SharePoint Site with Custom Features for Global Industrial Distributor

Overview

Our client, an industrial distributor with global operations, wanted to establish a new corporate intranet site that would reflect the company’s culture and deliver an array of unique features to support collaboration, insight into business activities, and specific business processes.

Concurrency took a holistic view of everything relating to intranet and collaboration topics. Working closely with our client’s internal IT team, we studied the current state and established a comprehensive roadmap to replace the firm’s aging Ektron-based web intranet with a SharePoint Online system that would meet its specific business needs and scale into the future.

Solution

We applied our proven approach that includes phases for planning, build, implementation, testing, and go-live. Our project team included a project manager, a business analyst, a SharePoint architect, a user experience designer and a developer. We applied an agile process that included regular standup meetings to ensure efficient progress through the stages.

As an employee-owned company, our client’s corporate culture proudly embraces sharing both business and employee information across its global locations. Information. The intranet design (and custom applications) demonstrated that focus through special features such as:

• Key performance indicators prominently featured, allowing users to drill down into figures for sales and shipments. To accomplish this via automation, we integrated the new intranet with an on-premises SQL Server database synced to Azure.
• Employee anniversaries and birthdays shown on the home page, together with employee photos. We built this feature to synchronize with Azure Active Directory to enable automatic population. Anniversaries and birthdays had been a popular feature of the prior intranet system.
• Content links specific to office locations to enable personalized content targeting.
• A set of world clocks to enable users to see the current time at any of the firm’s global offices.

The new SharePoint-based system now delivers all these custom components together with corporate news and convenient navigation.

Because our client had already rolled out Office 365 for email use, a user base was already established for the new SharePoint Online platform. Our business analyst supported organizational change management through communication with the user base, including trial phases that invited user feedback on the new system. Users reacted positively to the modern interface.

Now that the new system is up and running, our client can continue forwarding on the established roadmap, including projects to migrate over data from shared drives and other legacy storage areas. Next steps can also include additional collaboration tools.

This project serves as an outstanding example of the benefits provided by in-depth road-mapping at the front end of a portal project. This project is also special in the number and variety of custom features involved—and how those features are powerfully connected to the company’s culture.