SharePoint 2010 bridges Vela VKE's intranet challenge

The need for intuitive information and expertise sharing leads consulting engineering firm to turn to Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 in Intervate's first implementation of the new Enterprise platform.

Business Challenge

Vela VKE is one of South Africa's leading and most respected engineering consulting firms, with more than 500 staff members in 12 localities, with additional offices throughout the Southern African Development Community.

Vela VKE's legacy intranet suffered the typical affliction of being seldom used as a useful source of company-wide information, running counter to the industry culture of sharing knowledge and expertise. Company CIO Ian van Dyk says a new solution was sought as the intranet was not fully serving its purpose and hampered improved efficiency by not promoting the greater sharing of intellectual capital. “Sharing expertise and knowledge with 500 engineers is far more efficient than restricting that to only the people in your immediate environment,” he says. “We therefore identified the need for a knowledge management system that would enable us to share, capture and access this in an intuitive, seamless way right across the organisation.”

Solution

The contract to produce a new SharePoint based intranet system was awarded to Enterprise Content Management specialists Intervate, with the initial project delivery to be completed on the 2007 version. “Little customisation was needed, which helped enormously when Vela VKE decided toward the end of the project to rather roll out Microsoft SharePoint 2010 when it became available earlier this year,” comments Intervate Cape Town’s Sales and Marketing Director Marc Fletcher. “This was a smart move as the upgrade introduces many new features that have enhanced the solution to the customer, while avoiding an upgrade further down the line. It also presented us with our first SharePoint 2010 implementation, which went as smoothly as could be expected.”

The improved user interface is considered one of the most significant changes in the latest version of SharePoint, with the ribbon feature that was carried over from the Microsoft Office suite offering far greater ease of use. “Microsoft completely rewrote the user interface,” says Fletcher. “The ribbon menu is context dependent on whichever module the user is in, so they no longer have to dig into other menus to change settings.”

Information management has also been simplified through enhanced SharePoint Lists, Forums, Wiki’s, Document Libraries and a host of other features, which will allow Vela VKE to store information centrally, with full indexing and search facilities assisting retrieval. Van Dyk says information management is key to the firm's needs, and that the intuitive interface goes a long way to encouraging the proper sharing of information and knowledge, and retrieving that most effectively from the system.The introduction of social networking-type functionality was another of the motivations for Vela VKE upgrading to SharePoint 2010, he adds.

“As consulting engineers, we sell ideas and knowledge to clients, which equates to expertise and certain skills sets. So, if we are able to tap into a bigger knowledge pool, it will make us more productive and efficient, which is what the intranet allows us to do.”

Users can now search for specific skills or experience contained in engineers' profiles, instantly linking up resources that might otherwise have been working in isolation.

Business Benefits

Linking its 500-odd staff members across 12 locations in South Africa has been simplified immeasurably since the introduction of the SharePoint 2010-based intranet.

“The centralised solution enables standardisation and control of data. For example, it removes the problem of working on different versions of the same document,” says Van Dyk. “Everyone now knows where to find information and documents and with greater access to intellectual capital in the organisation we expect to see far greater adoption of the system.”
He adds that the increased visibility will also lead to an internal peer review perspective that will allow a wider audience to review skills and share expertise on specific projects.“We are very excited about the way the project has been handled and Intervate have been more than up to dealing with the challenges,” he concludes.

This sentiment is shared by Danie Gordon, Productivity Solutions Manager at Microsoft South Africa. “Delivering on Vela VKE’s requirements for knowledge management on our latest platform is a testimony to Intervate’s execution and strong partnership with Microsoft.”

Fletcher says the rollout of the SharePoint 2010 system is the first phase of a much larger plan to eventually integrate this into management systems that would allow authorised personnel to access data through the SharePoint interface.