Corporate-Wide Intranet to Unite Geographically Distributed Facilities

Summary

An international investment company that acquires, strengthens, and grows vertical-market technology businesses needed a corporate intranet to unite its geographically distributed facilities. Engaging INNERLUXES's SharePoint consultants, it received a full-fledged, custom SharePoint 2013 group intranet — a centralized information environment with content sharing, document management, enterprise search, social collaboration, and business-process automation — that strengthened corporate culture and sped up internal operations.

About the Client

The Client is an international investment company that employs a large global workforce. For many years, it has been committed to acquiring, strengthening, and growing vertical-market technology businesses, helping them become leaders within their focused sectors. Its companies deliver mission-critical solutions to vertical markets around the world.

The Challenge

As the Client grew globally, it recognized a pressing need for an intranet solution and a number of issues to solve:

• Create a centralized information environment to better manage geographically distributed facilities.
• Keep employees aware of the corporation's international operations and business lines.
• Enable content sharing, document management, and enterprise search within the organization.
• Strengthen corporate culture.
• Provide employees with tools for common work, interaction, and communication.
• Automate internal business processes.

The Solution

The Client brought its requirements to INNERLUXES's SharePoint consultants, who proposed building the global group intranet on the versatile SharePoint 2013 platform. To optimize development costs, INNERLUXES's architects chose SharePoint Composite — a no-code business application created by assembling, connecting, and configuring the main building blocks of functionality available in SharePoint 2013, which still gives the breadth and depth of a full SharePoint solution.

INNERLUXES developed a fully-fledged, bespoke global group intranet with multiple subsites and pages — a user-friendly, visually appealing, comprehensive solution where major features are easily found in the top or side bars and corporate users can reach almost everything they need in one click.

The portal incorporates multiple subsites whose functionality depends on the page type (e.g., vertical site, company site, regional site, personal account). A central hub for the news feed, company announcements, and news subscriptions keeps staff aware of major corporate events, and each page contains exhaustive information on the corporation's history, verticals, international operations, and business lines.

The intranet encourages internal staff to interact via microblogs, polls, and discussion forums, fostering corporate spirit, and a single search module facilitates access to vital internal data and documents. A workflow was created within the intranet to support RFP processing, and — as part of business-process automation — INNERLUXES set up automatic sub-site creation for new acquisitions. Before launch, the team implemented the corporate branding style and all associated elements across the whole intranet.

The Results

• INNERLUXES assisted the Client across the whole project life cycle — from requirements investigation and gathering, through architecture definition and infrastructure deployment, to thorough testing of the ready-made solution and post-deployment SharePoint support for stable operation.
• The project delivered a simple-to-use, highly searchable intranet with a customized look and feel. By bringing all employees to a unified source, the Client created a sense of community and communication across disparate operations.
• The intranet significantly increased the speed of internal business processes and the quality of delivered services — all completed in line with the Client's requirements and within the agreed timeframes.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2013, .NET, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer.