SharePoint – ISDK – Omnichannel and eCommerce retail solutions, CRM-marketing

Nov

Routine automation with Office 365 and Teams chatbot

Customer

Healthcare Clinics (50+ medical centers)

It is common for a large company to have many small routine procedures in different areas of its daily life. Employees’ vacation requests, business trips, workplace stationery, guest passes, meeting rooms booking and much more – all of those are simple one-two step actions, which don’t require lots of effort but can be very destructive and sometimes cause unpleasant situations like mistakes in bookings or clients waiting for access permits at the very last moment.

To address that routine, many companies, and our client among them, decide to automate procedures using its own corporate Office 365 environment and Teams messenger. Guest access permits be the first pilot process to automate.

The automation was done based on Microsoft Flow, Teams chatbot and SharePoint Online as a storage. Earlier, an employee would call or write an email to an office manager providing all the details for the pass. As there were many requests every day, it was taking a substantial part of the administrator’s working time. Besides, it took up to a whole day of employee to get the result. Now, he merely sends a brief message request to the chatbot and later gets a final approval.

The whole process looks like:

Employees that need a pass, contact the chatbot. In a quick and simple conversation, they provide all the details required to create the pass.
Wait for approval step of the process. A responsible office manager receives a notification in the bot and by email. The manager can see the information and choose to approve or to reject the pass creation.
If the manager approves the request, the flow continues to run. The data gets into a pre-created Word template and is being added to the relevant fields. The new Word document is then created and saved.
Once the document is ready, a requestor gets a chat message informing him about the approval along with a link to access the document.

Pass request processing and issuing time reduced from 4-5 hours on average to 20-30 min
An office manager got 2-3 hours daily freed due to this process automation

Oct

SharePoint Online and Office 365 in a business school

SharePointadmin

Customer

Business school (from Top 30 Financial Times ranking)

With a number of employees of over 300, it was challenging to find the right person quickly, figure out which department they belong to and get in touch with them quickly as there was no centralized address book.

The work on documents was also not centralized; they were stored on a server and collaboration would happen over emails, which was very time consuming and ineffective. Moreover, as processes were not set up, some actions would be unnecessarily repetitive which meant doing twice the work. For example, a PR department had to publish similar announcement on the internal portal and the official public site, there were two separate processes for this and the same news would need to be approved in both of the processes, which was unnecessary since in reality, a PR manager would take a decision about the publication only once.

It became crucial to build a modern, responsive and highly collaborative working environment.

The university management took a decision of setting up SharePoint Online and Office 365 and integrating local AD with Azure tenant. They also decided to streamline the process of news publication: synchronization, approval, distribution of articles on the official site and internal corporate portal.

Orgchat creation. SharePoint Online and the existing AD were synchronized.
A phone book was added. The phonebook supports a search by name, phone number, and job title.
Set up of the collaborative work with news and announcements:
- News and Announcements sections were created in SharePoint Online
- Roles and access were set up: content manager (creates publications), PR-editor (edits, approves and publishes the publications)
- SharePoint Teams for collaborative work was set up to support the workflow: content manager creates a file for an announcement or a news –> in this file the employee fills up pre-defines mandatory fields such as Name, About the event, About the speaker, Venue, Time, etc. –> Once the file is complete, the manager clicks “Send” –> Once the file is sent, a PR-manager receives an email notifying that a new announcement was added –> A PR-manager checks the announcement and edits it if needed. PR-managers also have additional fields for SEO promotion, such as KEYWORDS, meta DESCRIPTIONS, TITLE, Tags, which are not available to content managers –> Final step – the PR-manager clicks “Published”, the announcement then is being published on the official university web-page, it is displayed in the “This week events” section on the site and is saved in the admin section of the site. Once the announcement was published, the file can be edited only by PR-managers.

Corporate SharePoint Online portal became the major info space where all the employees would look for a colleague they need to get in touch with as well as for other organizational information
Time to publish news on the university site and the internal corporate portal was reduced from 2 days to 3-4 hours

Aug

SharePoint 2019 Document Archive

SharePointadmin

Customer

A Russian exploration and mining company

An exploration and mining company with a head office and several distributed mining sites, hundreds of employees and tens of contractors has hundreds of contracts and other documents to handle every month.

