Company intranet – Sharepoint
Renault Trucks s.r.o., a company providing services in the utility vehicles market, addressed our company with a request for creating an intranet company portal to facilitate teamwork and collaboration on joint projects.
What where the client’s needs?
The client expected the following criteria to be met in favour of the new solution:
- Centralized system to support information sharing
- Full-text search function supported
- Directory of contacts „Who is who“ – displaying internal contacts from Active Directory
- Synoptic view of the company’s organizational structure
- Support for team collaboration on joint projects (documents, tasks)
- Implementation of the company’s graphical identity
What did we offer to our client
In response to Renault Trucks company’s requirements we have implemented a Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 portal solution which meets all criteria as requested by the customer. Within a single portal framework we were able to create independent web portals which are accessible only for specific departments or workplaces. The purpose of deploying independent portals was to provide company employees in different departments with the possibility to share data with other team members at the same working sites. These were components which were set up with pre-defined access levels only for selected users, i.e. workers from the respective department. A standardly provided possibility is sharing of information among all employees within the company, which is handled through the main web portal – accessible to everyone.
How did the analysis proceed
In respect of a well-prepared and faultless portal implementation we held several meetings with the company’s IT managers and thanks to the gathered knowledge we were able to prepare a smoothly running portal for our customer, perfectly matching the presented requirements. The customer emphasized, among other, the correct implementation of the company graphical image which we had sourced from marketing materials.
The solution design
Following the results of our analysis, we decided for a Sharepoint system. The portal runs on Windows Server 2003, and data storage is safely handled by a database server on a computer running Microsoft SQL Server. In order to create a synoptic chart of the company structure and its internal contacts we decided to use Microsoft Office Search service and linked it to the customer’s Active Directory; this procedure ensures that information contained in the domain structure is correctly mapped to the intranet portal. The whole process is in compliance with pre-set rules that we have defined on the basis of the requested functionality for different target groups and also in accordance with synchronization rules.
To satisfy the requirement for displaying contact information we used user lists and we defined views for the intended content to be displayed. Thus the employer could see what he wished – an employee’s photo, name and job position.
Full-text document and contact search was a feature smoothly resolved by deploying Microsoft Office Search service.
Conclusion
Thanks to the implemented MS Sharepoint solution the customer’s employees who routinely use the system can experience improved and fast-moving processes in their daily work. Important information, i.e. documents, tasks, appointments, are now located in a single point of reference accessible to all workers.
