Empowering Collaboration and Document Management for a Government Agency with a Customized Intranet

About the Client

The client is a government environmental assessment agency in one of the largest but environmentally sensitive territories of Canada. They are responsible for assessing the potential impacts of proposed projects in the region before granting the required permits, licenses, and approvals. Their mission is to protect and promote the well-being of the Environment and Nunavummiut through the impact assessment process.

The Challenges Faced by the Client

As a large organization, the agency faced several operational challenges. These challenges often created issues and prevented them from realizing their desired operational efficiency. Therefore, they wanted a smart and effective solution to their challenges and to increase their responsiveness and quality of service.

The Need for an Effective Collaboration Platform

The organization was spread across different departments like Leadership, Operations, IT and more. However, they lacked an effective system that will allow for seamless communication between their departments. In some cases, intra-department and inter-department collaboration was essential. Hence, they needed a solution that facilitated real-time collaboration to increase cohesion and increase responsiveness.

Upgrading to a Better Document Management System was Essential

Due to the nature of their work, the agency receives thousands of documents every day. These documents needed to be routed to the relevant authorities and remain accessible to them. This is why they wanted to upgrade to a better document management process where managing and working on documents became more effortless.

Security was another major concern for the agency. Most of the documents are confidential in nature and hence they needed to ensure only those individuals with relevant authority can access and make suitable changes to the documents.

Building a SharePoint Intranet to Solve Their Document Management and Collaboration Challenges

After thoroughly understanding their key challenges, we determined that Microsoft SharePoint to be an ideal platform for building an intranet that solved their issues. SharePoint offers several key advantages. First, it comes with robust document management features which facilitates real-time collaboration, efficient organization, and has advanced security features. The intranet features of SharePoint help to increase collaboration among different departments and boost collaboration.

Building an Efficient SharePoint Intranet to Facilitate Collaboration

We built a SharePoint intranet to solve the collaboration issue. We started by planning the intranet architecture based on the client requirements. Once that was completed, we moved towards designing the SharePoint home page for their intranet.

The home page for any SharePoint site is crucial, since this is the first page the user sees after logging in. Presenting important and relevant information is key. As per their request, the landing page of the intranet was designed to include sections on monthly employee newsletter, recent press releases, policies, a Twitter feed, Board Meeting & Public Hearing events, FAQs, Employee Directory, Seminar and Conferences, and links to external sites.

We also built separate SharePoint team sites for different departments like IT, HR, Operation, Leadership, and the likes. On the department sites, the landing page was designed to contain components like SharePoint list and libraries, calendars, links, etc., for a productive work environment.

To ensure a consistent user experience, we also customized the look of the SharePoint site based on the company branding colors. Based on the client’s request, we offered them three custom color themes.

Enhancing Document Management Across the Agency

When creating a DMS based on SharePoint, we focused on organization and security. All the files were organized into relevant libraries, so that teams could access them whenever they wanted. We also set up user roles and permissions, which ensured that only the right people could access the files. Security settings were configured to protect the documents from any risks.

The Impact of Our Customized SharePoint Intranet

With a brand-new intranet in place, the team now experiences improved communication throughout the organization. The look and feel of their intranet sites align with their corporate theme and branding.

All the important documents are organized, and access to information is faster and easier. The intranet has increased their productivity and streamlined the processes, allowing them to respond to requests faster. Dedicated department sites have broken down the data silos and have made knowledge management less confusing and more organized.

Key Performance Metrics Improvement

65%

Increase in Productivity

50%

Reduction in Response Times

20+

Users Impacted