Case Studies

SharePoint Migration Enhances Collaboration and Communication

Project at a Glance
RDA implemented a SharePoint architecture to enhance administration and management of content. The use of team sites improved employee collaboration and communication.

About Our Client

Our client is an international company headquartered in Georgia with additional offices located in Quebec, Ontario, and the United Kingdom. Our client is a leading developer and manufacturer of advanced technology products for commercial space, defense, and wireless communications.

Background

RDA's client has grown significantly and has six main business units. These business units have numerous hardware and software implementations, which creates obstacles to employee communications.

In an effort to minimize these obstacles, our client implemented Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001. The SharePoint 2001 implementation provided a corporate portal and business unit portals from which employees could utilize SharePoint Portal Server 2001's document management features to organize, search and share information. In addition to the corporate and business unit portals, workspaces were created at the department level.

Our client realized productivity gains through the use of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, but users still experienced obstacles to effective communication and collaboration, including:

• Problems in locating information due to difficulty navigating the corporate portal or business unit portals
• Disconnected teams that are using SharePoint primarily as a document repository
• Difficulty collaborating on documents
• Disconnected activities and processes

Addressing these communication and cross-functional collaboration issues was the primary reason for converting the existing SharePoint implementation to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services.

Solution Detail

RDA assisted our client with the migration effort by creating a scaleable SharePoint 2003 architecture, mentoring key employees on SharePoint 2003 technologies, providing guidance on the migration effort and migration of content from SharePoint 2001 to SharePoint 2003 technologies.

Challenges

Due to the dispersed environment, a SharePoint 2003 portal was created for each business unit with the portals configured to utilize shared services for search and notification features. Due to localization requirements, several portals were configured to display content in French.

Benefits

The migration to SharePoint 2003 offered numerous benefits over the SharePoint 2001 implementation, including:

• Enhanced administrative capabilities and management of content at the portal and site levels.
• Improved ability to easily create and manage "project" team sites.
• Superior employee communication and collaboration through the use of team sites.
• The ability to target content to groups of users at the portal level.
• Better search capabilities.
• The ability to offer personal sites for users.

Technically Speaking

RDA's client deployed both Windows SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. SharePoint Portal Server hosted the corporate intranet and additional portals were created for each business unit. Where applicable, a secondary SharePoint Portal Server hosted the French versions of the primary portal and business unit portals. Project dashboards were migrated to Windows SharePoint Sites and linked to the appropriate SharePoint Portal server.

All employees were configured to have read only access to all areas within the portals. Administration of individual SharePoint Services sites was delegated to project leaders and access was granted to specific users.

All department level sites were created at the site collection level and site definitions were customized to offer enhanced communication and collaboration.