Company's constant growth and broadening of range of services, internal organizational structure improvement, pool of yet more employees possessing different skills and knowledge, called forth the necessity to create a tool, which would include accounting system elements, infrastructure for information exchange within and between projects and departments, document storage with a possibility of on-line collaboration, knowledge sharing system, unified into corporate informational portal. Furthermore, there was a need of tools for analysis of corporate information and possibility of data exchange with external systems. The system should have a friendly user interface with ability of personalization features.
After system requirements analysis, it was decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007®, which offers a number of ready-made customizable solutions. The portal is a unified information space, providing separate workplaces (sites) for every organizational unit (departments, projects), which, in return, increases effectiveness of company's working processes. In addition, it is possible to constantly extend system functionality.
Development environment for web-parts and external utilities: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005®, .NET Framework 3.5, C#, data access components to ADO.NET, LINQ. The system also uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005®.
From the moment of implementation, the system became a useful tool for both separate projects and the whole company.
The following elements appeared the most significant:
Collecting information, previously stored in segmental sources, into the unified storage, allowed substantially increase the quality of the said information, dispose data redundancy and discrepancy, which allowed making managerial processes more transparent
Existing security management system based on Microsoft Active Directory® groups was fully integrated with a new management system and provided flexible distributed users' access to different classes of corporate information
Integrated backup and recovery tools granted reliability and safety of corporate data stored
Information, stored in the corporate IS, on the basis of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007®, is available in Microsoft Office Excel®, Microsoft Office AccessTM, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007® formats and can be easily synchronized. Information stored in corporate IS is updated automatically
The use of Microsoft Office Excel® and Microsoft Office AccessTM allowed easily organize analysis and additional processing of corporate IS data
Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® web-services we developed external utilities realizing specific business logic and data processing included into corporate streams
Simplicity and convenience of collaboration
Utilization of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® libraries allowed solving an issue of convenient storing and coauthoring documents by providing intuitive and easy-to-use document version management tool and access management tool based on check-in/check-out mechanism, as well as a possibility to leave comments to the versions
Utilization of specially developed mechanism of e-mail notifications allowed informing about changes in real-time mode
Due to usability, multifunctionality, and system web-interface personalization possibility, employees' information space can be organized in the most effective way
Simplicity of distribution and search of information provided even inexperienced users with the possibility to work effectively
Utilization of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® let us significantly reduce efforts of IS infrastructure development: user interface subsystem, data storage and access subsystem, security subsystem, etc.; and concentrate on the business tasks solely
Utilization of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® enabled development team to minimize scope of programming and cocurrent expenses on testing, debugging, storing and maintenance of source texts, etc. Particularly, a variety of operations on data exchange with external applications could be easily organized without programming at all
Rich Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® embedded possibilities permitted quick launch of the first version of system, and further iterations of necessary functional acceleration
The system built on the basis of integrated set of server applications as part of the system and DBMS with integrated Microsoft services.