Here at AIS, we like to consider ourselves SharePoint experts. We’ve studied the various intricacies of the application, used it for countless client projects and published many blogs and white papers about it. So when we were approached with the idea of developing and deploying a global SharePoint Intranet solution for FTI Consulting (with a network of 3,800 employees in 23 countries on six continents), we had no doubt we were up to the task. Read on to learn how we used an analytical model based on incremental iterations, checkpoints and timelines to assure a successful outcome.
Background
FTI Consulting grew through numerous acquisitions and had inherited several disparate intranets and corporate communications platforms. Tasked with unifying these numerous and varying business communication platforms, AIS focused on a single global platform — providing a unified intranet and content management system where all corporate communications could reside. The intranet was to be fully secure and accessible to all employees, including a mobile workforce and users who were conducting business outside of corporate network boundaries.
Challenge
In order to successfully develop and launch a global intranet and corporate communications platform, AIS was required to unify multiple, decentralized communication platforms and networks, as well as develop a solution that addressed all site-to-site variances in IT organization and infrastructure. AIS also needed to implement a platform that would be secure, yet allow easy access to users working on varying software and hardware platforms, across continents, in a variety of work environments. The work also required the team to take special consideration of recent mergers — employees from newly merged entities would require intranet access without a trust between domains, and in certain instances, no direct network connectivity. Finally, AIS needed to implement and deploy a SharePoint platform to enable ongoing enhancements and the addition of more functional capabilities to meet future needs, while enhancing the business value of the intranet well into the future.
Solution
By leveraging the SharePoint platform, AIS deployed a solution that included the development and launch of a new global intranet. AIS assembled the client’s global operations and communications through a unified intranet, content management system and corporate communications platform which was deployed with two server farms — one in North America and another in Asia. AIS worked with the client’s IT staff to design primary elements of the intranet, including information architecture, navigation hierarchy and search topology. This included a centralized taxonomy for content types and managed metadata. Therefore, AIS laid the groundwork for all future information management. AIS created an intuitive, feature-rich, graphical user interface for the intranet that provided ease of use, power and flexibility with multiple page templates and the ability to share videos, corporate news and social networking data. By applying ADFS 2.0 and Microsoft’s Unified Access Gateway 2010, AIS maintained security while allowing access to thousands of users, many of which operated on unrelated networks, outside of corporate organizational boundaries. External access was also given to the recently merged offices without direct network connectivity through UAG 2010. The new offices have direct connectivity access the new intranet with their existing logins using claims-based authentication and federation through ADFS 2.0.
Results
AIS’ global SharePoint solution has not only unified all of the client’s existing business sites worldwide, it also allows for the quick integration of any future acquisitions — giving all new employees instant access to corporate information, policies and procedures. Further, by consolidating all intranets on SharePoint, it will now be possible to sunset legacy systems and reduce the maintenance costs of those systems. The firm now has a SharePoint platform that will enable it to provide ongoing functional enhancements based on business requirements.
Business and Technological Advances
We not only leveraged our expertise of SharePoint to build a platform that worked for the organization’s current needs, also for strategic planning for the future. The platform will also be the foundation for building future business applications to:
- Facilitate a worldwide extranet to provide and share information with their clients and collaborate on ongoing projects
- Add more Knowledge Management capabilities to provide a deeper enterprise-wide view into the skills and experience of their consultants and project capabilities
Future technological advances include the ability to:
- Provide enhanced Search capabilities
- Build out enterprise Content Management capabilities
- Develop a Records Management capability
- Extend the intranet to support Social Media
Technology
An agile iterative methodology was utilized to realize results quickly without having to delineate vast amounts of information up-front. Through multiple iterations, AIS was able to develop a SharePoint 2010 solution that satisfied all of the project’s requirements.
- SharePoint Server 2010
- Unified Access Gateway 2010
- Visual Studio 2010
- .Net 3.5