Expanding Content Management Capabilities in SharePoint Search Portal

Summary

An international consulting company that helps SMEs build their business and commercial strategies — and delivers premium content to end users — wanted to expand its SharePoint search portal. Building on an earlier portal it had delivered, INNERLUXES enriched the content with statistical charts and data tables across four target industries and added personalization features, giving users a much larger, more relevant, and easier-to-navigate content experience.

About the Client

The Client is an international consulting company that assists small and medium-sized enterprises in drawing up their business and commercial strategies. The Client also provides end users with high-quality content, such as exclusive news, unique digests, event overviews, and more.

The Challenge

In an earlier stage of the project, INNERLUXES helped the Client create a SharePoint-based search portal that gave end users access to a wide set of unique content — including important news and event overviews — and centralized numerous PDF documents spread across multiple Client storages.

To expand its offering, the Client decided to upgrade the content with charts and data tables containing accurate statistics revealing the latest facts and trends across four target industries: healthcare, real estate, education, and hospitality. The Client also aimed to improve the user experience by enriching the portal with personalization features that let end users easily sort the information and aggregate personalized content.

The Solution

INNERLUXES ensured a smooth integration of the new features by extending the existing solution with new menu items — each corresponding to a relevant capability: charts, data tables, and personalization.

The charts and data-table sections offer users a rich set of data that can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF/Excel files. To enable quick, targeted search across the data, INNERLUXES indexed over 400 pages from multiple Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to make each piece of information searchable and downloadable. All pages were thoroughly sorted and classified into four main categories matching the four predefined industries; the categories were logically divided into subcategories with up to four-level nesting, allowing precise search results by both tags and keywords.

To provide the required level of personalization, the SharePoint developers added a separate menu section similar to a personal account page, enabling users to store and manage selected information within a single tab by:

• Saving favorite search keys and marking interesting pages.
• Choosing certain keywords and enabling automatic email notifications when an associated item is newly published on the portal.
• Viewing the search history across the entire portal, including news, events, and digests.

The Results

• The updated search portal provides users with a much larger set of content enriched with statistical data covering four target industries.
• Beyond instant search of requested information, the portal now includes personalization tools that let end users pick out the most relevant information, store selected content, and review it any time.
• Automatic notifications keep subscribers informed when new content matching their interests is published.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2013, Microsoft PowerPoint Services, Microsoft Excel Services, HTML, CSS.