4-page Case Study - Posted 9/11/2007

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Weather Channel Interactive, The

Online Content Provider’s New Search Solution Improves Collaboration and Productivity

Employees at The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCi) must collaborate efficiently to produce accurate forecasts and to keep the TWCi Web site on top of public ratings. Disparate digital information stores and a poor enterprise search tool impeded their productivity. To address its issues, TWCi built a new collaboration portal using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. With a newly consolidated corporate information infrastructure and a user-friendly collaboration platform, staffers now have access to more data in one central place. They have universally adopted the site’s integrated Enterprise Search tool to search for structured and unstructured information with fast, accurate results. With the ability to search for people and expertise, employees can collaborate faster and easier to ensure that TWCi weather alerts are accurate and timely.

Situation

The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCi) is a subsidiary of Landmark Communications and a sister company to The Weather Channel. It produces The Weather Channel Web site, an online source of weather information that delivers current conditions, expert forecasts, and relevant lifestyle content for 98,000 locations worldwide. The site provides continuous 24-hour coverage and reaches an average of 20 million unique users each month.

Whether it helps in planning for an important outdoor occasion such as a wedding, preparing for severe weather, scheduling a weekend bike ride, or deciding what to wear to work, TWCi empowers its customers with the up-to-the-minute accuracy of its weather reports. TWCi is consistently ranked among the top five weather providers, according to Media Metrix. TWCi is also a leading provider of broadband products and wireless weather services including The Weather Channel Desktop and the Notify! personalized phone weather alert service.

Accurate, up-to-the-minute weather information requires coordination, planning, and quick responses. It also requires many different subject matter experts, editors, content producers, and executive producers who work on several projects at the same time to keep consumers up to date with the latest weather conditions.

Our portal project was to create a logically structured, online community environment to share work with true document management, [and] Enterprise Search is the glue that holds it all together. Andrew Drooker Director, Operations Infrastructure and Business Applications, The Weather Channel Interactive

Management at TWCi wanted a solution to improve collaboration, workflow, and business processes. It reasoned that a new framework for communication and collaboration would have the added benefit of helping organize teams and projects within a coherent, logical taxonomy.

“We needed a better collaboration portal for people to share information,” says Drooker. “Our office is like many others today, with more people wanting to telecommute instead of going to endless meetings. We needed to consolidate corporate and project information into one easy-to-access online community, with built-in document versioning and collaboration capabilities that people could use to work more productively when and where they wanted. To add value to the solution, we also needed a relevant, robust, flexible enterprise search tool to make that information readily available. We never embraced the old search tool in Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, so essentially we were coming from a position of not having had a search tool previously.”

Solution

The Weather Channel Interactive solved its collaboration and search issues with one solution: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Management chose to upgrade its original portal site to Office SharePoint Server 2007, expand the intranet to incorporate divisional and personal sites, and deploy the integrated Enterprise Search feature. TWCi also upgraded its desktop programs to the 2007 Microsoft Office release.

Management liked the tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the 2007 Microsoft Office desktop programs that staff can use to work more productively. For example, staff can coordinate teamwork with shared calendars, alerts, and notifications once they connect their team calendars within Office SharePoint Server 2007 to the desktop with the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client.

Drooker also liked the close relationship between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Active Directory® service, a built-in component of the Windows Server® 2003 operating system that he could use to more easily assign information access and permissions to staffers. TWCi management was keenly aware of the tremendous volume of highly sensitive data that it did not want available to everyone throughout the organization. Now this data is available through Enterprise Search only to users with the appropriate credentials.

“Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an entire information collaboration and management solution that we can incorporate into our strategic plans for the future—for example, creating Web Parts to connect into database systems for data mining,” Drooker says. “The fact that it came with a powerful, flexible enterprise search tool was a great added value.”

