The Challenge

A leading identification card and photo badge printer was using SharePoint 2007 as its Intranet platform but wanted to stay current and leverage the improved performance of the newest version of SharePoint. The proposed SharePoint farm would need to have the capacity to store more than 250,000 documents and support the client’s user profile base of over 1,500 accounts.

Hoping to achieve these goals while improving collaboration efforts such as document sharing and document management, our client sought a proven custom software development partner with experience in both SharePoint application development and legacy systems integration.

The Solution

Magenic built out a multi-server farm infrastructure including a dedicated application server and a dedicated SQL server, and upgraded the client from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Along the way, our team documented installation and configuration parameters in addition to training the client’s staff to transition administrative responsibilities.

Magenic’s SharePoint solution included customized web parts, user controls, timer jobs, branding artifacts, actions, application pages, and deployment scripts. The solution automatically pulled employee photos from the network file share into the SharePoint user profile database for display in My Sites and individual user profile pages.

The collaborative aspects of the solution saw integration with CRM web services and Oracle databases for enhanced collaboration and document sharing. Magenic also implemented workflows that allowed users to pose questions to the leadership team and nominate employees for awards. Other My Sites functionality included user profiles, activity feeds, tagging, ratings, and comments.

Along the way, Magenic not only ensured the usage of best practices, but also documented our work and processes. This documentation was handed over to the client at project’s completion to be used by their internal team in future administration and development endeavors.

Magenic is also working with the client’s team to migrate thousands of documents from Lotus Notes to SharePoint, reducing their dependency on Lotus Notes and instead providing one complete system.

The Result

Magenic updated the client from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 on-time and on-budget while adhering to the client’s business schedule. The migration and customizations yielded significant benefits for the client’s business workflows, including faster page load times, less resource consumption on servers, and a more than 80% decrease in search time. With their previous SharePoint 2007 platform, a search crawl could exceed an hour in length; Magenic’s solution reduced that time to less than ten minutes. The new customizations have improved not only performance, but collaboration among the team.

Beyond that, the process documentation used during the development and implementation process can be re-used by the client to simplify future technology projects. Should the client wish to build out a new server farm, Magenic’s documentation can serve as a how-to guide offering best practices and process walkthroughs to optimize the implementation.