SharePoint Intranet Portal Improves Collaboration and Reinforces Corporate Branding
Project at a Glance
RDA implementated a SharePoint site for a student lending leader that centralized shared documents and financial reports for departments and created a single point of access for additional business solutions.
About Our Client
RDA’s client is a Washington, D.C. not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote an educated citizenry through its Loan to Learn program. They pioneered the credit-based student loan industry by creating the very first nationwide privately-funded loan program. Our client has disbursed billions of dollars in education loans to students and their families since its founding nearly 20 years ago.
Background
RDA’s client is composed of departments that each collaborate extensively on a variety of documents and financial reports. Prior to this project, teams were using a combination of shared drives and email attachments to support their efforts.
The company needed a portal to support collaboration on documents and centralization of financial data related to its lending operations. The RDA team was tasked with developing a prototype portal.
Solution Detail
RDA implemented Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for our client to support document collaboration and communication via a portal solution. The solution enables our client to aggregate, organize, and search for specific data. SharePoint also provides our client with single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities as well as flexible deployment options and management tools. In addition, they may target information, programs, and updates to audiences based on their organizational role, team membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria.
RDA’s client established specific branding requirements for the portal to preserve a consistent design and functional interface. To meet these guidelines, The RDA team employed customized templates for each area of the portal using HTML and cascading style sheets to modify the existing SharePoint portal templates.
The solution also supports active data objects connected to back-end data stores and marts using Microsoft’s Reporting Services Web Part. Reporting Services produces automated reports based on data from SQL Server. This particular solution uses SharePoint for its interface, rather than the default.
Each department was provided with its own area on the portal.
Challenges
The RDA team worked hard to ensure that the portal solution met the stringent branding requirements established by our client. This resulted in a consistent portal design that supported the company’s corporate identity.
Because our client’s representative who would assume responsibility for portal maintenance moving forward was a technical writer and not a developer, RDA provided comprehensive training associated with all aspects of the portal.
Benefits
The solution provides the student lending leader with a single location to place, maintain, and collaborate on all of their financial documents. Also, employees are able to view information about the company through the backend data storage component.
SharePoint enables a single point of access to multiple systems such as Microsoft Office System programs, business intelligence and project management systems, and existing line-of-business applications, including third-party and industry-specific programs. Built on a scalable, highly distributed architecture, the portal allows users to extract and reuse timely and relevant information from systems and reports, and quickly locate and access documents, projects, and best practices across the company.
Technically Speaking
This solution employed Microsoft SharePoint technology, in addition to SQL Server 2005 for Reporting Services and SQL 2000 for the backend component. RDA also designed custom Web Parts in C#.