For Baptist Community Services, a major project to upgrade to a SharePoint intranet was like climbing Mount Everest. Safely atop the peak, IT Applications Manager Arvee Manaog and Senior Systems Analyst Kusal Wijewantha reflected on the epic journey at the Australia SharePoint Conference 2011.

Baptist Community Services is a leading not-for-profit Christian care organisation that has been serving the aged and people living with disabilities for the past 65 years.

With an annual turnover of $200 million, it presently has over 3700 staff and more than 1000 volunteers operating at 70 sites across NSW and the ACT. This includes 2500 computer users.

SharePoint 2007 was chosen in 2009 to form the basis of a completely redesigned intranet, the project was completed in 15 months.

Users were facing the typical problems of a large organisation, information was hard to find and there were multiple copies of documents scattered over many different sites. An existing intranet solution was not popular and staff did not find it user friendly.

After the selection of MOSS 2007, an Intranet Steering Committee was formed and immediately began looking for some “Quick Wins” to get users excited about the possibilities of the new intranet.

“We had support from the top with management on board with the idea of change, but we wanted to show some immediate benefits as our way of saying ‘Change is coming - there is hope, we are doing something’,” said Manaog.

Searchability was improved with the rollout of the Google search Appliance to ease that pain point. A revamp of the intranet front page was accompanied by the rollout of TeamSites and meeting workspaces to show the functionalities available in MOSS 2007.

An Intranet scan tool was also developed to provide a feel for how many sites would need to be migrated over. This also gave a view of the history of each site, when it was last accessed and who uses it. It revealed there were more than 500 sites with some that had not been accessed for more than four years.

A project team that included technical staff and Intranet champions then tackled the job of designing an information architecture, informed by focus groups held at all office locations in ACT and NSW.

A review of policies and procedures and forms found more than 1400 with extensive duplication between the existing intranet and BCS’s TRIM recordkeeping system.

“We decided we would have one source of truth, everything would be in TRIM,” said Manaog.

Integration between SharePoint and TRIM was tackled to provide a single source of truth for policies, procedures and forms. SharePoint provides another doorway to TRIM’s Document Library so that users think everything has been saved on the intranet.

Search was further enhanced through the improved search functionality in MOSS 2007.

“Google Search returns everything, and users end up being overwhelmed with the results list,” said Manaog.

“Because it is also hard to configure, we decided to go for the search function in MOSS 2007 and configure it using Search Scopes.”

A “QuickFind” function was also implemented based on 100 Keywords commonly used by the organisation, so staff can easily find a leave form or submit car expenses for instance. Workflows were initially tackled using an in-house developed engine created in MOSS 2007, however these are now being redeveloped in K2. K2 Blackpearl enterprise workflow and BPM software has been implemented to improve business process.

Senior Systems Analyst Kusal Wijewantha said, “K2 provides a massive saving on development time and automates the process of creating workflow forms.”

There were some obvious early targets to exploit the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint. The AgedCare division handles major Property Development projects worth up to $200 million each. There was a need for a collaboration site that would bring together document libraries and provide role-based security, version control and alerts.

The use of external sites to handle collaboration with engineers, interiors designers, architects and project managers was costing $30,000 per project. With eight projects on the boil at one time this added up to a major cost. Using out-of-the-box WSS 3.0 functionality, BCS built a series of external extranet sites that could be used by up to 30 different organisations working on each project, featuring a Wiki, Document Libraries, Calendar and Alerts.

Manaog says communication was essential to the success of the SharePoint intranet project.

“There is no such thing as too much communication. It was also crucial that our Governance Committee set a roadmap and path for the intranet to prevent proliferation of portals and TeamSites.”

Future challenges include implementing remaining workflows using K2 and upgrading TRIM to Version 7 and SharePoint to 2010.

Information Platform
* Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (32-bit)
* Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (32-bit)
* ASP.NET 3.5
* Microsoft reporting Services 2005/2008
* K2 Blackpearl
* TRIM 6.1.3
* Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Extranet)