The company was operating without a document management system for 10 years. Within this time, the amount of documents grew to 5Tb with hundreds of thousands of files. All the documents were stored in a shared file space.

This file storage had very limited possibilities of search, files classification, access rights settings. As a result, work was being done inefficiently and taking more time.

The decision was taken to create a new corporate portal that would improve internal processes of document flow, files storage and ordering as well as would simplify and broaden document search options.

It was decided to build a corporate portal on SharePoint 2019 platform that would be used as an archive and a document management system. The portal is intended to be used both by employees of the organization and its subsidiaries, and for interaction with external contractors (when an appropriate access is provided).

The documents archive on the portal is structured in a form of projects. All the documentation stored on the portal was grouped under a certain project, document type or a contractor to which it is related.

The SharePoint portal has a single-entry point from which a user can go to all other sub-sites and directories. At the same time, each sub-site can be accessed by entering its address and bypassing the main site. These sub-sites store all the documentation related to a certain project.

To organize documents storage on each site, documents libraries were created. Each library corresponds to:

The department’s type of work (for the technical department of the project site);
The contractor (for the financial and legal departments of the project site);
The type of a document or a contractor (for the sub-sites).

The employee’s address book uses information from the standard user profiles in the company’s domain. Profiles data update and organization of the access to the portal occurs by synchronization with the company’s domain.

To systematize the storage of the documents and to simplify the work with them, several types of documents were defined on the portal. Document type – required metadata field when uploading materials to the portal. To detail the classification of the documents, improve the search and status tracking, additional document metadata was provided. When uploading each document, a user may specify values for these fields – attributes. If necessary, these attributes can be easily edited by users. Using these attributes, documents can be quickly found using the search.

An opportunity to track related documents within the system was provided. For the convenience of working with the documents, related documents are presented to users as a result of a search query.

Shared access to documents and notifications were implemented: users can share with other people both certain documents as well as whole folders. Access can be granted to both individual users and groups of users. Access can grant only reading permission or reading and editing permissions. Access to sites and libraries is provided only to portal administrators.

The search was organized in two forms: standard and advanced. The standard form makes it possible to find documents by name of a document and by text in the document. The Advanced Search form allows to use the following search criteria: by a contractor name, if it is specified; by details of the Agreement, if indicated; by the Year of the document, if indicated; by type of the document.

To store many large documents and to speed up their indexing and search, Blob-storage was set up.

As the system has many components and is used heavily, it was decided to build a server farm. At the moment, there are 3 servers, one is used for the database, two others are for SharePoint. The farm is designed to be scalable. Once the company decides to transfer all their documents to this new system, it will be possible to expand the system to 5-6 servers, where one of the servers can be responsible for documents indexing and thus speeding up the search.

SharePoint portal numbers:

Currently, there are 60-80 main users of the system. However, potentially, it might be accessed by up to 300 users. The portal was planned the way it would scale up when needed
A few tens of contractors have access to certain libraries of the portal
The total number of documents is about 500 000, most of them are large detailed contracts of 30-50 Mb
The total amount of data in the new system is 1.5 Tb, however, in future, the remaining 3.5Tb will be also transferred there

Nov

Enterprise SharePoint Portal. HRM-Trainings

SharePoint, UI-designadmin

Customer

Russian telecommunication holding company that offers a wide range of services including broadband and mobile Internet access, telephony and digital TV

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As part of an update of corporate portal and transition to SharePoint Server 2013 (see profile Telecom.Enterprise-Portal.Services-Branding), the Customer has planned to automate some of his internal business services on the SharePoint base.

In particular, the HRM-module for internal employee training became one of these services. The module provides users with a set of training from internal and external service providers. As part of the service, an employee can enroll himself/herself and send a request for the passage of courses available to him/her, plan a calendar of his/her own training, complete trainings and assess them, etc.

The main functionality of this service consists of:
─ Management of the training directory and calendar;
─ Records for training by the company’s employees and planning personal training calendar;
─ Coach of the company: conducting training;
─ Employee: passing training;
─ Employee: assessing training;
─ Coach: assessing an employee;
─ Viewing training history and information of its passing by specific employees;
─ Creating and viewing reports on training.

