Case Studies

Enterprise Employee Portal Streamlines Operations

Project at a Glance
RDA developed, in conjunction with Microsoft Consulting and our client's development team, a groundbreaking Enterprise Employee Portal that fundamentally improved both our client's use of collaboration technology and business operations. This monumental effort was heralded by Bill Gates as "a great demonstration of SharePoint's flexibility and capacity to incorporate a variety of relationship driven functionalities typically limited to consumer social networking sites into a corporate business portal."

Project at a Glance

RDA developed, in conjunction with Microsoft Consulting and our client's development team, a groundbreaking Enterprise Employee Portal that fundamentally improved both our client's use of collaboration technology and business operations. This monumental effort was heralded by Bill Gates as "a great demonstration of SharePoint's flexibility and capacity to incorporate a variety of relationship driven functionalities typically limited to consumer social networking sites into a corporate business portal."

About Our Client

RDA's client is one of the nation's largest diversified financial services companies. The firm provides a broad range of retail banking and brokerage, asset and wealth management, and corporate and investment banking products and services to 13 million household and business customers.

Background

The Enterprise Employee Portal (EEP) was performed as a series of engagements to develop not just a replacement for the company's intranet but also as a true social networking portal for all employees at the bank. With over 110,000 planned users, this was the largest deployment to date for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. This enterprise-changing initiative was completed directly with multiple groups from within the bank as part of a joint Microsoft and RDA development effort. The scope of this engagement included custom Wiki, Blog, Authentication, and Search functionality as well as a custom client-specific user experience.

Solution Detail

The projects performed as part of this initiative are as follows:

Corporate Wiki - RDA developed a customized version of the Wiki functionality native to MOSS to add additional user features, customized content creation and approval workflows.
Custom Blog - RDA developed a customized version of the native Blog functionality in MOSS to create a unique user experience with tailored Web parts as well as a personalized approval workflow for content creation.
SAML Authentication - RDA developed a customized identity management solution that allowed MOSS to integrate with an IBM Data Center Appliance for authentication and authorization to content. This project allowed for easier identity management across all systems, including those not encompassed as part of the Active Directory forest in place at the bank.
Enterprise Search - RDA developed made-to-order content search functionality for EEP that leverages MOSS searching across numerous websites, data stores and file shares across the company's global enterprise. The team was composed of an RDA MOSS architect and developers, Microsoft Consulting and client developers. Features of the search functionality include:

Indexing for MOSS Employee Portal content, CMS content, Team Sites, and People
Configurations with noise words, thesaurus weighting, authoritative sites, best bets, "Did you mean?", Search Facets, and others
Configuration of the Search web parts and logging of search queries
Integration of Third Party component for Wild Card and Boolean Searches
Modifications to the Advanced Search, People Search, and Search Results in order to provide a unique client-specific user experience and search options

Custom UI Development - RDA developed a customized user-experience for this client for the Enterprise Employee Portal. The team was composed of an RDA MOSS architect and developers, Microsoft Consulting and client developers. The activities of this group included:

Development of templates for publishing, collaboration, news, encyclopedia, and blogs
Configuration of MOSS designer into Site Actions Menu
Enabling of Single-Sign-on
Alerts, Content Management, Audience, My Site, Configuration
Central Administration Configuration
Application Management Configuration
Shared Service Provider Configuration
Development of Basic Page Areas including Header, Footer, Navigation menus, Search Area
Human Resources, Resources, and Directory Sites Portal Home Page
News Home and Article Pages
Division and Local News Home and Content Pages
My Profile Pages
DR Splash page to replace standard 404 page
Email Page and Printer Friendly Versions of pages
Dynamic Resizing of pages

Benefits

RDA's client sees this initiative as an enterprise changing use of collaboration technology that will fundamentally improve the operations of the bank. Therefore, there is considerable industry excitement about this groundbreaking initiative that was recently featured in an article by CIO Insight: Will Microsoft Become the Facebook of the Enterprise?

In Microsoft's 2007 Annual Shareholder Meeting, Bill Gates highlighted this project as a great example of SharePoint being used in a creative way. He noted that the Enterprise Employee Portal demonstrates SharePoint's flexibility and capacity to incorporate a variety of relationship-driven functionalities (such as blogs and wikis) that are typically limited to consumer websites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Technically Speaking

This system extends the out-of-box functionality of MOSS 2007 Standard to meet this client's unique needs. This project demonstrates not only MOSS' ability to be significantly customized to meet unique and diverse corporate needs, but with some 27 servers in production it also proves the capability of SharePoint to scale to the largest of corporate needs.