SharePoint-based extranet for global oil and gas association streamlines member engagement
Solution Summary
IPIECA is an oil and gas industry association that represents the principal communications channel between the global oil and gas industry and the United Nations. The primary objective of IPIECA is to promote good practice and knowledge in the industry to advance environmental and social performance.
IPIECA turned to Intelogy to deliver a modern extranet that could meet their business needs and enable easier communication and collaboration with their members. The solution provided by Intelogy delivered a bespoke Digital Workplace utilising SharePoint Online, but through further engagement, it was determined that Microsoft Teams should also be utilised to centralise industry updates, resources, events and communications.
This digital transformation has broadened IPIECA’s collaborative capabilities, including the introduction of real-time co-authoring and centrally available, cloud-based storage. This consolidates their interactions into one easily accessible, mobile-friendly platform and ensures compatibility and easier organisation.
Challenge
As a relatively small team, IPIECA’s challenge is managing and coordinating the various communications of each working group and task force within the organisation in one easy-to-follow site. Their previous platform had a number of issues, including very slow performance, complex identity and credential management and limited accessibility for mobile devices. IPIECA had spent a significant period looking for a replacement platform as making members use a variety of third-party services and applications presented a fragmented approach and greatly complicated the management of IPIECA’s interactions with these members. This stood contrary to the IPIECA’s aim of unifying information and insights within their industry. Relying on these applications also heightened the risks of incompatibility with member’s devices, versioning conflicts and lack of program availability, which threatened to restrict IPIECA’s reach. Addressing these on-going issues proved highly time-consuming for IPIECA’s secretariat, who were tasked with the administration of member correspondence.
Prior to the engagement, IPIECA had a limited roll-out of a pre-existing Office 365 subscription. But, as with many organisations, the full potential of the suite of application and its ability to resolve the issues they had been facing had not been realised.
Solution Strategy
Given the challenges that IPIECA faced, Intelogy considered the priorities to be the usability of their platform, accessibility, permission control, communication handling, identity management, and the unification of their services. Whilst the original scope was the replacement of their extranet, in the discovery process, Intelogy were able to help IPIECA to realise the value of their pre-existing Office 365 E5 subscription through the consolidation of multiple applications to a single platform.
By helping to develop IPIECA’s presence on SharePoint Online, Intelogy were able to provide a much more flexible extranet solution, which delivered a unified user experience for IPIECA and its members. They were able to centralise IPIECA’s member management model, allowing easier and more visible access to relevant resources, communications and events from a single point of control. As this model leveraged Office 365 Groups, this access was inherited across the entire suite of programs, eliminating the need to determine access and permissions on a program-to-program basis. This approach is also future-proofed and will simplify the management and transparency of member and group subscriptions going forward.
As many core aspects of IPIECA’s collaboration with its members were already delivered using Microsoft services, migrating and unifying several methods of communication to Microsoft Teams was a highly efficient and empowering option. In addition, Microsoft Teams also introduced new tools and functionality for IPIECA, allowing for instant, synchronous and interactive collaboration, such as being able to record and automatically make meetings available for later reference, request control during screen-sharing sessions, and centrally share documents within meetings.
Intelogy were also responsible for running training and onboarding sessions at IPIECA’s headquarters in order to help ensure the smooth implementation of this new environment, as well as to increase user adoption and understanding of how to make best use of their new platform. These sessions allowed Intelogy to provide guidance on best practices to enable the sustainable growth of IPIECA’s extranet solution.
Results
Intelogy have constructed an intuitive and coherent extranet solution in SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams which has enabled IPIECA to recognise the value of their existing Office 365 E5 licensing. The unification of these services has reduced IPIECA’s reliance upon third-party tools and subsequently the costs and complexity associated with maintaining subscriptions to these programs have decreased.
The solution has provided many advantages, not only to IPIECA as an organisation but also to their members. The flexibility of Office 365 has enabled Intelogy to construct a platform which seamlessly incorporates IPIECA’s identity, resulting in a unified and highly engaging experience.
Intelogy are pleased that there are already thousands of members using this extranet. They are eager to see how engagement with this platform will develop and positively impact the organisation and their users’ experience.
Customer Quote
“Before embarking on this project with Intelogy, our greatest challenge was housing all resources for every workstream within IPIECA, including publications, meeting materials, news, events and webinars, in one easy-to-navigate place. Using a combination of Office 365, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint online – along with Intelogy’s bespoke modifications for IPIECA’s way of working – has provided an engaging and user-friendly environment that enables simple collation of our materials. Intelogy listened to and understood our needs and expectations and have created a fantastic platform for communicating and collaborating seamlessly with over 2,500 of our members.”
– Sophie Depraz, Programme and Communication Director, IPIECA
