Campbell River reaches out

Situated on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and at the south end of Discovery Passage, the city of Campbell River has a population of approximately 40,000. Given the city's important location along the coastal Inside Passage shipping route and its fame as "the Salmon Capital of the World", Campbell River needs a Web presence that can serve visitors, businesses, local residents, and internal staff.

"When I got here almost four years ago the City's intranet website was a maintenance nightmare," says Mary Ellen Callaghan, the city's IT Manager. "As the IT Manager my time was being wasted updating the site - for the internal site I had things coming at me left and right. As well, our external site had poor visual appeal and couldn't properly serve our community."

The previous internal website, built in Macromedia Dreamweaver, had a multi level directory for updates. It required workarounds that included publishing internal job postings on the external website instead of the Intranet site because it was so poorly utilized. On the external side, updates were so cumbersome Callaghan was forced to rely on a contractor for the first two years of her time at the City.

Campbell River needed a three part solution: one that enabled the inside site, the outside site, and which could support a community portal. To accomplish this, Campbell River turned to Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Burntsand, Inc. to update its Web presence using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Terry Lillico, Burntsand's VP Consulting Services in Canada, says that part of the appeal of SharePoint is its ability to serve as a foundation platform for future growth and enablement.

"We are seeing customers like Campbell River use it as a foundation platform," he says, "and then incrementally attacking different business processes. This is especially true in the mid-market, where our customers can tackle different projects at their own pace."

For Callaghan, employee enablement for internal document management (e.g. minutes and "How To Documents") has made her job a lot easier and has allowed her to focus on her real passion - the community portal.

"This was part of my dream over three years ago," says Callaghan. "The City has numerous stakeholders, and the portal helps bring them together."

At present the portal serves Rivercorp, which is the city's economic development corporation, as well as the Active Campbell River website, part of an initiative to increase the level of activity of Campbell River residents by 20% by the year 2010. Another partner site on the portal, Spirit of Campbell River, helps promote the area to 2010 Olympics visitors.

"The two public sites leverage common infrastructure on the same SharePoint instance," adds Callaghan.

SharePoint Server 2007 provides a common interface between applications for servicing the inside site, the external website, and the portal, all connected to the desktop and Microsoft SQL Server.

"It all works together," says Callaghan. "Part of the reason we chose Microsoft was so we could leverage SQL Server, Active Directory, and Office applications as part of an integrated suite over time - from desktop to database and back end. We needed a product that provided website design, content management , workflow and portal management all in the same product suite - SharePoint Server 2007 has all of this capability."

Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst for Nemertes Research, says that Campbell River is a good example of an organization that is taking full advantage of SharePoint's capabilities, from document management and workload integration to setting up a portal.

"SharePoint makes sense as a document management solution - it helps people get away from e-mail and keep track of documents, offering a more structured process for workflow management. And from the portal side we are also seeing interest in SharePoint because it offers one platform for Web templates; this is much better than having different groups rely on distributed services."

This is also a technology that can enable organizations of different sizes.

"It plays well from the perspective of scalability," says Burntsand's Lillico, "but from a different perspective. For our mid market clients it is not just how big can you go, but also how small can you start. Many organizations are looking for the initial point of entry to scale from. SharePoint works well for these customers because it is easy to adopt, and then to build on and scale."

Lillico adds that whether it be a municipality or a company it is possible to start with two or three departments, and then add more stakeholder groups with the confidence that the SharePoint platform will keep everyone on the same page.

"They can work with an architecture that all fits together - and know they won't have to throw it away in five years. They also get a solid implementation experience: all of our SharePoint projects are on time and on budget."

It is this kind of flexibility and consistency that explains why Burntsand became a pure .NET shop in 2004. Burntsand left behind the likes of WebSphere and Java development and picked its horse. And things have turned out very well, with Burntsand able to take a solution to a client and show BPO and workflow benefits in the context of enhanced document management.

This is significant given that regulation is becoming an increasingly important driver.

"Three of our past four SharePoint projects have been with heavily regulated bodies," says Julie Hsu, an Account Executive in Burntsand's Vancouver office. "You can comply and streamline at the same time - you don't have to have everything go through the IT department for approvals."

In Campbell River on the Intranet site, employees can post all manner of documents, access HR folders for internal job postings, and track announcements on major project updates. External capabilities allow citizens to do everything from subscribing for bid opportunities, renewing business licenses to paying dog tags and parking tickets.

"The end users love it," says Callaghan. "Everyone on our staff goes through the Intranet site on their way to the Web - they use it as their default site. For the Internet www.campbellriver.ca and Community Portal www.campbellriverbc.ca site there are over 50 users, with the site being updated 5 to 10 times a day. They do all the content updates - all I do is publish the page."

Lazar says that Nemertes' research confirms the trend toward SharePoint adoption: of the 117 organizations that Nemertes interviewed in a recent study, 81% were implementing or plan to implement a shared workspace platform, and the majority of these were looking at SharePoint.

"SharePoint has taken off because for Microsoft this is a natural extension of the .NET framework and Exchange," says Lazar, "which makes it easy to add capabilities for permission capabilities and rights management."

He adds that, in terms of market adoption, historically not many products have scaled at this speed, and that in Nemertes' research Microsoft gets rated very highly. Part of this is because Microsoft has reached out so successfully to the developer community.

"Organizations should be looking at the community element," he says. "Anyone thinking about SharePoint should look at the third party developers. There is a large and growing community with a lot of supporting products and services - social networking, blogs, the ability to build communities."

Many organizations want to cut through bureaucracy and use the Web and digital technology to increase efficiencies and enable stakeholders, yet find that by going with a mish-mash they have, in effect, simply replicated age old problems. Not so with Campbell River.

"Now that the framework is up I'm going to grow the portal like crazy," says Callaghan. "There will be a lot more pages, a lot more partner sites, and a lot more content. I expect to see 400% more content in another year."

For the stakeholders in Campbell River the transformation has been remarkable, and has had an impact far beyond making life easier for internal staff. Residents that formerly relied on five or six sites to find recreational facilities or schools can now find it in one place. The City has centralized its over 3,000 bylaws in a document library on the Internet site, which includes a search function that helps residents sift through some current and frequently used 250 bylaws. Perhaps the most compelling proof of the success of the SharePoint implementation has come from direct community feedback.

"I did a presentation to City Council," says Callaghan. "It was 40 minutes long and broadcast on the local cable channel. Afterwards a number of people came up to comment on how interesting they thought the presentation came across on television. To take an idea like this and be able to deliver it has been a dream of mine."