CASE STUDY
Make-A-Wish Foundation® Relies on KWizCom SharePoint Wiki Plus is Essential for Documenting and Publishing Online Content
Summary: As chief information officer for the Make-a-Wish Foundation of America, one of Jim Toy’s responsibilities is overseeing the organization’s SharePoint platform. The Make-A-Wish Foundation uses SharePoint as its collaboration platform to support content for 108 users at the organization’s headquarters in Phoenix and all 65 of its chapters throughout the United States. Jim approached KWizCom and received the WikiPlus product as an in-kind gift to help manage the various documents that support the Make-A-Wish® mission: “The Wiki Plus tool helps our developers drastically cut down on the time it would normally take to draft and publish Wiki articles and documentation,” Jim says. “Saving time translates into savings dollars, allowing us to direct more of our valuable funds toward our mission of granting wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy.”
Making SharePoint Even Better! | sales@kwizcom.com
KWizCom Head Office 50 McIntosh Drive, Unit 109, Markham, Ontario, L3R 9T3, Canada Phone: +1-905-370-0333 Fax: +1-905-784-1153 Email: sales@kwizcom.com
CASE STUDY About The Make-A-Wish Foundation The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants the wishes of children with life- threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy. The Foundation is the largest wish-granting charity in the world, with 65 chapters throughout the United States and its territories. With the help of generous donors and nearly 25,000 volunteers, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has granted more than 193,000 wishes in the United States since inception. For more information about the Make-A-Wish Foundation, visit wish.org and discover how you can share the power of a wish®. The Situation Managing the documentation that serves a critical role in the organization’s day-to-day operations is one of Jim’s most formidable tasks. These documents include standard operating procedures (SOPs), system configurations, organizational knowledge bases and context-sensitive help systems. The Foundation was using Microsoft SharePoint as its collaboration platform, and chose SharePoint to manage all of its documents in Wiki format. The Problem With SharePoint out of the box, the team faced versioning challenges, especially with the SOPs. Also, developers were spending inordinate amounts of time creating and publishing Wiki articles and documentation using the native SharePoint wiki functionality. “The native tool lacks many of the features my development team desires,” Jim says. As a nonprofit foundation serving children with life-threatening medical conditions, this extra development time meant that money that could otherwise be directed to the organization’s mission was being channeled to these development tasks. The Solution Jim approached KWizCom and received the WikiPlus product as an in-kind gift. “My lead programmer had been experimenting with KWizCom’s SharePoint Wiki Plus and found it to be the ideal solution for the robust set of features the team seeks,” Jim says. “I saw it and agree that it’s a fantastic application.” Benefits The Foundation found that WikiPlus’s user-friendly rich text editor simplifies creating and maintaining documents by providing users with familiar tools for formatting text, inserting media and referencing content. With its version history feature that automatically tracks changes to documents, Foundation staff members see WikiPlus as the perfect tool for documenting SOPs. “With WikiPlus’ version history feature, the record of changes is right at our fingertips,” Jim says. “There’s no question about what changes were made to a file, even with multiple developers contributing to a document. WikiPlus eliminates the challenges we’ve faced with version management in the past.” Importantly for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the WikiPlus lifecycle alert feature helps moderators and users keep content relevant. This provides them with a path for not only creating and deploying content, but also maintaining and deprecating it. About KWizCom Since 2005, KWizCom has provided innovative SharePoint solutions and services to over 3,000 customers worldwide. Diverse organizations from areas including finance, government, manufacturing, health care, utilities, consulting, media and entertainment depend on KWizCom to make SharePoint even better by expanding its out-of-the-box capabilities. With KWizCom, they streamline workflow, maximize efficiency and enhance over-all productivity for hundreds of thousands of users. KWizCom, a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner, is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
Making SharePoint Even Better! | sales@kwizcom.com
KWizCom Head Office 50 McIntosh Drive, Unit 109, Markham, Ontario, L3R 9T3, Canada Phone: +1-905-370-0333 Fax: +1-905-784-1153 Email: sales@kwizcom.com