Portals and Collaboration Success Story

Artumas Group Inc.

Artumas Group Inc. is an international energy producer with headquarters in Calgary, Alberta and field operations in Africa. Their business is focused on exploring, developing, producing and commercializing known petroleum resources. They acquire operational control of upstream properties they believe hold significant development and exploration potential.

Challenge

Artumas required a portal solution to reduce the amount of time employees spent searching for important documents, improve company-wide communication and enhance collaboration between project teams. Additionally, Artumas needed to ensure that users in their African field operations could interact with the portal, eliminating the need for two separate portal sites. It was critical for Artumas that location did not hinder the company’s ability to work together and share knowledge.

Solution

Ideaca worked with Artumas to ensure the overall portal strategy aligned with critical business objectives. One key criteria identified was the portal’s design needed to closely resemble their external corporate website to ensure company brand consistency both internally and externally. Ideaca implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporating a portal taxonomy to organize information according to departments and processes. This structure provides users with the ability to access sites and documentation across the organization. Ideaca also introduced the concept of team collaboration by creating project sites for current important initiatives.

Additional site functionality included search capability, communication through announcements and calendar events, display of weather and time according to geography, unique portal sub-sites for different departments, a current and easily updateable staff contact list, external stock ticker display and dynamically updated press releases from the Artumas external website. The portal was also published as an extranet for users in Africa to securely access shared documents while maintaining an acceptable response time across satellites.

Benefits

With this successful portal implementation, Artumas can now facilitate proper storage of documents and future collaboration initiatives for project teams regardless of their location. Some additional benefits include:

  • Operational and maintenance cost savings for IT
  • Increased employee productivity by securely providing access to the most recent information
  • Reduced turnaround time by providing a central site to access and search for information and documents
  • Lower total cost of ownership on IT investment by eliminating the need to support separate business applications and information systems