Lighthouse Computer Services is a Microsoft Certified Partner that provides IT services to clients in the Northeast region. They implement enterprise SharePoint portals for their clients, helping them convert isolated islands of data into a collaborative, interconnected community. Their clients have quickly learned that SharePoint out of the box has its limitations, and they confidently recommend Bamboo Web Parts like Password Change Web Part to alleviate the change password task for the IT administrator.
“Many companies rush into development before they even understand SharePoint and the out-of-the- box power it really has,” says David Pileggi, Senior Microsoft Solutions Specialist. “Bamboo Solutions understands SharePoint and understands where added benefit is needed. Their Web Parts fill the gaps out-of-the-box cannot fill. I am completely satisfied with Bamboo Web Part solutions.”
Castle Pines Capital LLC (CPC) is a channel finance company specializing in the technology industry. It provides innovative financing solutions to technology resellers and vendors worldwide. CPC has chosen the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as their web portal infrastructure and relies heavily on the Bamboo Web Part solutions to deliver high quality graphical data representations.
Castle Pines is a big advocate of Bamboo Chart Plus and other visually oriented Web Parts. “A picture says 1,000 words,” says Armand Brunelle, Senior Vice President of Technology. “Customers appreciate the ability to come to our portal and quickly see the status of their facility with us. Bamboo Chart Plus helps us easily convert a large amount of data into useful charts for instant decision making by our customers.”
CPC is also in the process of deploying the Bamboo SharePoint Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator to share knowledge within the various departments and across the company. The Bamboo Project Management Suite with its Portfolio Dashboard allows the CPC Tech group to communicate the status of active projects via our CPCINTRANET as well. “Bamboo Solutions has quickly become a very important partner of CPC. Their products deliver tremendous value and functionality and I highly recommend them.”
The Make-A-Wish Foundation® is dedicated to granting the wishes of children with life- threatening medical conditions. Collectively, the 66 U.S. chapters grant more than 13,000 wishes annually. Being a non-profit organization, resources must be allocated carefully and managed closely.
The Foundation is utilizing SharePoint (MOSS 2007) to meet its growing technical needs and unify all of its decentralized chapters. Foundation IT staff quickly realized that MOSS out-of-the-box had limitations for their SharePoint needs, such as importing large volumes of legacy data, streamlining administrative tasks and making the deployment user-friendly. A simple, cost- effective, third-party solution was needed, and the Foundation turned to Bamboo Solutions for help.
Faced with volumes of legacy documents and data, the Make-A-Wish Foundation utilized Bamboo’s List Bulk Import. The Web Part has helped streamline the import of these documents and knowledge base information into MOSS 2007. This information along with the MOSS 2007 ‘Help Desk Site’ template allowed the Foundation to more easily convert its old issue management system into the new SharePoint helpdesk. Besides improving document accessibility, time economies are being realized by using Bamboo’s IT Productivity Pack. This pack includes the Bamboo Password Change and Password Reset Web Parts, which have alleviated the workload of the IT administrators by enabling end users to manage their own accounts.
In an effort to help users embrace the SharePoint deployment, Bamboo’s List Rotator visually captures users’ attention while informing them with active content such as scrolling announcements, photos and other noteworthy news.
“Bamboo Web Parts have helped free up time and financial resources to focus on our mission, granting the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions,” said Jim Toy, the Foundation’s chief information officer.
As needs change and the Foundation grows, its IT staff will return to Bamboo Solutions to implement additional Web Part tools quickly and effectively. All of these Web Parts have helped the Make-A-Wish Foundation with its MOSS 2007 rollout, allowing for the successful unification of its 66 chapters nationwide.
Big Thought experiences the chronic challenge of most non-profits - restricted ability to invest in infrastructure but the need to function efficiently as would any business.
Karim Virani, Big Thought's Director of IT says, "This is why we have selected various Bamboo Solutions Web Parts such as the List Rollup Web Part and the Password Change. The List Rollup is valuable in integrating information across a mulitple web-based applications. This improves the visibility of critical information by allowing us to bring it together in one place. The Password Change Web Part supports our external partners using Active Directory accounts with the SharePoint platform. This eases the internal burden on our own IT staff. The cost of these tools paid for themselves within days."
