Vermont Law School is a private, American Bar Association‑accredited law school located in South Royalton, Vermont. The school has one of the United States' leading programs in environmental law and has maintained consistently high ranking in Environmental Law by U.S. News and World Report.
The Challenge
One of the initial challenges that we assisted with for the law school was the migration of PCs to Windows, to be compatible with their new accounting system. in 2001 we deployed over 80 PCs and refurbed dozens of older models.
A decade later, we were of assistance with the installation of SharePoint 2010 and designed and developed business process automation apps. They had a number of records that needed to be parsed into a SharePoint list so that these could be searched, edited and maintained in one centralized location. They also wanted some new functionality to be included in the design, utilizing SharePoint's search and Microsoft Office integration features.
What We Did
- Installed a new SharePoint 2010 3-tier farm on provided VMs (SQL backend, WFE, App server), setup search scopes, and balanced services
- Set up a security system for FBA so that external users would be authenticated against SQL and didn't need to be in AD
- Branding, provided elegant branding to match their messaging and style.
- Migration of multiple record formats and files into a single SharePoint list. The data was scattered throughout a large number of spreadsheets and files and fields were not normalized, which made automated methods for parsing difficult. Many varying methods, both programmatic and manual, were employed to "clean up" the data so that it could be used in SharePoint. We also spent considerable time verifying the integrity of the data, to ensure that the resulting SharePoint list was an accurate copy of the source materials. We worked with the client to verify the data as well, and where there were discrepancies, we painstakingly went over the source files again to guarantee accuracy.
- Past work... Around 1999 we helped set up their IT department infrastructure and provided many servers, hundreds of PCs, a computer lab, and migrated all existing systems to the latest platform, which was Windows 95 at that time!
The Result
Working together we have been able to successfully meet the goals of the Vermont law school, which of course are changing all the time, as they keep pace with the changes in matriculation, the demands for long-distance learning, and bring one's own device technology.
One of the easiest ways to get to know our SharePoint consulting services is with a SharePoint health check! We can quickly review your current SharePoint farm and recommend solutions for improving performance and to better align SharePoint with your business goals. Learn more about our services by contacting us today!