4-page Case Study - Posted 7/11/2007

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Skanska USA Building

Builder Improves Access to Information and Expertise with Enterprise Search Capabilities

With increased reliance on its enterprise content management system and corporate intranet for information sharing and access to data in back-end systems, construction company Skanska USA Building needed a way to help people easily find information they required to do their jobs. The Enterprise Search capability in Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 provides a single solution for searching across shared files, document repositories, and other unstructured information; information in line-of-business systems and other structured data sources; and directories of people and their associated expertise. By choosing Enterprise Search over a stand-alone search solution from Google, Skanska USA Building is helping employees find what they need quickly and effectively—and without the added cost, complexity, and custom development that a third-party search solution would entail.

Situation

Skanska USA Building, a business unit of Sweden-based Skanska AB, is a leading provider of construction services. Headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, the company is the third-largest contractor in the United States. Skanska USA Building has approximately 3,800 employees and generates about U.S.$4 billion in annual revenues.

In 2003, Skanska USA Building standardized on the Windows® operating system and consolidated more than 100 applications to just over a dozen. Although the 10-month project reduced annual IT costs from $22 million to $13 million, the company still needed a way to easily integrate the information in more than a dozen back-end systems and make that information readily available—in the right form—to a distributed work force, which may be spread across 2,000 active job sites at any one time.

Subscribing to the proposition that its technology investment provides strategic competitive advantage, in 2004 Skanska USA Building decided to implement an enterprisewide portal infrastructure based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. The company dubbed the new intranet myskanska and eventually populated it with more than 1,200 collaboration sites, which Skanska USA Building employees, customers, and subcontractors use to share information throughout the entire construction life cycle.

Although the company’s initial incarnation of myskanska provided great value, it had one weakness: searching. The portal’s search capabilities were not scalable enough to effectively handle the tremendous amount of content and number of documents stored on the site, nor were search results consistently relevant to the task at hand—for example, when someone was attempting to find another person within the organization with a particular skill set.

“We have more than 150 gigabytes of files representing some 100,000 documents stored across more than 1,200 SharePoint team sites, and needed a fast, efficient way to make all of that data easily searchable,” says Allen Emerick, Director of IT, Applications and Integration, for Skanska USA Building. “In addition, we had to provide users with the ability to search structured data stores, such as our human resources and project management systems. Finally, we needed to make it easier for people to find other people, such as when a business development manager working on a proposal for a new hospital in Seattle needs to find an expert within the company on infectious disease control, who may happen to be located in Atlanta.”

Solution

Skanska USA Building is meeting its search needs by upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and taking advantage of the server application’s Enterprise Search capabilities, which extend beyond Web site content to include shared files, document repositories, and other unstructured information; information in line-of-business systems and other structured data sources; and directories of people and expertise, including information stored in the Active Directory® service of the Windows Server® 2003 operating system.

The Enterprise Search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 give us just what we need to put information and expertise at people’s fingertips. Allen Emerick Director of IT, Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building

Today, Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the standard entry point to the company’s business systems, and the place to look for and share information. The portal also hosts several Office Business Applications (OBAs), which build on the Microsoft Office system as a development platform to streamline access to data in line-of-business systems—ultimately helping users work more productively and have a greater impact on the business. Today, people across the company use these OBAs to access and manage information—from executives who use graphical scorecards to monitor business performance, to construction supervisors who use mobile Tablet PCs to download blueprints and upload safety reports.

Selection Process

The company’s quest for a better search solution began in mid-2006, a few months before information about the planned features for Office SharePoint Server 2007 was made public. Skanska USA Building initially turned to Google. Upon closer examination, however, the company realized that the deployment of such a solution would require a significant amount of custom integration, resulting in additional complexity, higher development costs, and longer time-to-market. Furthermore, that choice would go against one of the company’s key strategies for its portal—to deliver functionality that could be turned over to the business to use and manage, without continual involvement from the company’s IT team.

“Google lacked the security layer that’s built into Office SharePoint Server 2007, which limits search results to the information that people have rights to access,” says Emerick. “We already use Active Directory to set permissions for the areas and files on the portal that people can access, and would have had to hand-code the mapping of those rights to the site and document levels on the portal. Our strategy is to turn the management of user rights and permissions over to individual teams and departments, and we didn’t want to have IT stuck in the middle, maintaining security rights for search results.”

A better option came a few months later, when Microsoft introduced the first public beta version of Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Unlike most third-party search solutions, the Enterprise Search features in SharePoint Server 2007 don’t require any custom software development to automatically trim the search results based on security rights,” says Emerick. “The security trimming feature in SharePoint Server 2007 was the piece that was missing with third-party search solutions. This, along with all the other search-related improvements in SharePoint Server 2007, made the decision to go with it an easy one.”
 
