SharePoint-Case-Study-Burnsville

Customer and Industry

The City of Burnsville.

Project

Create a new Intranet platform.

Technologies

Office 365 and SharePoint.

Customer Profile

The City of Burnsville's goal is to provide quality services and amenities for residents and visitors to enjoy.

The Challenge

Burnsville previously had an HTML-based “Employee Intranet” that could only be updated by a select group of people who knew HTML and how the Intranet was configured. It was managed and changed via Microsoft Expressions, another product that only a few people had access to and knowledge to use. This made their intranet very “stale” very quickly, as time to make updates was limited and the entire site could not be appropriately maintained.
The old Intranet did not have any document management functionality.
The old Intranet did not have a usable “search” function and was messy and hard to navigate by end users. Employees stopped using it.

Alto's Solution

Use Office 365 – SharePoint to serve as the new Intranet platform. Alto helped create a new Intranet from the ground up.

A new home page with content that was relevant to everyone in the organization. There is now a rotating news banner, featured links, dynamically changing “What’s Popular” and “What’s New” sections. These sections display popular and new documents from across the Intranet. There is also a section to display YouTube videos and feeds from social networks such as Facebook. Departmental sub sites – Each department will get a subsite to contain work and information related to their area.

Multiple libraries were created to house documents that were before housed on a server and linked to from the intranet. These documents are now in a common area, able to be searched, modified and more easily accessed by all users.

Additional metadata was used to further categorize the documents to enhance the visibility of each document, making them easier to find and interact with.

A common calendar was implemented to allow employees to put things on the company calendar.

This calendar has a custom workflow attached to it so that managers can approve/reject items before they appear on the calendar for everyone to see.

Search and Usability:

Alto created a custom employee directory. The employee directory by default lists all the employees in the organization with refinements to filter by Department, Job Title, Ask me About, etc. This directory utilizes full search as well to search keywords that might be in that person’s profile.

Summary

The City of Burnsville now has an organization-wide intranet that is more dynamic, more appealing, and much easier to manage. It offers document management, workflow processes, and much more.