Bord Bia bring home the bacon with Microsoft Office SharePoint

As information becomes one of the more valuable commodities in the twenty-first century many organizations are restructuring their IT platforms to ensure that they can capitalise on these changing values. Different audiences - customers, public consumers, suppliers and employees have different needs that can only be met by tailoring the information delivery systems to their expectations.

The control and delivery of this new currency can yield significant organisational benefits when it is appropriately managed. Staff productivity and efficiency is improved, customers have a better experience, access and security is improved, collaboration and information management is improved enabling streamlined and more consistent processes.

Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board, is the state agency responsible for the development of new markets and the promotion of Irish food, drink and horticulture. The agency has a broad mandate covering trade development, promotion, quality programmes, information provisioning and marketing support especially for export markets.

The agency employs about 100 people with about 30 located in nine overseas locations. In 2002 Bord Bia embarked on a program to update its intranet and extranet delivery platforms. These platforms were built round Microsoft SharePoint, CRM and Content Manager Server. Subsequently Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) was mandated for the public internet and extranet sites to enable delivery of an integrated information management platform.

Situation

Bord Bia being a geographically dispersed organisation with 30 per cent of its employees working overseas needs to ensure that the quality of information delivered to employees and others accessing its web sites is consistent across the organisation.

The agency's export orientation demands that information on its sites is consistent, up to date and accurate as it must meet the needs of a dispersed audience. Prior to the installation of the current systems the agency had relied on an external organisation to update changes to its web sites with all the delays that this entailed. This is "one remove" from the content that did little to foster a sense of ownership by employees.

Information movement and sharing among an organisation's points of contact is the lifeblood of many organisations. Good collaboration depends on accurate information delivered efficiently in a timely manner. Searches for information were hampered by lack of intelligent indexing and the absence of any metadata describing the file contents.

The management of event registrations was a time consuming and costly process as registrations were handled manually and involved a lot of interaction between Bord Bia and its clients.

Solution

In 2002 Bord Bia appointed Parity Solutions to develop an employee intranet and two extranets for clients and producers integrating Microsoft SharePoint and Content Management Server 2001. These systems were updated subsequently to the latest version of Microsoft SharePoint, Content Management Server and CRM. In 2007 a public facing internet web site was developed by Parity based on MOSS that was adopted as the strategic solution platform. These moves have been combined with the appointment of an in-house "web master" to oversee the management and content updating of the web pages.

Parity Solutions was the first of three Microsoft Gold Partners in the U.K. and has built up an expertise around SharePoint and MOSS that has been further enhanced with its MOSS Solution Accelerator. The latter is a development kit that enables solutions to be put together with greater speed and accuracy that require less testing as the components are already proven. Parity Solutions also undertakes systems integration and complex program management and has worked extensively with Microsoft on solutions for their clients and is one of only four Microsoft Managed Partners in Ireland. Parity has been in Ireland for over 20 years and employs over 70 people in the Belfast office. George Maybury, title, said "We are famous in Ireland for developing our solution accelerator for MOSS - which allows us to develop AA compliant public facing websites and multi lingual variants of the site".

The replacement of the hosting company gave selected employees in Bord Bia control over the content and ownership of the information delivered on the web site. It also enabled information to be updated much more quickly resulting in information always being up to date and accurate. It helped to ensure that a more consistent corporate branded image was deployed across all the web sites that could easily be updated by non-technical staff.

The MOSS approach also enables other services to be easily appended to the web site such as electronic newsletters, event registration and subscription processes for pay-to-view documents. Event registration is highly automated in contrast to the manual system that it replaced. There are facilities for users to subscribe to eAlerts on a range of topics. Other technologies are easier to incorporate such as Microsoft CRM and language translation facilities that are currently being used for Italian conference registrations.

The approach adopted for the public facing internet site will be used as the basis for developing the extranet and intranet sites. As Julian Smith, Information Service Manager at Bord Bia explains, "MOSS provides us with a platform that allows us push content control out to those who 'own' the content for our anonymous user site knowing that we can use that familiar environment for the upgrade of our Intranet from the previous version of SharePoint, thereby reducing training and support costs."

The solution provided by Parity included many additional features. One of the more unique features for an Irish web site was AA compliance to support web site accessibility for people with disabilities. Parity was the first software company in Europe to provide an AAA compliant web site for the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Bord Bia internet site is also integrated with Microsoft CRM enabling inquiries and follow up actions to be monitored and controlled.

Benefits

Scalability
The dissemination of accurate up to date information on Bord Bia's internet and extranet is a key component to the success of the agency. MOSS technology has enabled this to be achieved in an easily controlled safe environment that has yielded many benefits to the agency, its suppliers, customers and the general public.

Information availability

The simplified sharing of information between Bord Bia and consumers, producers and buyers is key to the success of the new internet and extranet systems. This covers a very wide spectrum of data from recipes to programmes for manufacturers to publications. The information is integrated and managed using Microsoft CRM that enables the synergies of information sharing to be available to all parties involved.

Information ownership

MOSS simplifies and makes the updating of information displayed on the web sites accessible to people and departments that are responsible for the information. Third parties are not required to intervene in the maintenance of the web site contents. Apart from reducing the inevitable delays that occur when third parties are involved self maintenance instils ownership and greater levels of accuracy and an improved adherence to corporate standards.

Information inflow

Among the facilities included on the Bord Bia website are event registration and payment processing. These have been designed as automated online systems that require very little intervention on the part of the agency employees saving both employee time and enabling the better management of the event organisation.

Information for everyone

The dynamic nature of web sites necessitates constant reappraisal and design modifications. The new Bord Bia web site is not only better deigned, it is easier to use and greatly improved search facilities have enhanced its usability. The new dynamic nature of the web site ensures that the feedback from users results in the appropriate content being increased and expanded. Cross browser compatibility is supported as is AA compliance that caters for users with disabilities through the support for multiple screen reader technologies. System Delivery speed The advanced features of MOSS 2007 combined with Parity's Solution Accelerator ensured that the Bord Bia internet web site was delivered within a very tight time scale. The component type approach enabled by the Solution Accelerator allowed the implementation to proceed at a much faster pace.

Summary

MOSS provides a great degree of flexibility that goes beyond the traditional association with intranets to encompass both internet and extranet applications. Bord Bia has been empowered to deliver on its mandate to disseminate accurate up to date information in a cost effective manner to all its points of contact.

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2009