Industry Overview - Technology

The technology industry is a powerful driver of the global economy, and Microsoft SharePoint has evolved into a mission-critical tool for technology companies worldwide. Many have been using SharePoint for collaboration and document storage for some time now. To fully leverage the platform for success, however, technology firms must develop strategies to deploy sustainable SharePoint-based business solutions safely and efficiently.

Sustainability - Some technology firms have built customized business solutions in their SharePoint environment. When they began planning their migration to SP2010, they realized the level of effort to migrate custom code was not something they had planned for. Instead, they are now looking for commercial products to provide the capabilities in SP2010 that custom code provided for them in MOSS. Bamboo's Ultimate Library provides access to those commercial products.

Safety and Efficiency - The next phase of SharePoint deployment for many technology companies leverages the SharePoint investment by using it for more than just collaboration. They are using SharePoint as a development platform on which to build solutions that solve real business problems. They are putting plans in place to migrate proprietary, legacy applications to SharePoint. Though extremely powerful as a platform, SharePoint's out-of-the-box capabilities do not deliver all the functionality these organizations demand with regard to delivering the solutions to enhance their business processes. Bamboo's Ultimate Library provides the tools needed to fill the gaps and can be used and re-used in a variety of business applications. These tools, used across a SharePoint farm, provide consistency for end users while speeding up business solution deployment.

Solutions Brief - Technology

A large technology company was experiencing a great demand for answers to legal and corporate affairs inquiries from employees using their Intranet. The legal and corporate affairs site on the Intranet was well organized, had lots and lots of content, and provided a prominently placed individualized email link to the logged in employee's legal representative. If an employee couldn't find what they were looking for, they just needed to click the email link to send an inquiry to their representative. The problem was that there was no process in place to track the emails, nor was there a central place to store answers to previously asked questions. The legal representatives spent a lot of time answering a wide variety of questions - sometimes again and again. This gets pretty expensive since legal staffs are typically highly compensated employees. Perhaps the larger problem was that employees had no way to know if their question was received and when to expect an answer. Sometimes their question fell through the cracks.

Three key success factors of the solution were to (1) Provide a central knowledge repository so employees could check to see if their inquiry has already been answered, (2) Assign inquiries to legal staff based on what the inquiry was about rather than who it came from, and (3) Track the inquiries so the company can better plan for resources needed to address higher loads in certain subject areas.

Using the Bamboo Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator, a Knowledge Base was quickly deployed. Out of the box, it provides a repository for articles stored by category. Employees can browse or search for articles using the same tools they use to search the rest of the site. Once found, they can rate articles and provide comments, so the content can be continuously improved. Because the Knowledge Base tracks how many times each article has been viewed, users can browse through popular articles first, if desired. When an employee cannot find needed information, he/she submits a question.

The Knowledge Base Solution was extended using the Conductor product to automatically route questions submitted by employees to the appropriate subject matter experts (SMEs). A Conductor workflow is also used to escalate questions when necessary. Using the Alert Plus Web Part, reminder alert emails are sent to the SMEs when a question is assigned and also if it is not answered within 2 days. Thank you emails are also sent to employees, acknowledging the receipt of their question and providing some guidance as to when they can expect an answer.

Finally, a dashboard showing status charts for unanswered questions, the disposition of completed questions, and a list of the outstanding questions helps the management team ensure that the Knowledge Base is continuing to meet the needs of the employees, mature, and minimize redundant tasks for high dollar resources (i.e., the legal staff).