June 2010
SMC Enterprise, a leading Microsoft Gold Partner, through its SharePointKonsult division has completed an implementation of a SharePoint-based web solution for Old Mutual South Africa. Old Mutual is a leading financial services organisation in the region with more than ten thousand staff. OMSA IT, Old Mutual SA information Technology had the need for a collaboration and content management platform to serve its internal clients.
With increasing costs to maintain its ageing technologies and web applications, the time was opportune to explore newer technologies and techniques available to service Old Mutual’s collaboration and web requirements.
According to Caron Burger, IT Manager - Web Application Development; “We required a solution to centralise our SharePoint initiatives and enable our internal clients to request collaboration and content management functionality without manual intervention presently needed.
The solution had to be provisioned automatically with all audit trails and request for services to be stored electronically. Further we needed to deliver rapidly on client requests without going through the system development life cycle normally associated with custom development projects. “
Solution
Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007 was identified as the most suitable platform for this complex IT environment. SharePointKonsult designed the solution to meet the client’s needs for collaboration, content management and social networking.
According to Zlatan Dzinic, SharePointKonsult Lead (MVP), “The solution we developed allows internal clients to request new collaboration and content management spaces in order to share documents and content on projects. The collaboration features are automatically provisioned using SharePoint’s built-in features.
The other functionality out of the box we deployed included content management and mysite social networking.”SharePointKonsult delivered a turnkey project; from the initial user requirements, planning, development, deployment and change management deliverables.
Benefits
The major benefit of the solution will be that internal clients can rapidly provision shared content and collaboration spaces thus sharing information on projects, inter department, intra department and across the organisation. Users will also have features via the SharePoint’s MySite social networking to maintain their profile and share documents and content at an individual level.
This project will form the basis for the future rollout of SharePoint at Old Mutual, and already significant interest exists to rollout out further SharePoint features. “Previously the time to build and provision this type of functionality at Old Mutual was quite significant and expensive, but with this solution we will derive benefits from improved service delivery and reduced budget to our clients” added Burger.
About SharePointKonsult (www.sharepointkonsult.net)
SharePointKonsult is a division of SMC Enterprise; an IT consulting firm with a 10 year track record with clients that cover the spectrum of industries ranging from petroleum/oil, financial services, government, utilities, manufacturing and telecommunications. We offer development, implementation and integration of portal solutions on various technology platforms. SMC Enterprise is a Microsoft Gold Partner and SAP Services Partner.
