SharePoint Intranet for Effective Cross-Departmental Collaboration in a 45,000-Employee Bank

Summary

As a large commercial bank opened new offices, communication between its departments and locations grew harder to maintain and its internal processes needed streamlining. INNERLUXES designed and built a SharePoint corporate intranet that connects every level of the organization — global and department workspaces, document sharing, a social hub, Citrix integration, and a mobile-optimized portal. After the mobile version launched, the bank reported a significant rise in employee productivity.

About the Client

The Client is a full-service commercial bank with more than 400 billion US dollars in assets and over 40,000 employees across a growing network of offices.

Rapid Office Growth Strained Communication Across the Bank

As new offices opened, it became increasingly difficult to maintain effective communication within the organization. Interaction between separate offices and departments was poor, and a number of internal business processes needed optimization. The Client selected INNERLUXES, a recognized expert in delivering custom SharePoint intranets, to build a corporate-wide solution.

The intranet had to meet several requirements:

• Optimize communication across all levels of the bank.
• Create a single environment for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and informal communication.
• Streamline internal business processes.
• Promote corporate values and strengthen a sense of community in the workplace.
• Involve every staff member in corporate life.

A SharePoint Intranet With Department Workspaces, Social Tools, and Mobile Access

INNERLUXES first investigated the Client's infrastructure, then installed and configured the SharePoint environment and developed the corporate intranet on top of it. Both out-of-the-box features and custom web parts were used, combining a global intranet site with numerous sub-sites that carry predefined functionality. The delivered solution brought together:

• A bank-wide corporate page visible to all users, surfacing major bank activities through links such as community programs, corporate policies, mission and values, organizational charts, corporate history, and the employee handbook, plus a calendar of events and corporate news.
• A document-sharing component that displays links to applications, documents, forms, and policies and processes for download, with a search field for quick retrieval and a FAQ section where users can discuss questions on a forum.
• Dedicated department workspaces that bring together each department's core activities, automate internal processes, and keep all relevant materials in one place; access to a department's pages is restricted to that department's users.
• Individual employee pages offering blogging, the ability to follow colleagues, and an activity feed, to draw every staff member into corporate life.
• A social hub — a Yammer-like component where staff can post notes on a bulletin board, share pictures, collect likes, leave comments, take part in lotteries, and buy or sell items.
• Citrix integration via a SharePoint web part that lists Citrix applications, so users can reach the intranet from the local client or Citrix; this enables full use of the intranet from mobile devices and gives the IT department complete control of portal content.

The portal was then optimized for iOS and Android devices, with a clean, intuitive interface that adapts to the most popular browsers. To assure quality, INNERLUXES elaborated UI, functional, and regression test cases and verified the solution against four browsers — Internet Explorer 9 and 10, Firefox 23, Chrome 28, and Safari 5.1.7 — running ten cycles of regression testing, plus dedicated UI test cases on iOS and Android. Finally, a consistent brand was applied through custom layouts and design elements so the experience would hold together as intranet content and usage grew.

Stronger Cross-Department Collaboration and Higher Mobile Productivity

• The Client received a multifunctional, user-friendly solution that addresses all of its major needs.
• The intranet significantly improves collaboration between departments through dedicated tools for sharing documents and storing a corporate knowledge base.
• It encourages internal communication and streamlines business processes across all of the bank's levels.
• Since the mobile version launched, the bank reports that employee productivity has greatly increased.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2013, .NET, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer.