Corporate-Wide Intranet to Unite Geographically Distributed Facilities

Customer

Customer is a Canadian company focused on development of world-class social business platforms and sites in SharePoint and other .NET technologies. The Company has over 10 years rich consulting experience working with dozens of Fortune 500 and world-leading brands – and more than 200 engagements to-date. Recently, the Customer got a request from an international investment company that employs over 1000 professionals across the globe, for development of Corporate-wide Intranet. For more than 15 years the final Client has been committed to acquire, strengthen and grow vertical market technology businesses enabling them to be leaders within their focused sector. Its companies deliver mission-critical solutions to vertical markets around the world in the following industries: Agri-Food, Asset Management and Logistics, Benefits Administration, Cultural Collections Management, Insurance, Justice, Marine, People Transportation, Rental Management.

Challenge

Communication is one of the organizational functions that helps companies stay productive. Lack of communication between internal staff members can have negative impact on the overall efficiency and competiveness of the organization. As the final Customer grew globally, he realized a burning need of an Intranet solution. Thus, he needed to solve a number of issues:

• Create centralized information environment for a better management of geographically distributed facilities;
• Keep employees aware of the corporation international operations and business lines;
• Enable content sharing, document management, enterprise search within the organization;
• Strengthen corporate culture;
• Provide employees with tools for common work, interaction and communication;
• Automate internal business processes.

Solution

The Customer addressed his requirements to ScienceSoft's SharePoint consultants who offered to create the global group Intranet with versatile SharePoint 2013 platform. In order to optimize development expenses, ScienceSoft architects settled on SharePoint Composite - a no-code business application that can be created by assembling, connecting, and configuring the main building blocks of functionality available in SharePoint 2013. And because it’s built on the SharePoint 2013 platform, it gives the breadth and depth of a SharePoint solution.

ScienceSoft developed a fully-fledged bespoke Global group Intranet with multiple subsites and pages. The solution has a user friendly interface, is visually appealing and comprehensive. The major features of the intranet can easily be found in the top or side bars, and corporate user can access about everything he requires with just one click.

The portal incorporates multiple subsites. Their predetermined functionality depends on the page type (e.g. vertical site, company site, regional site, personal account etc.).

Central hub for news feed, company announcements, subscription to news updates allows staff members to be aware of the major corporate events. Each page contains exhaustive info on corporation history, verticals, international operations and business lines.

The intranet encourages internal staff to interact using microblogs, polls, discussion forums and fosters the corporate spirit within the organization.

Portal facilitates access to vital internal data and documents thanks to single search module.

There is also a workflow created within the Intranet in order to support RFP processing. As a part of business processes automation ScienceSoft team set up an auto sub-site creation for new acquisitions.

Before launching the solution the team successfully implemented corporate branding style and all the elements associated with it on the whole Intranet.

Results

ScienceSoft assisted the Customer with the whole project life-cycle. Our team started from project requirements investigation and gathering, then we helped the Customer with architecture definition, infrastructure environment deployment and finally with a thorough testing of the ready-made solution. After all, ScienceSoft provided its SharePoint support services to ensure the portal's stable operation during the post-deployment period.

The project has resulted in a simple to use, highly searchable intranet with a customized look and feel. By bringing all of his employees to a unified source, the final Customer managed to create sense of community, and communication across disparate operations. Implementation of Intranet has significantly increased the speed of internal business processes and quality of delivered services.

All works are completed in line with the Customer’s requirements, within the time frames.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2013, .NET, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer