Northern Power Systems designs, manufactures, and sells wind turbines, and provides engineering services for energy applications, in the global marketplace. European headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Italy.
The Challenge
NPS had an on-premise 2010 SharePoint farm. Their goal was to upgrade to O365, and re-launch with an emphasis on applications and content management document. One of the key applications was regarding iso document management which was a sub-project of this migration. They had a on premise 2010 based document control system that stored and managed documents relating to the implementation, maintenance, and continuous improvement of an ISO 9000 QMS (quality management system).
What We Did
We discovered some Sharepoint 2010 process automation scripts that were undocumented and we reverse engineered these for a simpler solution within O365. We created a portal structure that would contain all their content and added branding to it to reflect their vision for a new modern site that was focused on apps.
Working closely with their SharePoint administrator we reviewed the iso documents and came up with a taxonomy that would satisfy both the ease of placing documents into the system and for staff to locate them. This taxonomy was uploaded to their terms store, and a custom search results page was created.
"How To Create an Amazon Shopping Cart Like Experience for Files"
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- Assess current content in file shares
- Conduct a gap analysis of how staff were searching for ISO documents and what terms would make it easier to refine results
- Setup O365 information architecture
- Build tagging taxonomy and import into the O365 term store
- Create a central library with folders to micmic file shares (for familiar management by admins)
- Pre-tag library folders with terms from the term store
- Build a custom search results page to show these terms as search result refiners
- Brand it to look like NPS style
- Teach content managers how by simply dragging files into the folders (using Windows Explorer) they would be taging documents so they display well in the
custom search results page
The Result
Staff can now very easily find documents, and they can be uploaded using Widnows Explorer into a folder which then automatically tags them with a classification term. Now management of their enterprise content is extremely simple.
"SimpleSharepoint came highly recommended via a mutual client as being a trusted, proven, development team to partner with and they certainly didn’t disappoint. They were immensely helpful, professional, and accessible throughout the development process – from working with us on the initial technical requirements through to project completion and delivery". - Zsolt Tölgyesi, IT Manager
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As one of the oldest providers of SharePoint consulting services, we have been working with O365 since it was first released. That means we know all of the problems that get run into and how to fix or work around them.
Contact us today so we can help you get the most out of SharePoint!