The customization of the user’s interface in compliance with the common corporate identity and Brandbook of the company was a separate task of development.

Jun

SharePoint HR-Portal – Employee Request Approvals

SharePoint, UI-designadmin

Customer

Automobile company group, comprises 5 official dealers of leading car brands

Initially this project was targeted to decrease stress on HR department making them free of various routine work: preparation of certificates/references, paychecks, ordering of stationery and business cards, application forms, notifying employees about changes in company procedures, adaptation materials for hew hires etc.

Before project start, it was decided to interview employees to know their issues and expectations from new portal. There was significant feedback – and project expansion became evident. With support from HR department such extension was approved at company top management level.

We in ISDK shared our experience and portal solution developments and provided consulting on which services are most commonly used in other companies, which issues can happen in implementation, what should be done first and what can be postponed. All this resulted in preparation of extended solution concept together with customer functional team and eventually in a project start.

Pilot project (for one division of the company) achieved the following goals:

News ribbon, calendar of events, phone book, employee birthdays
Employee personal page and department pages
Meeting room booking service
Requests service (documents, stationery, statements, leaves, certificates/references)
Voting and surveys module
Corporate events and thematic blogs (health, travel, volunteering, self-development) discussion platform
Corporate knowledge database (new hire package, application forms, description of procedures and relevant contacts, business literature library)
Ideas exchange: any employee can share his or her ideas on improving company business or corporate life

Some modules required custom development but main part was developed using standard SharePoint portal functionality (free Foundation edition) and modular blocks of our company («ISDK portal: SharePoint – HR services» and «ISDK portal: SharePoint – electronic requests» solutions). Maximum usage of standard functionality allowed savings on cost of implementation and time to Go Live.

Additionally we developed mobile version of the portal with limited read-only functionality for key portal sections.

Based on the results of first project phase portal went live. Several months of pilot usage showed benefits as well as future improvement areas, from both technical and business perspective. For example, there was significant decrease in the number of non-standard user tickets to Helpdesk and directly to accounting department related to leave balance calculations, leave requests, orders for stationery and other goods, business cards etc. Estimated decrease is 25-30%.

Another good result is the decrease of average request processing time down to 30-60 minutes in semi-automatic mode. Before it took up to several days. Portal sections with downloadable materials – marketing, technical, corporate policies and instructions – became very popular among employees. Total number of documents downloaded from the portal in the first few weeks exceeded 2000 items, which indicates high demand for such unified file storage.

We also noted indicators of the need to further development of internal company business processes and tools for its automation. For example, some of business processes require deeper integration of disparate IT systems. This relates to integration with accounting system and with sales and customer database management systems. This is the most useful for data aggregation for company management.

Jun

SharePoint-Integration, Reporting and BI

Integration, SharePointadmin

Customer

AUTOMOBILE COMPANY GROUP, COMPRISES 5 OFFICIAL DEALERS OF LEADING CAR BRANDS

Company top management had a need for reporting and BI system for each of its divisions (new car sales, used car sales, service) with the ability to get detailed info per each brand (car manufacturer). Such system would allow transparency and quality of management decisions.

First phase was about building unified data model and automating creation of 7 financial reports. Total scope of work including various views and details was about 20 different forms. Development of those reports required integration of data from internal accountant databases.

Second phase was about moving all reports to new system based on internal SharePoint portal (free Foundation edition) and training finance department specialists in building their own complex reports with different slicing and data depth.

Third phase was about configuration of sales and costs forecasting and analysis tools and building tools for plan and actual analysis for past periods.

Pilot project achieved the following goals:

Development of data model for the following areas: finance, sales, including data per division and per brand, HR (payroll)
Connecting of the following data sources: 1C Accounting, 1C HR, internal sales databases for each brand division
Development of unified procedures and business rules for data integration and aggregation
Automation of document creation – periodical and on user request reporting and BI generation
Implementation of costs forecasting module

Pilot module (its user layer) was developed as a component of SharePoint portal. However, technical implementation is platform-independent and this module can work as standalone Web application.

