online or downloaded in PDF/Excel files. To enable quick and targeted search across the provided data, ScienceSoft indexed over 400 pages from multiple MS PowerPoint presentations in order to make each piece of information searchable and downloadable. Moreover, all the pages were thoroughly sorted out and classified by 4 main categories coinciding with 4 predefined industries. The categories, in their turn, were logically divided into subcategories with up to 4 level nesting, which allowed for precise search results both by tags and keywords.

To provide the required level of personalization, SharePoint developers added a separate menu section similar to a personal account page. The section enables users to store and manage selected information within a single tab by:

• Saving favorite search keys and marking out interesting pages.
• Choosing certain keywords and enabling automatic email notifications when an associated item is newly published on the portal.
• Viewing the search history throughout the entire portal, including news, events and digests.

Results

The updated search portal provides users with a much larger set of content enriched with statistical data that covers 4 target industries. Apart from enabling an instant search of the requested information, the portal was complemented with personalization tools allowing end users to pick out the most relevant information, store the selected content and review it at any time. Automatic notifications are created to keep subscribers informed when the new content answering their interests is published on the portal.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2013, Microsoft PowerPoint Services, Microsoft Excel Services, HTML, CSS.