Business Impact Article - Posted 5/11/2007
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A Blueprint for Search
When Mike Harvey, a trained architect turned IT director, first got involved in IT back in 1985, he used an IBM PC for word processing—and that was it. Since then, IT has become central to how his company, PRP Architects, operates. The company is drawing up a blueprint for the future in which Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 plays a central part.
PRP Architects is one of the most established residential architectural practices in the United Kingdom (U.K.). It has 350 employees in four offices across the U.K. With the company’s quality assurance system, every email and document is printed out and filed. “This is obviously frustrating to a lot of people,” says Harvey. PRP’s project aims to upgrade this paper-based system with a digital one.
The big challenge with a large, multi-office company is to avoid reinventing the wheel. “Part of the brief was to help people find out if something had been done before,” says Harvey. Working with Core, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Harvey identified SharePoint Server as the right solution after evaluating other solutions and seeing a demo of the product. The first stage of the project involves using SharePoint Server to index and search PRP’s Knowledge Net—the company’s intranet—which serves as a repository for files.
The new SharePoint Server intranet gives every member of staff a company home page. From there, they can access company news and popular architectural Web sites. There’s also a company phone directory, which users can search by name, role, or area of expertise.
There’s a technical tab, which lets architects download standard drawings. Most important, the search tool lets users search the thousands of documents in the Knowledge Net.
Core built an add-on for Microsoft Office Outlook® that lets staff tag files and e-mails with customer information and store them for quality assurance purposes. They are indexed by SharePoint Server and, hence, searchable. This functionality is still being tested, but it promises to revolutionise the company’s filing system and save a lot of time and printing. An important business benefit is that SharePoint Server is widely supported and flexible. It isn’t dependent on a single firm to implement or maintain and doesn’t require in-house technical expertise.
The biggest benefit comes from putting information at everyone’s fingertips. As the practice adds documents to its database, search becomes increasingly valuable. “Search is a way of taming that growth,” says Harvey. It means people can quickly and easily find information about clients. It also gives them access to client and project records so that they can get a picture of what is going on very easily.
What do users think of the new system? According to Harvey, the ones who have been testing it are “ecstatic. “They think it is absolutely wonderful that they don’t have to print documents and can easily find what they need.”
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
