/ Consulting Company Rejuvenates Intranet with Radically Improved Search and Superior Performance
Overview
Country or Region:India
Industry:Business and IT Consulting
Customer Profile
Sapient is a business and IT consulting company established in 1991. Today, it has over 9,000 employees with 31 offices globally. The company's revenues in fiscal year 2010 was U.S.$823.5 million.
Business Situation
The company has built an intranet portal called ‘People Portal’ on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007. Several features and templates had been custom-built as these were not available out of the box. Also maintenance was time consuming
Solution
Sapient believes in technology innovation. It upgraded its intranet by participating in Microsoft’s Early Adopter Program for SharePoint Server 2010.
Benefits
- Improves usability
- Better performance
- Faceted search improves search radically
- Saves time
Ashok Sethi, Chief Information Officer, Sapient
Sapient, a leader in business and technology consulting, leads by example. One of the ways Sapient gains and maintains its competitive edge is by effectively leveraging best in class technology to create innovate solutions. People Portal, Sapient’s employee intranet, had fast become the nerve centre of the organization as the one-stop shop for people to find the information they are looking for. All employees head to it, be it to find a colleague, gain insight for a sales pitch, or just check the latest corporate policy and news. The initial release was based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and an upgrade was eagerly anticipated when Microsoft announced SharePoint Server 2010. As part of the upgrade initiative, Sapient participated in the Early Adopter Program to jumpstart People Portal 2, producing a far more intuitive and user-friendly intranet system that effectively leverages the key improvements and new features that are available with SharePoint 2010.
Situation
Sapient is a global services company that helps clients transform in the areas of business, marketing, and technology. The company operates three divisions that enable clients to gain a competitive advantage and succeed in an increasingly digital world. SapientNitro, Sapient Global Markets and Sapient Government Services fuse insight, creativity and technology to drive innovation and to help clients navigate complex business problems. The company has operations in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
The company had built an intranet portal called ‘People Portal’ on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007. Several features and templates had been custom-built as these were not available out of the box in the 2007 version. While the solution worked well, itwasn’teasily maintained and upgraded as out-of-the-box features. Sapient seized the opportunity to leverage SharePoint Server 2010’s robust capabilities with fewer customizations, increasing performance and application stability while adding better search and content management features.
Solution
Sapient has an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, which offers free upgrades and flexibility in managing software licenses. This meant that Sapient could upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 without having to purchase any additional software. “The driving factor for the upgrade was the out-of-the-box features such as document and metadata management, expertise location, and faceted search,” comments Ashok Sethi, Chief Information Officer, Sapient.
Sapient evaluated the new solution and ran a proof of concept in April 2010 using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta 2. After user testing, Sapient worked closely with Microsoft to identify deployment roadmap, migration of content and retirement strategy for the old portal.
The migration of content was the most critical and time-consuming component of the solution. In the 2007 implementation, Sapient used a distributed publishing model but did not include robust content management features to automate content governance, resulting in a tendency for outdated and duplicate content. In addition, Sapient needed to modify the existing page templates to better suit the content. Therefore, a large part of the overall effort was spent on manual cleanup and migration of data and communities, while the actual upgrade and deployment to SharePoint Server 2010 was straightforward and very quick.
The new portal, called ‘People Portal 2’ was launched in April 2011. The key features and upgrades include faceted search, robust expertise finding via customizable My Sites combined with search on all fields of a person’s profile, and a front-end site structure based entirely on managed metadata.
Benefits
Improves Usability
The response from users clearly points to better usability of People Portal 2. Features such as My Profile have improved considerably, as Sapient users are now able to enter information about their skills, interests and experience so that they can be located quickly. When searching for others, users love the ability to browse a person’s position in the organization chart using the visual organization browser. In addition, Sapient built a recognition and kudos tool that allows others to add a note or award nomination directly to a person’s profile. Users also like the ability to see seat numbers, and project history.
With People Portal 2, users get a more personalized experience. They can bookmark the pages that are most critical and access their favorites from their home page. They can add links to frequently used applications and view their current staffing allocations. They can also see news and events targeted by audience to their specific location or business unit.
Users can also browse for information using managed metadata in libraries. For example, the standard taxonomy managed from within “term store” that allows people to quickly drill down through thousands of case studies to see only the ones that are relevant. All people centric policies and processes ranging from hiring updates, business process, people process, travel and HR policies such as employee benefits etc. are published on the portal.
“We realized that the time spent on customization of content in the People Portal 2 was at least 50 percent lower than the previous intranet.”Abhishek Bhatnagar, Senior Manager Program Management, Enterprise Application Services, Sapient
Better Performance
The earlier solution was starting to show performance related issues, with over 235 thousand pages and growing each month at 8 percent. Complaints on performance were trickling in. “However, on the day of the launch of People Portal 2, we had over 160,000 page views with over 1500 concurrent users. With such high traffic, we experienced excellent performance with pages opening in under 1 -2 seconds,” saysRahul Waddehra, Director Enterprise Application Services, Sapient.
More importantly, as many as 30 to 40 percent of Sapient employees, access the intranet and intranet-based applications over a Virtual Private Network. With SharePoint Server 2010, secure and quick access has become possible for all employees.
Faceted Search Improves Search Radically
“Over 400 content owners adding a mix of internal and externally related content regularly to the intranet.People were having trouble finding what they needed in search. For example, a search on Health Insurance returned hundreds of documents, some of them related to employee benefits and many of them related to work we had done for clients. Sifting through this information was a waste of time and cumbersome for employees,” comments Nicole Bussard, Senior Manager People Strategy.“However, managed metadata in combination with Faceted Search allows users to filter results by content type, industry, geography, owner and other data, making it quicker and easier to browse a large data set to find the most appropriate content.”
The same is true with People Search. If users need a Microsoft .NET developer, he or she can enter “.NET” in the search box and then quickly filter by geography to find someone nearby.
“The search options along with meta data tagging have improved the solution dramatically. The visual cues enable users to find information far more easily and quickly. Even better, we don’t have to worry about terminology changes over time, since the term store makes it simple to update, combine and re-organize our metadata,” she adds.
Saves Time
Sapient has used some of the key features of SharePoint Server completely out of the box. This means that deployment time decreased considerably. “We realized that the time spent on customization of content in the People Portal 2 was at least 50 percent lower than the previous intranet,” explains Abhishek Bhatnagar, SeniorManager Program Management, Enterprise Application Services, Sapient.
He adds that Sapient People are also saving significant time each day with easy access to information, documents and artifacts available on the portal. They are also benefitting from better content. On the back end, content is stored in sites provisioned by owner, so that permissions are easy to administrate and content is easy to audit and govern. On the front end, the People Portal uses the managed metadata together with Content Query Web Parts to surface the content in a task-based architecture, making it easy for users to find what they need in context. Since content can surface in multiple places, duplications are avoided, and the true path is persistent for bookmarking and linking purposes.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.
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