In effect, the Enterprise Search feature worked well for Skanska USA Building, with no customization required. By choosing Microsoft software, Skanska USA Building was able to streamline its IT systems and implement a forward-thinking solution that it can build on for years to come.

Single Search Across All Types of Information

Dubbed myskanska 2.0, the company’s new portal solution puts all kinds of information at people’s fingertips through a single search utility. Information that Skanska USA Building plans to make searchable includes:

• Unstructured data. Employees can search all Web site content, documents, and multimedia files stored on the portal, and shared files on servers located at both corporate offices and job sites.
  
  
• Structured data. Skanska USA Building can use the Business Data Catalog feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to extend the reach of users’ searches into line-of-business systems, including its SalesLogix customer relationship management system, Prolog project management and accounting system, Timberline estimating and preconstruction system, and JD Edwards enterprise resource planning and financial system.
  
  
• People and expertise. Skanska USA Building also can use the Business Data Catalog to allow people to search information in its Epicor human resources system, which is used to track people’s skills and who’s working on which project.
  
  
• Office Business Applications. Enterprise Search provides a convenient way for people to find the Office Business Applications that Skanska USA Building is building on its portal. For example, a search for the words “new employee network access” would return a link to an online form that, when filled out and submitted, kicks off a workflow that manages the provisioning of the IT assets needed for a new employee.The migration to Office SharePoint Server 2007 is currently underway. The new portal is expected to be introduced to the entire company in the fourth quarter of 2007.

“A key business reason for our upgrade to Office SharePoint Server 2007 is its Enterprise Search functionality,” says Emerick. “The fact that we don’t need to do any custom development makes the move that much easier. The upgrade process mainly consists of getting the new hardware that we want, bringing up SharePoint Server 2007 alongside our existing portal, and migrating the sites from the old portal to the new one.”

Benefits

Skanska USA Building is using the Enterprise Search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to make information and expertise more accessible throughout the organization. Search results will be broad yet relevant—tailored to each user’s role and the information that the user is allowed to access. Furthermore, Skanska USA Building is able to deliver the desired search capabilities as an integral, ready-to-use part of its existing portal infrastructure, without the additional time, expense, and complexity that a third-party search solution such as Google would have entailed.

“As our enterprise portal becomes the preferred way to share and access information, the ability for users to easily find what they need becomes all that more important,” says Emerick. “The Enterprise Search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 give us just what we need to put information and expertise at people’s fingertips.”

Improved Access to Information and Expertise

Skanska USA Building is empowering people to find what they need when and where they need it—through a single, intuitive interface that includes user-friendly features such as simple search boxes, sorting options, content summaries, highlighting of keywords in search results, and automatic query correction and collapsing of duplicate search results.
 
“One really helpful feature of Enterprise Search is the inclusion of a People tab in the search results, which makes it easy for someone to find someone else who has needed knowledge or expertise,” says Emerick. “Instead of having to pore over search results from all content sources, users can go to the People tab and quickly find who they’re looking for. Or, if they’re looking for a document, they can gauge the relevance of that document through the ability to easily identify the author—including clicking the author’s name to get information on that person, or using the presence information tied to that person to see if he or she is online and available to answer a quick question.”

Strong Search Security and Manageability

Skanska USA Building is taking advantage of the built-in security trimming feature of Enterprise Search to easily limit search results to the information that people are authorized to access, with the flexibility to tie those permissions to either Active Directory or SharePoint Server groups. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, it’s easy to secure search results—without the custom development that we would have needed to do with a third-party search solution,” says Emerick. “As soon as we roll out myskanska 2.0, people will be able to search across all the information that they are allowed to access, without those results being cluttered with links to information or documents that they don’t have permission to view.”

The Enterprise Search functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable Skanska USA Building to manage its new search solution in other ways, as well. For example, the company will be able to use the Enterprise Search management console to easily manage all search-related settings, including content sources, relevance, search scopes, and so on—all in a single place.

Significant Cost Savings

By choosing Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search, Skanska USA Building will avoid paying additional up-front costs for a stand-alone search solution. Furthermore, the company will avoid the expense of having to integrate that solution into its existing portal infrastructure, including the custom development of a security layer to limit search results based on user permissions. Finally, because SharePoint Server 2007 is licensed per server rather than on the basis of the amount of data searched, Skanska USA Building can continue to make more information available through its portal without having to pay additional licensing fees, as it would need to do with Google’s licensing model, which is based on the data volumes to be searched.

“Our decision to go with the Enterprise Search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 will save us at least $50,000 in up-front costs,” says Emerick. “Furthermore, we’ll be able to avoid the added development costs that would have resulted from trying to integrate a third-party search solution into our portal infrastructure. We made the decision to standardize on Microsoft technology several years ago because of cost and time-to-market benefits, and our decision to use Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server is yet another validation of that strategy.”

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For more information about Skanska products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.skanska.com