Murray Wills and Chan Kulathilake

After me and just before afternoon tea, Chan and Murray provided a case study on how the Ministry of Transport embraced SharePoint. Murray is the managing director at Maxsys Limited, and frequently takes roles within organizations as the CIO, etc. This is what he did at the Ministry of Transport — he was Acting CIO at the time.

Agenda:
– Who is the MoT?
– What were the business issues?
– Opportunities, Outcomes
– SharePoint Overview
– Solution for MoT

Murray kicked off …

Who’s the MoT?
– All about the transport sector in New Zealand
– Supporting the Minister of Transport

Business Issues
– 2005 … growth from 50 to 140 people
– IT architecture hadn’t been refreshed by some years
– The Ministry had no intranet … but ran Lotus Nots as a sort of quasi Intranet (were using Lotus Notes 6.5)
– As the organization grew communication and collaboration become more challenging.
– Up to 6 different contact databases were used
– 140 Lotus Notes databases, a number of which were dead or legacy
– Authoring and process for content authoring was sporadic
– No Content Management System (CMS) was used for intranet or internet development
– Current publishing process was very email centric
– No publishing division
– “All staff” emails
– Introduction of Fun … culture creation
– Teams need to be “connected” to their content to create ownership
– Team sites … give ownership

Opportunities
– Strategic information systems
– Clear need to move off Lotus Notes for email and calendar. Staff were actively seeking/asking for Outlook, because they had used it at previous organizations.
– Intranet with workflow capabilities, integrated with email and with Office products
– Distributed authoring
– The Ministry looked at using SharePoint 2003 and CMS … but it wasn’t ready
– … so, went with the beta of MOSS 2007 … the promise of integration, collaboration and interoperability
– Pleased with the path they chose

Outcomes
– In October 2006, implemented “Discover”, the MoT Intranet
– Went to the RTM version of MOSS in early 2007
– Have since been through some updates and changed the visual design (all normal intranet stuff)
– Integration has occurred with Microsoft CRM v3
– The path from Lotus Notes not as difficult as first thought. There were about 20 key databases … that have gone to SharePoint or CRM … some have been left, and haven’t been shifted yet.

Outcomes
– Integration with Active Directory and Exchange
– Migration tools used for email and calendar
– Tools and coding used for database transfer to CRM or to MOSS
– Office Communicator implemented to replace Lotus Sametime
– Integration with HR system and Exchange for floorplan and organization chart. See an example at inside.liverton.com. This technology is generated out of MOSS. The integration with Exchange is for signalling that a meeting room is busy, and when it is free again and for how long.

Chan took over for the technical presentation …
Chan works at Provoke Solutions. He blogs at www.chandima.net.

SharePoint … “… is an extensible platform for service delivery within organizations“. It is extensible to the various levels and needs of people, teams and organizations. MOSS includes six major components: collaboration, portal, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business forms, and business intelligence.

At the MoT, key capabilities of focus were Intranet Portal, Enterprise Search, and Enterprise Content Management.

The Journey
– Analysis
– Planning (governance, ongoing management, proliferating sites vs. not, backup and recovery)
– System architecture
– Implementation

Chan showed a video of the Intranet (not on YouTube, AFAIK).
Content and navigation … tagging, meta data, contextual navigation, screen click through to certain items. The pages are personalized to individuals.
Used a lot of out-of-the-box capabilities, along with custom development.
Support for online / inline editing of content. Can also alert users directly from the editing window.
The search capability offers RSS for subscriptions, plus alerts for email notifications of when things change.
The public facing internet will be able to pull out some information from the Intranet and publish it for wider distribution. It’s on the roadmap.

Lessons Learnt
– Plan … Refine … Adopt
– Beta’s can be volatile (get the right technical support and expertise early)
– Engage users
– Long term plans are key for architecture

Murray finished off …
We knew MOSS would be a core system, but it’s become even more core. Eg, integration with the HR system, possibility for using it for the Web presence, and future direction of document and content management. “In order to do that, we will implement Office 2007 in the next couple of months. We’re not implementing Vista — that’s a whole different kettle of fish.”

Chan’s closing … go look at www.codeplex.com