United Way Sharepoint Success Story

Non-Profit Organization Reduces Training Costs and Improves Employee Productivity with Document Management System

Business Situation

United Way Calgary was using a portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 for simple communications and to act as a employee home page. United Way Calgary wanted to to make enhancements to their portal to leverage MOSS’s document management capabilities as they were challenged with:

  • Individual employees creating ad hoc folder structures in existing shared drive with no shared vocabulary or naming convention
  • Multiple versions of documents existed with an inability to determine the most correct and up to date version
  • Document searching was tedious and time consuming

Solution

Ideaca worked with United Way Calgary to enhance their SharePoint portal by adding a document management section to replace their shared drive, conduct an architecture review, create MySite pages and provide training to end users. Some of the key elements of the project included:

  • Content audit to determine what was to be migrated into SharePoint
  • Several workshops to determine the categorization of content for each department and groups within each department. A taxonomy was created for each department and confirmed with the business users
  • A new structure of sites and sub-sites was created to manage the content
  • MySite template was built to allow for end users to display information to other employees at United Way Calgary
  • Training guides were created for site administration, content administration and a quick reference guide for general SharePoint tasks
  • Training sessions were completed for the content administrators

Benefits

  • Faster, easier and more secure access to information and documents for United Way Calgary employees making consistent documentation available to the right people at the right time
  • Search capabilities based on properly structured information allows employee to find key information quickly and efficiently
  • Improved speed for new staff and volunteers to become productive as information and key documentation is easy to find
  • Reduce training costs by making all information available via a single interface