Educational Institution
Senior Consultant within the Technology and Solution Architecture team
July 21 – March 22
This educational institution, founded over 140 years ago to promote the standard of technical education, realised the need to replace their incumbent intranet service, which over time had become fragmented, out-dated, and difficult for both administrators and staff members to use. This led to the start of a transformation programme which would promote connectivity and collaboration with colleagues across the group. This case study is just one of multiple streams of work being supported by Konvergent’s Managed Service model at this client.
The current SharePoint based intranet (Citynet) provides various social and project areas for Microsoft Teams sites and stand-alone SharePoint sites. Additionally, the group has network drive areas, and a host of communication tools (email, webinars, etc). Employees require access to elements of this content on a daily basis and the current infrastructure and environment configurations were acting as a blocker thus making it difficult for staff to access and share content and connect with colleagues.
There were a number of immediate ‘pain points’ that the management team had already identified, for example:
Konvergent’s Managed Service function was engaged to undertake a review of the existing SharePoint intranet environments across the group, this included both on-premises and online environments for the client, Kineo, Gen2 and Intertrain and document the current ‘As-Is’ configurations in order to understand the content and infrastructure landscape in order to enable business and functional owners to audit their content effectively.
Throughout this process, the Konvergent solutions architect worked closely with the client’s project team to fully understand and document the architecture required to enable the implementation and configuration of a new Software-as-a-Service intranet platform.
Due to the current Covid-19 restrictions, the project was carried out remotely via the use of collaborative tools such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Office 365. These restrictions provided the benefit of enabling us to understand how the new platform would function both inside and outside of the client’s group company firewalls via desktop, laptop and mobile devices.
The ‘As-Is’ architecture landscape was reviewed and mapped out in detail, as was the ‘To-Be’ architecture for modern workplace and the incumbent SharePoint sites across the group. A gap analysis was then performed to identify what needed to be done to enable us to get to the desired end state. The following high-level actions and recommendations were delivered:
Delivery of a new SaaS intranet using the Managed Service model has provided our client with the ability to easily manage content sharing and collaboration for all staff members across the group of companies in the following ways:
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