Telecommunications Company Achieves Greater Document Discovery and User Experience with SMBology’s Intranet Solution

Company Overview

SMBology’s client is a fast-growing telecommunication services company with offices in both Texas and Georgia, assisting a wide variety of large clientele. Maintaining a strong reputation within the marketplace, the firm designs, develops, and maintains advanced communication based software systems. This includes VoIP, IP-PBX, MS Unified Communications and other innovative solutions that deliver results to clients and organizations of all sizes. 

Business Challenge

The telecommunications firm had documents and company related material stored throughout the organization on various file shares and servers. Employers and staff members needed to be able to easily access and work on these documents on a daily basis without having to waste valuable time trying to search for these items. Moreover, relying heavily on Microsoft Outlook to manage the firm’s day to day business appointments, client communications and support processes, any proposed solution would be need to seamlessly integrate with Outlook.

SMBology Solution
SMBology developed an Intranet site for its client using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) and set up a custom search feature to solve the problem of not being able to find and easily access company documents. This feature included filtering capabilities that allowed users to better drill down their search results. Additionally, each department was given its own sub site within the company Intranet to store and process key documents and tasks, hoping to provide organization and reduce the need to search. To better the user experience, SMBology customized the look and feel of the SharePoint site, making it cohesive with the firm’s brand and external facing website.

SharePoint’s integration capabilities were employed to keep users’ Outlook and SharePoint calendars integrated inside the firm’s Outlook environment. Additionally, SharePoint’s document libraries and department announcement lists were connected to Outlook, giving employees the ability to access SharePoint content when working within Outlook, even if offline. In parallel, content was to be automatically synched between SharePoint and Outlook, so users could access and add information from either platform.

Security for the SharePoint site was developed to read from the firm’s Active Directory and security trimming was set up across the entire site and sub sites, limiting user permissions. Department heads were automatically assigned as site administrators for their department and permission for other users was restricted to only allow “contribute” or “view” privileges within their department page.

SMBology offered extensive training and made best practice recommendations to increase usability, governance and better the user experience. Guidance was also provided to increase internal site adoption during the initial launch phase.

Results

SMBology effectively developed an Intranet site using MOSS 2007 that was able to successfully meet the firm’s desired goals. Providing departmental sub sites along with incorporating a custom search feature, time searching for documents was reduced. The integration of SharePoint within Outlook leveraged an environment users were already familiar with and greatly enhanced the firm’s current processes. Moreover, SMBology’s client was able to more efficiently handle customer data, support issues and other key business tasks in a stable, secure, and well integrated Intranet environment.