ABF Food Law Programme
Secure collaboration with SharePoint and Sitefinity
Our client is a diversified international food, ingredients and retail group with sales of £12.8bn, 124,000 employees and operations in 48 countries across Europe, southern Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australia.
Challenge
The Food Law team is made up of members that are based across the world, and, therefore, found it very difficult to get together and collaborate on important matters. The team also needed an environment where they could present authorised content to a wider audience. The solution that was in use at the time, was more than 10 years old and the functionality was, therefore, extremely limited and outdated.
In order to meet our client’s needs, a combination of SharePoint and Sitefinity was suggested. The requirements were quite unclear, and the customer didn’t know what the products could offer, so an iterative approach was needed.
Solution
A new collaboration site was provisioned on SharePoint based on the existing team site template. Due to the sensitivity of certain information, accessibility was locked down so that only certain groups would have access to the environment. The site was broken down into different business areas in order to provide an easy identifiable structure that the team would be familiar with. Combinations of out of the box SharePoint features like discussion boards, document libraries (with and without content types), document sets, and contact lists were introduced.
Sitefinity, which is currently the organisation’s primary intranet software, was used to provide an area for content authors to publish the authorised information for their users to consume. The site was based on the existing intranet layouts. Both native Sitefinity features and custom widgets, like news article roll ups, contact lists, and document libraries were used to meet the client’s business needs. A standard Sitefinity form’s functionality was extended.
Intelogy followed an iterative approach on this project whereby the skeleton site map of both sites were agreed with the client, built out and the applicable functionality was added to illustrate the different features available. This also allowed the client to familiarise themselves with their brand new environments as well as the products.
