Management Consulting Firm SharePoint Account and Project Team Portal

Challenge

Despite being known for its novel business approaches, this consultancy found itself following a very traditional approach – file servers and email – for information sharing among project teams, account teams and offices. As the company grew, executive management increasingly saw the need for better knowledge management that would facilitate communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise. But how? Each client account belonged to a specific office, and each account generated multiple projects and teams. Furthermore, authorization and access requirements varied from one project, office, or employee to the next. With so much stratification, the task was daunting.

Solution

Abel Solutions implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for the client, defining and structuring the site templates at four separate but interconnected levels – office, account, project and national service area. Each template supports the appropriate priorities and authorizations, enabling substantial automation.

For example, Abel customized and automated the site provisioning process for new project initiation. When the designated representative within an office approves a project manager’s request for a new project site, SharePoint generates the site, defines permissions automatically based on the designated template, and performs many other site configuration steps. The requester then receives notification that the site is ready for use, condensing a 30 to 40-step process into a few steps.

Abel also developed custom solutions for access at varying levels. These include giving clients project level access via an extranet and enabling project managers to generate new accounts and auto-notify clients and users of login credentials.

Results

Today, the consultancy has attained an advanced level of automated network and cross-network collaboration with industry-leading information security. All data, including documents, deliverables, schedules, notations and contact lists, flows through and is archived in a central repository, where the system retrieves it as needed for usage at pre-authorized permission levels. All 12 national service area sites update the repository and the service area home site dynamically, with recently added data being highlighted on the home site. The entire integrated network is uniform and accurate at all times.