Project results are as follows:

Development of 4 key analytical reports and 15 supporting forms with different data slicing and depth. These reports were put into pilot production;
Before reports were generated once in a month at a certain date. Now company management has an analytical tool which is accessible on-line and allows building analytics for any data with any data slicing and depth (based on defined data model);
Development of forecasting analytical tools for sales and costs of service;
Time saving for report generation of about 80 man-hours of employees per month

Jun

SharePoint Tablet App

Custom development, Mobile, SharePoint, UI-designadmin

Customer

RUSSIAN TELECOMMUNICATION HOLDING COMPANY THAT OFFERS A WIDE RANGE OF SERVICES INCLUDING BROADBAND AND MOBILE INTERNET ACCESS, TELEPHONY AND DIGITAL TV

Client management was looking for a long time possibility of a high-level integration center for project and process tasks accompanied with the easy to use KPI dashboards. Besides that, top management wanted not only integration on its own but also easy to use aggregated information visualization tools and quick functions (task assignment, commenting, and attachments).

Ultimately, this solution was supposed to be implemented within the scope of corporate Internet portal upgrade and migration to SharePoint Server 2013 (due to the fact SharePoint became an integration center itself). Customer also planned automation for some of its internal business services and that was a good point as well to develop a desirable integration center and its services.

One of these services was a module for integration of investment planning, technical projects and billing systems. Main business users of this service are company top managers. Certain challenges included the need to integrate data from independent systems in single information space. Systems were not designed for such integration either technically or logically (from business models perspective).

Another key goal (above integration) – as highlighted in the very beginning – was to get lightweight mobile client for company top management. The idea was to gather and aggregate all key information for current projects and top-level tasks. Top managers wanted to have analysis tool accessible from tablets and wide format devices.

To achieve the set goals, project included the following tasks:

Integration and aggregation of data from disparate IT systems
Creation of a single task center based on Microsoft SharePoint corporate portal
Development of a visualization and monitoring tool for key programs and project and their KPIs
Development of a mobile client for tablets and wide-format devices allowing to show key aggregated data and KPI on dashboards and do quick task assignments

Technically solution was developed using Devexpress Devextreme HTML5 application development platform (https://js.devexpress.com/). This platform is a large collection of JS/HTML components for building interactive and lightweight Web applications responsive for both common laptops and modern tablets and mobile devices.

We used the following components:

DataGrid
Charting Widgets
UI Widgets (main UI building blocks)

Data exchange and work logic of HTML5 components is standard – call (usually asynchronously) for Web services located on a company’s SharePoint portal.

Developed solution allowed integration of 3 key corporate systems that were complete disparate before. System provided top and middle management with single tool for analysis and management of project and technical tasks. In total system monitors more than 200 projects and program tasks.

Mobile client for tablets includes dashboards for aggregated project information – target KPIs and dates, actual statuses and key issues with the ability to quickly create and assign tasks. Average mobile application response time with stable Internet connection is 1 second or less.

About 20 top and middle-level company managers including its president use this system.

May

Energy Saving Program. Analysis, Design & Integration

Analysis and design, Integration, SharePointadmin

Customer

Russian vertically integrated oil company

Customer has multi-year resource and energy saving program for its subsidiary entities. Resource saving program includes periodical monitoring and analysis of resource saving initiatives.

A special multi-tier IT system is being developed to support this program.

Complexity of this task lies within the need to integrate all power and resource saving initiatives at each subsidiary company and connect them at head company level where final initiative approval decisions made and their status monitored.

To support these business functions the following tasks should be completed on technical side:

Building of single corporate data bus for data interchange between head and subsidiary companies;
Implementation of user tools for program approval and monitoring on corporate SharePoint portal;
Building visual reporting and BI tools using specialized instruments from market leaders, like QlikView, or similar products.

ISDK took part in this project as a contractor starting from the second phase, when certain parts of the system were already implemented in subsidiary companies. However, those implementations in subsidiary companies were done in isolation, without single logical, structural and information model. Implemented modules were not suited to support unified corporate business functions.

