Australia's Commonwealth Bank is home to the modern corporate banker, with a SharePoint-powered intranet providing the power for staff to work with iPad in hand, updating a blog while simultaneously checking email and preparing a presentation for the first of many meetings that day.

When bank staff need to find a colleague who can assist with particular expertise, a quick People search will throw up some appropriate suggestions among many nationwide colleagues, who may even be online that moment and ready for a videoconference to help fill in the blanks on a particular subject.

The Commonwealth Bank is building an environment to make all this possible through SharePoint 2007, which has been deployed over the past 18 months to replace an ageing intranet platform.

A small centralised team of 5-10 staff were previously responsible for maintaining intranet content, with the result that content was not regularly updated and hence the intrant was not well used.

An intranet has gone off course when staff see it as just as a company home page that they click off before they try and find stuff in Google.

“There was no collaborative focus and a long queue to get stuff up on the intranet, which ended up consisting of just the CEOs message and some news updates,” said Scott Suine, Solution Delivery Manager at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Without any analytics, the bank was not even able to gauge its usage, and there was no intranet search engine deployed.

By 2009 there were up to 70,000 pages of content on the intranet, however less than half was up to date and staff were not using it regularly. This resulted in a huge support burden. Half of the 13,000 calls to the bank’s help desk each year were from staff asking where to find content on the intranet.

“The help desk was a costly search engine,” said Suine.

In early 2009, the bank began developing the business case for a new collaboration platform, and the fact it already had SharePoint 2007 licensing as part of its Microsoft Enterprise agreement made it an attractive option.

The bank hoped to encourage greater use of the intranet by its 45,000 staff, and to slash help desk calls.

EMC Documentum provides the bank’s document and Web content management backbone. Management wanted to exploit as much out of SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality as possible, and avoid having to commit a large team of .Net developers.

In collaboration with systems integrator CSG, the bank built up a proof of concept for the first phase which it proceeded to implement in three months using some high profile business units.

Up to 50,000 pages were identified as being required to migrate to SharePoint within the first 12 months; while new capabilities such as blogging, videoconferencing, online realtime polling and integrated search were to be offered.

By June 2010 the bulk of the bank’s intranet sites had been migrated, and there are now more than 250 content authors instead of just four.

“We have also put a strong governance model in place to ensure the right content is in the right place and it is always relevant and up to date,” said Suine.

Some of the SharePoint functionality that is being embraced by the bank includes the new People Search capability, group knowledge base, and form-driven applications.

The use of SharePoint MySites has not been provided, as the bank still wants Documentum to act as the main document repository.

SharePoint People Searches draw on information extracted from the bank’s PeopleSoft human resource management systems via Active Directory.

Web 2.0 revolution

The availability of Web 2.0 tools on the intranet has been a major culture change for the bank, one that is easier for the younger generation to embrace.

It’s not just a case of “build it and they will come,” according to Suine.

“To get high level executives to blog took some doing” he said. “There is a wide variation of computer literacy across the bank.”

Some unique approaches to archiving had to be developed in some areas, for instance, where the bank faced stringent legislative requirements to keep the entire structure of an intranet site at a point in time. This is handled using a tool called Offline Explorer.

Visual Basic has been the toolkit for providing customised applications until now, although Suine is keen to see the bank’s non-technical staff work with non-programming tools to develop individual workflows.

One tangible result of the SharePoint rollout at CBA has been a healthy reduction of more than half of those help desk calls initiated by staff, who could not find what they needed on the previous intranet.

A major task was to migrate eight separate knowledge repositories into one centralised knowledge base of 125,000 pages of reference material, policy documents and product information.

The next phase of development for SharePoint at the Commonwealth Bank will see the complete migration of existing sites from the old intranet, and the implementation of FAST 2010 search.

Documentum has recently been updated to the latest version which offers enhanced integration functions, while a migration to SharePoint 2010 will commence shortly.