Portals and Collaboration Success Story
TransCanada
TransCanada is a leader in the responsible development and reliable operation of North
American energy infrastructure. TransCanada's network of approximately 41,000
kilometers (25,600 miles) of pipeline transports the majority of Western Canada's natural
gas production to key Canadian and U.S. markets. A growing independent power
producer, TransCanada owns, or has interests in, approximately 6,700 megawatts of
power generation in Canada and the United States.
Challenge
As a result of sharing access to written work, primarily through emailing attachments,
TransCanada had struggled with multiple versions of documents concurrently being
used. Dynamic teams were often built to work on deadline imposed projects that
required a considerable amount of collaborative writing efforts. During this time, multiple
versions of a document would be passed through individual email with limited ability to
consolidate the efforts of the working teams. Team members did not have immediate
access to updated working documents, which lead to frustration over access and the
need for considerable editing to incorporate and correctly format multiple revisions prior
to documents being finalized. Working groups also needed access to other team
member schedules and information to book meetings and free up time to collaborate on
work efforts. To eliminate these challenges, TransCanada turned to Ideaca to establish
a document collaboration solution that could provide a central storage of information all
employees could have access to.
Solution
Ideaca helped TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. implement
Windows SharePoint (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server
2003 (SPS), to provide a platform for internal collaboration
across corporate functions and business units. The
TransCanada Pipelines portal required a moderate amount
of graphical customization and development, which the
Ideaca team was able to provide, in order to meet the
specific requirements of TransCanada Pipelines. The
solution was implemented using medium server farm (3
servers) with guidance from Ideaca. Infrastructure was
shared with the Microsoft Content Management Server, to
support enterprise-wide search capabilities across projects
and to support long term growth for TransCanada.
Benefits
The SharePoint portal resolved a number of key business issues and provided
significant benefits for TransCanada Pipelines:
- Operational and maintenance cost saving for the functional support teams
- Increased employee productivity by securely providing access to the most
recent information
- Reduced turnaround time by providing a central site to access information and
documents