Case Study: Engineering Firm Leverages Office 365 Intranet to Enhance Company-wide Collaboration
Challenge/Opportunity
The legacy Intranet was a dated, in-house application, maintained by the client’s internal IT staff. Updating content and information on the legacy Intranet was only possible by the IT admins and documents were stored in local and shared drives, rather than centralized and accessible document libraries. The legacy Intranet platform also did not enable and promote easy and modern internal collaborations and the company information and content was not easily accessible or searchable by all employees.
Optimum’s Involvement
After conducting an initial assessment of client’s legacy Intranet as well as content and document management and collaboration needs, Optimum designed a custom SharePoint-based Intranet solution, enabling company-wide and departmental communication and collaboration as well as document management, knowledge-sharing, and organization of company content and information in one centralized and accessible location.
Results
This new and modern Intranet solution enabled internal collaboration and communication, secure access to departmental content and documents, and better searchability of content and company knowledge, resulting in improved productivity and increased ROI and adoption of the Office 365 platform.
Project Background
Barton Associates is an Industrial Engineering company providing quality engineering solutions to clients throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region with office locations in York, State College and Pittsburgh, PA. The company offers a holistic approach to any new construction, addition or renovation project and services that include energy studies and facility master planning, systems design, commissioning, and sustainable design.
Barton Associates engaged Optimum to establish the company’s Office 365, SharePoint-based Intranet portal, define SharePoint Taxonomy and Governance, and develop a robust SharePoint-based document management platform to better manage and share company documents and content. The company’s legacy Intranet platform was a dated hard to maintain and did not allow for modern and easy collaboration and content sharing capabilities, resulting in the lack of company-wide and departmental knowledge sharing and proper content and document management.
SharePoint Intranet, Taxonomy, Governance, and Document Management
Working with the client’s various departments and teams to understand the current and desired state, Optimum defined the company’s information architecture and content structure, company-wide collaboration and communication needs, desired user interface and branding, and departmental-wide content generation and security requirements.
Our team of certified Office 365 and SharePoint experts then established the SharePoint taxonomy and developed the back-end document management and security structures. We then designed and developed a fully branded, customized Intranet portal, using SharePoint’s Modern Sites, and some light SPFx and PowerShell programming. Each department was also interviewed and evaluated individually to identify the opportunities to increase collaboration and the future content and information management needs.
After the development of the new Intranet in Office 365, Optimum migrated the content and documents from client’s legacy Intranet and shared folders to SharePoint, ensuring proper metadata and searchability of the documents and enabling a smooth transition to the new environment. Our team also conducted user training for departmental content owners and users to ensure the maximized user adoption of the new Intranet.
Project Outcome
A fully branded, customized, and easy-to-use Intranet and document management platform that enables and promotes company-wide collaboration and communication, better management and access to content and documents, and proper security and content ownership, all resulting in increased efficiency and productivity of the teams and company’s employees.
About Optimum
Optimum is a modern Software Consulting firm, designing and building result-driven, customized solutions that brings the power of SharePoint and Office 365, Digital Workplace Portals (Intranet and Extranet), Business Intelligence (BI), and Systems Integration to organizations to increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and drive digital transformation.
Our services are designed to help organizations realize the full impact and ROI of Microsoft solutions investment, while increasing their user adoption and engagement, especially for Office 365 based solutions and apps.
Contact Us to speak with one of our Office 365 and Portal certified experts and schedule a free discovery session.