The Local Government Association (LGA) was formed on 1st April 1997 and represents the local authorities of England and Wales - a total of just under 500 authorities.
The LGA exists to promote better local government. It works with and for its member authorities to realise a shared vision of local government that enables local people to shape a distinctive and better future for their locality and its communities.
The Project
Adepteq (formerly Compusys Consulting) were appointed as partners by the LGA to deliver a collaborative intranet workspace on SharePoint Portal Server. The project includes the provision of an intranet that will facilitate team working, and bring greater efficiency to the document creation and storage process. Currently, file stores grow at a rate of 34% per year, with multiple versions of the same document being stored in different locations on the corporate network.
As a result of the project, the LGA has far greater visibility of all documents on the network and will see a reduction in the number of documents stored on the network. An archiving policy will be created during the summer and will be based on the usage patterns of the users.
The Future
Adepteq are now working with specific departments to improve communication and efficiency throughout the organisation. Project control will also improve due the integration of Microsoft Project Server with SharePoint to provide 'teamsites' for their projects.
The next phase of the project will include workflow to automatically publish documents from the document stores directly to the external website, bringing even greater efficiency to the document creation and publishing process.
SharePoint Integration
The latest version of SharePoint products and technologies are designed to enhance the integration with the Microsoft Office System, by allowing the creation of team and meeting sites, and the collaboration around live documents directly within the Office applications. The new design enables organisations to personalise and customise their intranet and extranet portal experience using advanced user profiling capabilities, to collaborate with internal and external team members through SharePoint sites in one consolidated portal view, and to integrate and access line-of-business applications with easy to configure Web Parts that take advantage of the built-in integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server.
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also offers rich lists for calendar items, announcements, links and tasks, and custom lists that provide flexibility for a wide range of uses. In addition, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables users to create Windows SharePoint Services Meeting and Document Workspaces directly from within Office 2003 applications. These sites, created using tested templates, facilitate document discussion and meetings, enabling users to work together better in teams.
To discuss this project in more detail or to find out how Adepteq can help make your own project a success fill in our online enquiry form, email us at info@adepteq.com or simply call (01296) 468 160.