Business Impact Article - Posted 5/11/2007
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Major Charity Tames Document Tangle. Building an intranet that lets users access and search thousands of documents
The National Autistic Society is the foremost organisation in the United Kingdom (U.K.) for people with autism and those who care for them. With a head office in London and 60 sites throughout the country, it relies on its intranet to draw the organisation together and share information among members of staff, volunteers, and partners. “We recognised that our biggest challenge was getting relevant and discoverable documents to the right people,” explains David Moore, the charity’s ICT Manager.
This is why it decided to replace its intranet. The charity had relied on public folders in Microsoft® Office Outlook® and shared network drives to distribute documents. As the number of documents approached 1,000, Huntley says, the system “couldn’t cope.” The idea of replacing this ad-hoc system with an intranet with built-in document management made a lot of sense.
Working with Core, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the National Autistic Society created a taxonomy—a system for classifying and labelling documents on the site. Core ran four sessions with end users to create a structure that worked for all the stakeholders. Core took Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server and added some specific features for the National Autistic Society, including a simple wizard that allowed content creators to apply tags to documents that reflected the taxonomy.
Instead of exposing the central document library on the site, Huntley found that “having mini-document libraries sprinkled around the site” has driven traffic. Each mini-library contains a list of documents that are directly relevant to the other content on a given page. To do this, Core built a unique gadget (or “Web part”) that could be added to any page on the intranet to list relevant documents. It used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to search for tags that related to the page in question.
Of course, the intranet also features a conventional Internet-style search tool and other useful features such as an HR area, hints and tips, and an event calendar.
The whole process of building the new intranet took about 10 days. This is because the standard functionality of SharePoint Server allowed Core and the National Autistic Society to focus on the taxonomy, site architecture, content, and special features like the document library. “It gave us a lot out of the box for very little time and only marginally added to our maintenance overhead,” says Huntley.
The results have been impressive. Since the initial launch in October 2006, traffic has grown by about 20 per cent, from 10,000 page views weekly to 12,000. In addition, the site has become more “sticky,” meaning that people stay longer and explore beyond the home page. In fact, the number of people who view more than one page has doubled.
© 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.
