SharePoint Portal for Team Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Customer

The Customer is a US-based financial advisory firm that has $800 million in assets.

Challenge

The main Customer’s challenge was inefficient internal collaboration at the firm. It was caused by the lack of centralized project and task management and insufficient transparency of business operations. Besides, employees didn’t have online access to the corporate content management system and a knowledge base. The Customer’s employees wasted much time on simple repetitive tasks, which essentially impaired their performance. So, the Customer needed a consistent system for employee communication and collaboration and sharing work-related information across the firm. In addition, the Customer required the solution to support enterprise-level security and regulatory compliance.

Solution

After analyzing the Customer’s business needs, ScienceSoft’s SharePoint experts recommended creating an enterprise business portal in SharePoint Online.

ScienceSoft’s team transformed the Customer’s needs into solution requirements and implemented an enterprise portal accordingly. The key functionality of the portal covers enterprise search and content (image, audio, and video files) management, including automatic metadata extraction for image files. To improve internal collaboration, communication and increase employee performance, our specialists integrated the portal with such Office 365 tools as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner, thus leveraging the available capabilities of Office 365 suite.

To support data security and regulatory compliance, our SharePoint professionals enabled permission-based user access to the enterprise portal’s content. All users were divided into three groups: Viewers (read-only for pages, list items, documents and files), Contributors (viewing, updating, and deleting list items, documents and files) and Supervisors (creating list items, documents and files; accepting and rejecting content uploading; creating, editing and deleting news and announcements on the banner, etc.).

The enterprise portal consists of 4 main sections:

Home Page

The Home Page section contains the following information:

• Corporate events. The portal shows a calendar with dates and descriptions of upcoming corporate events.
• News & announcements. Authorized users can create news and announcements and post them on the Home Page banner as a slider. The slider contains up to 5 recent items. Each has a picture, a title, a brief description, and a link to view details.
• Action buttons. The portal offers two action buttons that support employee recognition (Recognize a Teammate) or ordering supplies (Request Supplies). For example, clicking on the Request Supplies button opens a popup window where a user can type a required item and additional information and send it to an office administrator.
• Compliance tile. The tile allows users to navigate to the Compliance storage with training, safety and disaster recovery documents.

Teams

ScienceSoft’s specialists created separate pages for different departments of the firm: Administration, Accounting, Investment, and Tax & Financial Planning teams. All the team pages are adjusted to the specific needs of the corresponding departments. For example, the Administration team page contains client documents, marketing documents, quarterly reports, and the Accounting team page – accounts receivable, payroll and benefits, audit records and other information.

Knowledge base

An enterprise wiki serves as the firm’s knowledge base. The wiki allows creating, editing, deleting and linking wiki pages, uploading documents and files to the knowledge base, filtering pages by author, editor, date, etc. Also, the enterprise wiki enables users to put likes and add comments to the pages.

Contacts

This section displays all the firm’s employees and their personal and contact information and allows filtering them by the selected criteria like names, job titles or locations. This page also allows sending direct emails with attached files to employees.

Results

The Customer acquired a digital space for team collaboration, project and task management and internal communication. The enterprise portal enables the Customer’s employees to search and access documents they need for their work quickly and easily. It also allows them to be aware of all company-related news and events, which has increased employee engagement. Due to access restrictions and centralized storage of sensitive documents, the portal helps the Customer’s firm to remain compliant with internal regulatory requirements.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, .NET core, SharePoint Framework.