As Celerity has grown it has been looking for a way to allow its staff to collaborate on documents and share information between departments enabling us to provide a better service to our customers. As a Microsoft Partner, the solution found to best fit their requirements and vision for the future is Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
As SharePoint is a Microsoft product it integrated seamlessly with Celerity’s current Windows Environment and Microsoft Office, and because it can be managed and accessed from a web front-end this means that it can be used on virtually any platform without the need to install and manage any extra software.
Relying on Active Directory for user authentication and security ensures Celerity’s data is stored securely with strict access policies to maintain customer confidentiality. SharePoint allows departments to have their own site on the intranet, whilst also allowing users with the right permissions to view or edit the documents on other departments’ sites. This means that when Celerity personnel are out of the office their knowledge is not.
The last statement is especially true for our technical team who produce a lot of customer documentation such as design documents and installation reports. In the old days these documents would reside on the author’s laptop or emailed to colleagues. Now customer documentation is available to the entire team, allowing any member of the team to easily get up to speed regarding a customer's IT environment in order to provide support and consultancy.
As part of Celerity's ISO9001 accreditation we are bound to implement a document management system which incorporates a change and version control mechanism. Sharepoint's ability to allow users to check-in and check-out of documents and provide comments on changes made satisfied this requirement. However, documents can be co-authored if needed, which allows users to check out only part of a document while letting others work on another part of the same document at the same time. Official company documents or final versions of documents can be locked down to prevent further changes from being made. As some of Celerity staff do a lot of travelling; laptops can be synced to work offline so they can still have access to documents without the need for internet access. There is a search feature which allows the user to quickly find what they are looking for, and be used from within the Windows 7 desktop search tool.
The ability to create skills profiles for all users has helped streamline Celerity’s internal project management and resource allocation processes allowing Project Managers to quickly pull together the right people with the right skill set for new projects.
Celerity has taken the opportunity to integrate our website’s news page and twitter feed within the SharePoint site, so that personnel are always up-to-date with what is happening within the company. Discussion boards and team calendars allow Celerity’s staff across its five offices to share information and collaborate without any geographical restrictions.
Celerity has only scratched the surface of what SharePoint can do so far. However, we can see that this new collaborative infrastructure will help a growing and expanding Celerity retain and improve on the swiftness that our customers have come to expect.
John Carson - Technical Consultant – Celerity Ltd