SharePoint Online Development for a Large Construction Firm

19 MAR 2020

The Client

A large construction company in North America engages Star Knowledge for custom SharePoint Online development and redesign of its existing SharePoint deployment. 

The client is a leading builder in diverse market segments. The company has earned recognition for undertaking large, complex projects, fostering innovation, embracing emerging technologies in the cloud, and making a difference for their clients, employees, and community. They are the highest value provider of global construction services and technical expertise.

The Need

The client runs SharePoint Online within their organization setup with custom workflow within their organization to collaborate. The current deployment has more than 100 SharePoint sites and subsites in their current environment with the need for better organization, user experience and optimization causing some hardships amongst users to use the SharePoint deployment to the fullest potential. The client already had several hundred sites in their existing deployment and the entire structure was based on Folder Structure and had minimal metadata and meta-tag usage. Additionally, most of the users of the subsite mapped their local network drives with their sites making the management and even searching for required content a tedious task.

The Solution

Star Knowledge with its expertise in SharePoint consulting services, created a roadmap strategy to perform the complete assessment of the entire SharePoint Online deployment that needs to be cleaned up. We identified the current workflows that are present in the environment and got an understanding of the new ones that are to be deployed in the environment without the use of workflow automation tools such as Nintex. We optimized search and enabled metadata search for all the documents.

The solution involved redesigning the complete hierarchy of SharePoint site collections and subsites involved with a base template for each-site that would be created. Each sub-site provided had several folders bound by the Meta-tags to manage the usability and accessibility of the content with personalized views to capture the required data parameters.

Several custom workflows were designed to ensure total collaboration amongst all the stakeholders in managing content, events and document approvals complete with integration of a digital signature module. Custom alerts and notifications were set-up at the library and document level to ensure all concerned stakeholders were made aware of any modifications to the library.

Additionally, with several users accessing the system, SharePoint versioning control was set up to ensure content backup.

Benefits of the Custom SharePoint Online Solution

• Easier Navigation and Distributed Administration experience with organized shared libraries and group calendars.
• Automated Custom Workflows and File sync based on user permissions
• Faster search and personalized views
• Easier to manage security settings for the entire site collection

Technology:

• SharePoint Online