Challenge
A Canadian energy company building a massive hydroelectric plant needed a centralized platform where project teams could come together to collaborate, share documents and stay in constant communication. OnX’s Digital Services team recommended a managed SharePoint hosted solution, which integrates with the Microsoft Office 365 suite of business applications.
As the construction of the hydroelectric plant started, the energy company’s executive team realized they needed a centralized platform to enable real-time information sharing across the ten divisions involved in the project.
Each division had its own portal, many using technologies that did not speak to each other. This made it extremely difficult to manage the construction project, stay on schedule and create a culture of accountability.
The energy company had three urgent needs:
- Unified platform: Company leaders wanted a unified platform for information sharing and collaboration across the divisions and a multitude of external contractors.
- Security: The unified platform had to be secure and protect sensitive company information. It also needed a comprehensive, authority-based workflow hierarchy with secure access management capabilities.
- Cloud Delivery: Company leaders preferred a hosted, software-as-aservice model to hand off managing the infrastructure.
Solution
The OnX Digital Services team helped the company implement a managed SharePoint solution that had four key components:
- Assessment: OnX consultants met with company leaders to document their current technology, establish strategic goals and timelines and define what project success would look like.
- Fully managed hosted SharePoint: Once OnX understood the full scope of the project, its consultants recommended a customized, fully managed SharePoint collaboration platform to connect all existing environments and replace any that were not already built on SharePoint. To improve time-to-market and help meet stringent audit and governance requirements, the OnX Digital Services team used the company’s existing Active Directory set-up, avoiding a complete start-from-scratch approach.
- Customization: OnX customized a ticker feed for the centralized portal to broadcast high-priority communications— particularly weather updates — to each division to help project managers meet their timelines.
- Social media: Based on the initial discovery assessment, OnX created social media feeds to post project updates on popular social media platforms, to ensure that all communications were received via channels preferred and leveraged by the end users.
Results
Clearly establishing the project requirements up front and defining what a successful outcome would look like ensured the OnX Digital Services team could execute the design, configuration and deployment of SharePoint in a fraction of the time it would have taken the energy company to do on their own.
OnX’s deep experience with SharePoint allowed for the integration of all individual portals into a centralized view with robust collaboration capabilities.
This significantly improved the hydroelectric plant’s communications, document management and data governance & security.
Finally, the cloud-based SharePoint model helped the client avoid investing in the expensive hardware and headcount that would have been required to manage the SharePoint collaboration environment on their own.