TWCi IT staffers built their new collaboration portal and took advantage of the personal, divisional, and enterprise hierarchical nature of the site taxonomy in Office SharePoint Server 2007 so that the new intranet mapped to the organization’s requirements. “At the root level, we have a portal page for TWCi where the vice presidents post their thoughts, and on the main page we have links to specific business unit sites, marketing, operations, and so forth,” explains Drooker. “Each business unit can create subsites easily using the template we provided, and each business unit has a manager who can easily add users and set permissions on the local level. We wanted an online identity for the business units, so we gave each a unique URL and database.”

At the same time, TWCi engaged Microsoft Services to help configure Enterprise Search to set search scopes that complemented the taxonomy and infrastructure of the new company intranet. “We created a scope for each business unit’s site and a broader scope that covered the enterprise, taking all the smaller scopes and rolling them into one so in one search page you can see across all sites,” explains Jonathan Miner, System Administrator at The Weather Channel Interactive. “Unlike our previous tool, as we created the portal sites, it was easy to assign information access rights and permissions because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly connected to Active Directory.”

“Microsoft Services provided some key input,” adds Drooker. “We wanted to launch the new portal with as much out-of-the-box Enterprise Search functionality as possible. Enterprise Search was on the top of the list of requested functions.”

It took just one month for TWCi to create its new intranet with Enterprise Search capabilities. The intranet was launched in February 2007.

Benefits

Employees at The Weather Channel Interactive are using Enterprise Search to unlock previously unsearchable content. They are also searching for people and expertise and collaborating more efficiently.

Provides Single Search Tool for Increased Effectiveness
In the several months since the launch of the new intranet, TWCi employees have all adopted the intranet into their work lives and use the Enterprise Search field that is on the main page to search structured and unstructured data, including people and expertise. Enterprise Search is also enabled on every team site. To date, more than 70 percent of TWCi employees have created personal sites called My Sites. Some people have started to create customized search scopes for their sites; for example, Drooker has created his own scope to search the operations site.

“People are intuitively working with the new intranet and using Enterprise Search because it’s really very simple, familiar technology,” Drooker says. “Before, no one used the old search tool; now everyone that goes to our new site uses Enterprise Search. Search usage has increased 100 percent every month in the five months since we launched Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

Out-of-the-box Enterprise Search features like keyword search, relevancy ranking, and “did you mean” spelling suggestions are all new experiences for employees at TWCi. Results are displayed more clearly, hits are highlighted, duplicate entries are collapsed, and synonyms are suggested. “Today, with Enterprise Search, we have true search capabilities that our employees knew about but never had in their corporate search tool,” says Drooker.

Supports Team Collaboration
Within a company that depends on project-oriented teamwork, employees can use Enterprise Search to improve their productivity as they search for people and expertise. For the first time, employees can quickly search for their colleagues not only by department or job title but also by expertise and common interests.

“It was great how Microsoft listened to the field and added social networking into the business environment using tools like Enterprise Search,” says Drooker. “As more and more people fill out their personal profiles on their My Sites, the more useful Enterprise Search will become for locating peers and colleagues.”

Extends Search to New Uses
As TWCi evolves its intranet with the addition of new content and features, Enterprise Search will continue to provide all the search functionality required. For example, Miner has just created a wiki—a Web application designed to allow multiple authors to add, remove, and edit content—for the operations department that comprises advice, comments, and frequently asked questions (FAQ) about the maintenance of servers and applications. This is a place where IT staffers can share common issues and collaborate on documentation that is searchable by Enterprise Search.

“Now if I search on a particular application, Enterprise Search not only serves up all the relevant Word documents and projects, but it also crawls the repository of knowledge that’s been created in the wiki pages,” Miner explains.

“The beauty of Enterprise Search is that it’s integrated in Office SharePoint Server 2007, the foundation of our collaboration infrastructure,” concludes Drooker. “So as we develop new content management policies, roll out Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 or Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, or create new workflows and integrate them with the Microsoft Office desktop programs, Enterprise Search will be there to work for us. Our portal project was to create a logically structured, online community environment to share work with true document management, [and] Enterprise Search is the glue that holds it all together.”

Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
 

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about The Weather Channel Interactive products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.weather.com