Development of a SharePoint Collaboration Portal for a Global Nonprofit Educational Institution

Customer

A leading global nonprofit educational institution for autistic children wanted to support its future growth and improve efficiency by creating a common workflow and collaboration platform for its geographically dispersed employees and instructors. This platform would automate workflows for creating, sharing and finding information easily so that research, courseware and other materials can be accessed consistently and efficiently.

Project Objective

Trigent was given a two-fold objective for the project:

• Study and analyze the spread of information silos and business processes of the enterprise and to set a roadmap for the long term implementation of the intranet/extranet/internet platform using MOSS
• Implement a departmental portal using Microsoft SharePoint as a proof of concept for certain user groups to address the immediate pains demonstrate the feasibility of the roadmap for the long term goal of building an efficient collaboration platform for all employees

Customer Challenges

Over the years several manual, paper based business processes and workflows had become pervasive in the organization. IT infrastructure which consisted of shared network and emails could not support the needs of different versioning of documents, forms, policies and audit needs for compliance and reporting needs of a globally operating non-profit organization. Management reporting, employee performance monitoring and organizational KPIs could not be obtained efficiently.

Trigent's Solution

Trigent designed and implemented a departmental portal based on SharePoint to enable the client to manage and publish information consistently and accurately. Steps involved were:

• Conducting and moderating discussions with a representative group of stake holders, end users and IT, to understand the vision leading to the development of a high level architecture and a roadmap
• Implementing a departmental portal which consisted of document libraries, workflows for document review and approval, search, and other collaboration features such as mySite and Discussion Boards, AD integration for security and enhanced people search

The SharePoint portal implementation process was highly collaborative involving both, the end users and the IT team.  The deployment process was phased and iterative involving requirements gathering, prototyping, training and deployment at each stage.

Client Benefits

The organization benefited from this project in terms of:

• Efficient document management, version control integrated with ease of search to find the required information
• Automated document review and approval process using workflows
• Improved speed and convenience of publishing of information 
• Reduced IT support overheads and infrastructure needs
• Buy-in and usage by a smaller group helped in easier enterprise wide adoption