SharePoint: It’s Not Your Father’s Portal By Russ Rodrigue
In order to be effective as a company, Cianbro team members must share ideas, review and vet documents, support projects, collaborate on bidding new work, solve technical issues, meet and discuss issues/problems, and many other person-to-
person or group-to-group activities. Today, this is done in a variety of ways, using a variety of technologies, across a variety of mediums; but are we effective? Cianbro Leadership has determined that in order to drive new business, we need to focus on markets and industries that are growing, or have the greatest opportunities, or simply have reliable funding sources. As always, Cianbro is successful because we encourage team members to find creative solutions; we “make things work” and we all pull in the same direction. Essentially, we collaborate! Expanding the company’s power to collaborate is why IT has been working on a new technology solution from Microsoft called SharePoint that, when fully deployed, will replace the cianbro.net web portal. The SharePoint environment will have many of the features that team members rely on every day, such as Team Member Finder, SOP, Pay Stub Viewer, Citrix links, HR & Finance documents and reports, news stories, and much more.
The SharePoint portal will deliver these capabilities using newer technologies and simple, logical navigation links. SharePoint will have departmental pages (e.g. HR, Operations, Finance, IT, Purchasing, etc.) that will contain additional content, documents, links and public information accessible throughout the company.
Finally, a global search capability will be implemented that will allow team members to find information more quickly using a “Google-like” search engine. This will enable searches of documents, images, videos, content pages, the SOP site, etc. and return results based on the closest match. In addition, IT will introduce two additional portal sites geared towards “partners” and “work pages.” The Partner pages will allow sub-contractors, vendors, JVs and business partners to more easily connect with and share information with Cianbro team members and project teams, as well as submit invoices and check on the status of payments. The Work pages will offer capabilities related to shared project pages, document storage, collaboration on documents, workflow, various data and business intelligence…geared at the work activity or project level. The goal of these two additional portal sites is to offer Cianbro’s team members a more robust solution for collaborating on projects,
including common calendars, alerts, news, centralized storage and retrieval of project documentation, etc. The SharePoint project is scheduled to release in the first quarter of 2013. The first phase entails replacing the existing cianbro.net landing page which incorporates news stories, departmental pages for HR, Safety and IT, Careers page, and links to many popular applications and reports. SharePoint will be integrated with the existing cianbro.net portal allowing access to all the tools, reports and documents familiar to team members. Phases II and III (Partner site and Work sites respectively) will be deployed throughout 2013 and will be communicated via the SharePoint portal. IT is not alone in the design and development of the SharePoint site. IT has teamed up with members from HR, Safety, Finance, Operations and Creative Services. An advisory committee has been formed to guide all aspects of the SharePoint project and implementation. The stakeholders include:
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HR: Mark Hovey, Debbie Cyr, Andrea Pelletier SAFETY: Dan Coffey FINANCE: Jerilyn Underhill, Tim Cooley, Laura Curtis OPERATIONS: Matt Bradeen CREATIVE SERVICES: Mike Brooks, Chris Karlen IT: Gordon Monk, Tim Flewelling, Greg Schueman, Joe Kennedy, Christine Nadeau, Russ Rodrigue
SharePoint is a very powerful tool, but is only as good as the content published. The capabilities are seemingly endless. SharePoint is a Microsoft product and one of their most popular and best funded. According to Microsoft, there are over 225 million end-users of SharePoint worldwide, so this is a very powerful and user friendly tool, one that many of our business partners, joint venture partners and vendors already extensively use. In addition, SharePoint is already integrated with thousands of business applications, enabling rapid deployments and simplified data sharing.
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