Needing a reliable and secure way to enable multi-department access to patient treatment and specialist care schedules, Good Samaritan Hospital turned to Bamboo Solutions for the products need to support these functions on their SharePoint platform.
Key features such being able to resize the calendar, to color code based upon a specific parameter, and a more aesthetically pleasing presentation contributed to making the hospital staff more productive and reduced scheduling errors. By providing an easy to use, collaborative solution, Calendar Plus enables all the many functional areas of the hospital to run smoothly and effectively.
With eight program managers managing approximately $30 million in grants annually, an increasing number of applications and over 90 grant recipients, precision and efficiency are vital to the success of OTPF. The grant application, award and post-award process is an arduous affair, requiring the synchronization of many people and much information. The sheer volume of administrative tasks associated with the previously paper-based grants process prohibited OTPF from running their grant program as they wanted.
Bamboo Solutions' Grants Management portal solution provides collaborative, information-sharing capabilities between the grantor organization and the 90 plus grantee. The familiar Windows-based format was easily adopted by all users and was designed to assist users in navigating through vast amounts of information; features that allow for targeting information to specific audiences.
The SharePoint portal has assisted in Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation’s transformation from an overburdened organization to a highly efficient, coordinated, grant-issuing group enabling them to focus on the fight against tobacco, not mastering the art of the filing cabinet.
"I am so impressed by this system that I had to tell you... I found it to be user friendly and the customer service is excellent! The system is so easy to use!" - OTPF Grantee
Having used SharePoint for many years, ShareSquared is more than familiar with both the functionality and flexibility of the platform, along with some of its limitations. Bob Mixon, the ShareSquared Managing Director and SharePoint MVP, recently needed to set up a Windows SharePoint Services 2007 (WSS v3) site collection for managing his clients' projects. The relatively simple task of creating the sites to manage these projects became more difficult when he began to manage the multiple user accounts. In order to create a user’s password and ID, Bob would have to remotely log in to his Windows 2003 Server, create a new account and e-mail the information to the user. Out of the box, there are only two options – the administrator must choose the password and then inform the user, or give the user remote access to the server so that they can change it themselves.
For many consultants, this is not an ideal situation for obvious security reasons. Bamboo’s Password Change Web Part allowed Bob to manually create a Windows user account and assign his users a temporary password in less than 15 minutes. Bob's users are able to go and change passwords themselves. Password Change Web Part, which is also supports MOSS Beta 2, has the ability for both Active Directory (ADS) and Local NT users to change their passwords by using a standard text box interface and will even warn the user if the password does not meet security requirements or if the password change failed.
For more than three years, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has used SharePoint to help collect, manage and synchronize internal data such as contact information from multiple office locations. Like many agencies using SharePoint, the FAA found as their use of the system expanded, so too did their need to extend the functionality of their application. FAA Operations Officers had a need to quickly identify who the duty manager is for a given function, at a particular site, at a given time, during an air emergency. This data is available separately in their SharePoint application, but in order for it to be useful information, the FAA needed to collate multiple SharePoint lists from several different regions containing internal contact lists for critical operations personnel. Bamboo’s List Rollup Web Part, one of several web parts the FAA purchased, provided them with the ability to collect all of their contact lists from various locations and merge them into one master list.
LiquidFrameworks was
approached by a large energy services
company for a SharePoint portal
solution. In designing their
solution for the customer, LiquidFrameworks
tested Bamboo Solutions Calendar Plus
Web Part to see if it would meet their
customer’s needs and to ensure confidence
in the Web Part’s performance to utilize
it as a component of their solution for
their customer. Bamboo Solutions
Calendar Plus Web Part passed the test
with flying colors for LiquidFrameworks
Project Manager Bill Beardshall.
“The color coding capabilities
of the Bamboo Solutions Calendar
Plus Web Part were exactly what the
customer was looking for and allowed
us to shorten the overall project development
time. I look forward to future
upgrades from Bamboo Solutions and using
the part in future projects.” - Bill
Beardshall, LiquidFrameworks Project
Manager.
