Success Stories |
Our client, managing more than $30 billion in assets and $20 billion in deposits is a community-oriented bank providing financial services to individuals, families and businesses across the Northeast United States.
The company needed an IT Uptime Dashboard to use as a method of reporting key system uptime information to various stakeholders across the organization, both technical and non-technical. The current process requires a significant effort, with key metrics being manually re-entered from the ticketing system, and other figures emailed to the resource assembling the dashboard, resulting in a net time spend of an extra hour a day, every work day. Much of this work could be automated by allowing individuals to directly enter their metrics into a SharePoint live dashboard. In addition, systems like ticketing could be accessed via Business Data Connectivity Services (a part of SharePoint 2010) to directly pull metrics regarding system outages and open tickets.
In 2010, our client made the decision to begin a massive upgrade of several components of their service offerings through the implementation of new SharePoint-driven solutions. Our client asked us to engage in several overlapping projects to expedite this transition and leverage their expertise in this domain area.
ProSource scoped, designed, and architected a live dashboard that allowed multiple individuals to allow data entry, which presenting a single cohesive view of overall IT system uptimes. The solution was able to pull data from the ticketing system’s SQL server database to allow reporting of system outage tickets, as well as currently open tickets. The final deliverable recognized the company’s situation regarding SharePoint Enterprise CAL licenses, and optimized the out-of-the-box feature set to expedite installation while reconciling customization specific to this organization.
As part of the company’s ongoing efforts to upgrade and secure SharePoint, it required a full security and architecture review completed on its existing SharePoint 2007 environment.
ProSource performed a complete review of the DMZ and AD infrastructure, as well as an investigation of the installation and configuration of SharePoint. An analysis of SharePoint installation included documentation of adherence to Microsoft best practices, farm topology, scaling of the farm, network bandwidth constraints, and any recurring event log errors. In addition, an analysis of SharePoint configuration included documentation of adherence to Microsoft best practices, configuration of SSP, web application architecture, site collection design, logging policies, and custom solutions and features deployed. The final deliver offered recommendations for migration to SharePoint 2010 technologies, as well as server security, port/server lockdown, patching, and local user policy.
ProSource moved forward with a SharePoint Basic Governance engagement, a scaled-down governance engagement focusing more on offering a set of prescriptive guidelines than on the creation and education of a full governance committee. This engagement focused on several topic areas and offered specific recommended practices and policies based on industry standards, Microsoft recommendations, and ProSource best practices. The result of this engagement was a living document that First Niagara can refine and evolve over time as it continues to build out it SharePoint Governance Committee.
ProSource successfully migrated the data in the existing SharePoint sites to the new internal SharePoint 2010 site. As requested by the client, ProSource focused exclusively on moving the core site contents and did not focus on remediation of JavaScript and jQuery used on the pages considered archived (as sites listed as migrated will have jQuery remediation performed by a development resource). As part of this initiative, several sites were deleted entirely from the old environment, and selected sites migrated from the old Extranet to the SharePoint 2010 Intranet environment will include the new master page and jQuery remediation.
ProSource was able to identify several key issues relating to data integrity, backups, and compliance risk in the use of collaborative information outside of the company. We were able to build new environments to ensure dramatic growth could be supported. Finally, forward-looking governance plans were used to ensure that future business needs and processes could be smoothly integrated into the platform.