The Challenge

Within a large law firm a number of enterprise technologies are employed to help manage people, client, and matter related processes. Unfortunately many of these technologies do not integrate well directly with one another and for a variety of reasons it is necessary to create levels of abstraction (to ensure security and effective ethical walls enforcement) which further complicate the management and user experience for employees.

Understanding these challenges, the client came up with an effective multi-year strategy to define, develop and implement the next generation of information sharing and collaboration tools and technologies. These tools will provide employees efficient ways to create, store and disseminate valuable firm and client information. Employees will benefit as the information will be personalized for their role, and will be timely, relevant, useable, accurate and reliable.

The Solution

Allin working with client helped define, design, develop and deploy a new Iteration of the client's portal.

The portal continues to further surface critical business data and information for employees which is housed in various systems across the organization. However it now does this in an improved way through the use of SharePoint 2010 functionality and a series of well-designed webservices.

• SharePoint Business Connectivity Services are being used to effectively enable users to search for external business data such as people information, client information, and matter information.
• SharePoint content management capabilities are employed throughout the site to enable the business owners of the Portal to make updates to many aspects of the Portal without IT’s direct involvement.
• SharePoint 2010 search capabilities were employed to provide a more responsive, faster, and effective search. Empowering users with new ways to filter, sort, refine and retrieve people, clients, and matters as well as their subsequent information.
• Based off of user feedback and careful analysis of the business needs the interface design was improved so that it is more standards compliant and more accurately represented user behavior/needs.

The Benefits

• The new SharePoint 2010 architecture makes the management of navigation, content, and business data considerably easier and more effective.
• New portal capabilities and intelligent design greatly improved system performance, response times, and provided new functionality that helps employees be more productive.
• Employees readily accepted and praised new changes and improvements to the portal. In many cases illustrating how it made their day to day job much easier.