Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Platfrom for a Global NGO

In order to have extensive collaboration and knowledge sharing mechanisms, XYZ - an international development agency decided to create an intranet portal using Sharepoint Server 2007. This would help the XYZ employees to form communities across geographies in order to communicate, collaborate and share experiences helping them in their fight against poverty.
The need for XYZ was to have an intranet that is very user friendly, has multi-mode collaboration mechanisms and has a extensive cross-referencing capability.
They decided to partner with Sonata, in view of Sonata's expertise on Sharepoint 2007 and Sonata's commitment to the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Sonata is currently working on the intranet and the first phase is due to get completed in July.

Situation

XYZ is an international development agency whose aim is to fight poverty and related social issues worldwide. They are established in 44 countries and work on programs with their local partners. There is a need to collaborate across the country programs in order to share knowledge, take joint action as well as interact person to person. The main mode of collaboration is through unstructured modes like e-mail and the ability to learn from experiences would depend on personal knowledge of a program in a different country. Also given that this would be based on user driven content each employee had to be capable of setting up or participate in communities united by a common theme.
Sharepoint portal and the underlying Sharepoint services, with the concepts of workspaces, rich collaboration and knowledge sharing mechanisms like Blogs, Wikis, document libraries allied with a powerful search capabilities proved a good fit for their needs. This resulting intranet would enable users who are not computer friendly, who sometimes work in remote areas with little or no internet connectivity to take advantage of the experience and knowledge of their co-workers and partners around the globe.

Building such an intranet would need a good amount of customization of Sharepoint to meet the usability and collaboration needs of XYZ. XYZ chose Sonata for its experience in Sharepoint portal 2007, which it was working on from its first beta release and its understanding of building portals.
A smart partnership thus evolved among XYZ, Microsoft and Sonata - aligned to deliver extended value to XYZ employees.

The Solution

Sonata is currently delivering the phase 1 of the Intranet. This phase is slated to deliver

• My Site - for each XYZ employee. This is the first page that every user lands after logging in. The site has been extensively customized in accordance to XYZ usability requirements.
  
• Workgroup creation and management
  
• Cross-linking (referencing) at workgroup, folder and document level using workflows.
  
• Content upload over e-mail. This allows an user to upload content without having to log on to the intranet.
  
• Custom calendar view that segregates users private view, public view and enables publishing events to other users and workgroup calendars.
  
• Custom Web parts for "My Site"
  
• Advanced search that lets the user choose the level of search (site, workgroups, regions etc), search parameters and Boolean search.
  
• Collaborative tool access Wikis, blogs, yellow pages

The solution architecture was designed to meet XYZ requirements given the geographical spread, user computer awareness and the existing IT infrastructure in XYZ.br>

The project was executed using Sonata's proven delivery model. The multi-phase project execution involved system study, prototyping, design and development of common integration components & integration points, testing & delivery / acceptance testing. Sonata's deliverables included:

• Solution Architecture and Deployment architecture recommendations.
  
• Intranet delivered in two phases
  
• User manual
  
• Instruction notes for installation of the various components

Intended Benefits

• Leveraging power of Structured information
  XYZ employees can efficiently search and access content. Ability to tag content as a way for user driven classification. unity. Be able to cross-reference and access content of interest without having to navigate to other workgroups. Be able to use tools like Wiki's and Blogs to disseminate information, opinions and viewpoints oriented around a specific purpose.
  
• Growth of Collaborative communities
  Be able to create workgroups based on a issue or a set of issues which could be unique to a region or a time (like a new law being passed) and be able to build a community around it. This can enable gather of opinions, can cause concerted action or can just leverage the experiences from XYZ employees.
• Personal workspaces
  Enables each employee to have a personal space which they can use for user specific content (Career tracking, Leave tracking, personal documents) as well use to access information required for their day to day activities.
  
• Content Storage
  The intranet is intended to be the primary repository of content replacing the scattered content stored in multiple systems across the globe.

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