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Case Studies
SharePoint Planning and Design Keep Safety Regulations Current on Portal
Project at a Glance |
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RDA managed the analysis, planning and design phases of the SharePoint architecture implementation for a portal that houses corporate information on vessel maintenance and standard operating procedures for The Vane Brothers Company (VBC). The portal keeps the latest information on hand to meet the many safety regulations that each vessel must comply with while supporting the company's paperless initiatives. |
About Our Client
The Vane Brothers Company (VBC) provides tug boat and barge services to offload petroleum products from huge tankers and distribute the products up and down the eastern seaboard. Additionally, they take supplies out to the tankers.
Background
Since 9/11, there are many safety regulations that all vessels must comply with, and these tend to change with some frequency. It is critical that the information on the vessels is always up to date.
VBC sought to insure that users could efficiently access the latest corporate information related to vessel maintenance and standard operating procedures. They selected SharePoint Server (SPS) to house the vessel safety information, which is then replicated to the laptops onboard the tug boats and barges.
A properly designed SharePoint 2003 implementation creates an environment that aggregates this type of corporate information and becomes an enabler for increasing user productivity. The full benefits of a SharePoint implementation are realized when users find the portal structure easy to navigate and traverse.
Solution Detail
RDA managed the analysis, planning and design phases of the SharePoint architecture implementation. The portal design needed to allow for easy navigation of the portal and related Windows SharePoint Services sites, commonly called the portal taxonomy. In addition to housing their intranet on SPS, VBC wanted to create an extranet for their clients to be able to track information about their shipments.
Future corporate initiatives for the SharePoint implementation include the integration of SharePoint with Great Plains software and offering enhanced workflow capabilities that will offer further user productivity gains through streamlined operations. The design of the SharePoint architecture took these future technology initiatives into consideration.
Benefits
VBC is realizing user productivity gains through a reduction in the manual effort related to replacing outdated documentation stored within binders located on each vessel while ensuring users have access to the definitive document revision. They now have a local replica of the SharePoint vessel information site on the computer on each vessel which syncs with the server when network connectivity is available. Thus, the SharePoint environment addresses corporate paperless initiatives by reducing the dependency upon the use of paper documentation.
Technically Speaking
The Vane Brothers portal introduced a consolidated intranet to Vane Brothers for the first time and will provide a common platform for information collection and delivery in the future. This information includes the documentation required to run the business safely (policies, handbooks, manuals, certificates, etc.) as well as line of business information maintained in other systems. It enables corporate communications through the posting of news items, announcements, and events on web pages visited regularly by employees. The portal can also include email alerts to interested employees when specific information is added or updated.
RDA provided the technical expertise to deploy SharePoint Portal Server and to customize it to Vane Brothers' needs. This included branding through custom style sheets and site definition modification to provide portal area pages, navigational aids, and team sites that met the VBC's user interface requirements. This also involved supporting the development of the taxonomy and organization of information and navigation within the portal.
RDA developed custom web controls and Web Parts for alerts, navigation, and other information display. A web control was developed to display the current MARSEC (Marine Security) level on every portal area and team site. This control was inserted into the pages for all of the site definitions to place it in the center of the page just below the main menu. This web control leverages the SharePoint object model to obtain the current MARSEC level from a SharePoint list. A similar web control for displaying important messages as a banner above the main menu at the top of the page was also developed and would insert a scrolling marquee at the top of the page with any non-expired entries in an announcement list. When no important announcements were active, this banner is not rendered and the page shifts up to use that screen real estate.
Several custom Web Parts were developed to display information from Vane Brother's Central Data Repository (CDR) system for vessel information. This system integrated with an ASP.NET application for maintaining updated information about all of the vessels in Vane Brother's fleet as well as a real-time location system that could show the current location of any vessel on a map in near real time. During this engagement, RDA provided training and mentoring on various SharePoint topics to the Vane Brothers technical staff and prepared them for maintaining and modifying the portal in the future.
