Migration and Redesign of a Corporate Portal Serving Employees and External Contractors

Customer

The Customer is a U.S. company providing aircraft maintenance services.

Challenge

The Customer ran a corporate portal on SharePoint 2010. The solution served both internal and external users as a single collaboration area. Unfortunately, due to insufficient SharePoint maintenance and support, the portal became hard to manage and use. To put their SharePoint portal back on the rails, the Customer addressed to ScienceSoft to perform the following activities:

• Migrate the existing solution from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016.
• Redesign the portal leveraging SharePoint 2016 out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Improve analytical capabilities by integrating the portal with the Microsoft Power BI suite.

Solution

Following the Customer’s requirements, ScienceSoft’s SharePoint team started with migrating the SharePoint 2010 solution to SharePoint 2016, the platform’s latest version. Using the database attach method, a SharePoint developer and a SharePoint administrator performed a two-step migration:

SharePoint 2010 → SharePoint 2013 → SharePoint 2016

Concurrently, they restored all the missing and defective functionality (SharePoint templates, metrics and sources) via Windows PowerShell.

When the migration was completed, the SharePoint development team moved on to the solution redesign. The major objective was to rebuild the solution that would serve as:

• An internal portal ensuring team, departmental and cross-departmental collaboration for the Customer’s employees.
• An external portal enabling collaboration between the Customer and contractor companies providing their services on behalf of the Customer.

ScienceSoft created a new architecture for the solution. Currently, the SharePoint portal includes 3 major components:

• Portal homepage
• Departmental sites
• Contractors’ sites

• The portal homepage welcomes both internal and external users and lets them see the latest organizational announcements and the corporate calendar. It also provides direct access to numerous portal resources via quick links.
• The departmental sites include a variety of SharePoint sites united into a single site collection. The sites support departmental activities, on the one hand, and cover specific business process, on the other hand. Thus, the portal hosts the following sites:
  • Human Resources
  • Business Development
  • Operations Management
  • Contracts Management
  • Accounting
  • IT
  • Security
  • Safety Management
  • Quality Management
  • Purchasing
• Each site represents a collaboration area with a departmental calendar, announcements and an individual document storage. Each site keeps departmental policies and objectives, department- or domain-specific metrics, as well as includes reports covering different aspects of department activities.
• The contractors’ sites are designed to ensure smooth collaboration between the Customer and their subcontractors and make the activities of the latter streamlined and transparent. The SharePoint sites also enable contractors to manage their internal processes (for example, HR-related activities), as well as to participate in bids, manage customer relationships and report an array of performance and compliance metrics.
• Apart from contractor-specific reports, the Customer also wanted to have enterprise-wide reports reflecting the overall business outcomes in different periods. To enable this, ScienceSoft’s BI consultants assisted the SharePoint team in integrating the portal with Microsoft Power BI suite. Thanks to the integration, the key metrics on the Customer’s and contractors’ performance can be seen right on the portal pages. Using the dynamic Power BI reports, the Customer’s management can compare business results achieved in different years and months and take decisions relying on accurate business data.

Results

The project covered all the Customer’s initial requirements and allowed the organization to:

• Get a more powerful portal built on SharePoint 2016, which improved the solution’s performance and opened wider collaboration capabilities for end users.
• Get a solution using the maximum of SharePoint 2016 capabilities, thus reducing the total cost of the solution.
• Extend the reporting capabilities on the portal and make the reporting process easier and more efficient.

The Customer keeps collaborating with ScienceSoft and gets the ongoing assistance of the SharePoint team in customizing the portal and adding new business-critical features.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SharePoint 2016, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server 2016, SharePoint Designer 2013, Visual Studio 2015, Windows PowerShell.