As a result on a second phase of the project – implementation at parent company level – the following tasks were of high priority:

analysis and description of existing processes (as-is analysis),
development and approval of business requirements for implementation at corporate level (to-be analysis),
refinement/development of logical, informational and structural design for this solution,
preparation of detailed functional and technical requirements for main components of the system to be built:
- Data enterprise bus,
- SharePoint portal,
- Reporting & BI tools based on QlikView.

Project team included 15 people – business and system analysts (including 3 people from ISDK), architects for corporate data bus and workflow processes based on SharePoint (lead architect was from ISDK), developers and QlikView product and integration experts (including 1 person from ISDK).

After analysis and design on the second phase of the project ISDK together with general contractor did the following:

Functional and system analysis resulting in documentation on AS-IS and TO-BE process and model descriptions;
System should support in total more than 2000 users with different access rights;
Development of business processes and corresponding functional, logical and data models using ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) methodology;
Development of AS-IS and TO-BE model diagrams also using ARIS methodology, more than 150 models of different types were developed;
Design of data exchange between enterprise bus and system modules in subsidiary companies;
Design and pilot development of the module for parent company resource saving program visualization and management on corporate SharePoint portal;
Pilot integration of QlikView analytical tools and SharePoint user environment.

Apr

SharePoint Enterprise Portal. HRM. Trainings

Custom development, Integration, SharePointadmin

Customer

Kazakh engineering company

As part of the Company’s corporate SharePoint portal evolution and introduction of HRM-functionality the decision was made to develop specialized training management system.

Company has extensive training program that includes various activities. Decision to move training management into corporate portal was a natural way of growth for services that Company provides to its employees.

Service development goal was to gather information on all Company training activities in one place and to automate management of these activities.

System allows management of training schedules, registration for coming training activities and (for trainers, defined as separate role in the system) assessing results of trainings completed by employees.

Service specifics included the following requirements:

Management of training activities schedule.
Registration for coming activities.
Employee manager approvals for training participation.
Training results assessment (trainer gives marks for trainees).
Personal employee training data card with information on completed, active and future trainings.

Project development and implementation included the following:

System architecture, functional and graphical design works. Deliverables – functional UML diagrams and UI mockups;
Training form development (InfoPath Forms);
Training catalog import from external database;
Access rights configuration – only administrators and trainers can make changes;
Employee training data card development (asp.net, JavaScript and web services). Corresponding form uses ajax and doesn’t require reloading;
Training schedule development using standard SharePoint functionality;
Training approval process development using SharePoint Workflow;
Training results assessment feature development. Trainer assesses trainees by giving them marks after training completion. These marks are stored in personal employee training data card;
Development of user and administrator documentation;
Customer key users training;
Full system testing, go live and putting system into full production mode.

System was deployed into corporate portal in autumn 2013.

It allowed convenient and consistent training management for more than 700 employees. System provides line managers and HR team with convenient tool for training management and monitoring. Now system includes more than 100 various training courses. Employees successfully completed more than 2500 man-courses, and training time exceeded 30000 man-hours.

Apr

SharePoint Enterprise Portal. HRM. Reports

Custom development, Integration, SharePointadmin

customer

Kazakh engineering company

As part of the Company’s corporate SharePoint portal evolution and introduction of HRM-functionality the decision was made to develop reporting system with the ability to download detailed employee data.

Service development goal was to provide users with the ability to generate reports using various filters and data views.

Module specifics:

A large number of reports;
Inability to implement required data aggregation using standard SharePoint tools;
Calculated fields in reports depending on certain rules and conditions.

The following reports were implemented within project scope:

Labor book log
Employees on probation
Sick leaves
Employee’ documents
Salary changes
Work trips
Health insurance
Job locations
Vacations
Trainings passed
Employment contracts
Employee’ marital status
General monthly report
Schedule of positions and salaries
Leave balance

Development specifics:

Module is based on SQL Server Reporting Services Platform;
A special web service performing server-based searches was developed to fill reports with data. Upon report opening Reporting Services platform calls certain web service methods passing report parameters to them. Methods collect and aggregate the data and return it using xml;
Client part of the system uses this data to create reports for end users.

More than 20 reports of varying complexity were created. Now it is possible to aggregate information and obtain reports on more than 700 Company employees.