SyncEx Employee Portal Case Study

Business Case Study: Enterprise Content Management Solution for Employee Self Service Portal using IBM WebSphere Portal Software

Industry :

Business Need :

Solution :


Service :


YASH Business Partner :

Manufacturing

Improve Employee Productivity & Raise ROI for E-business infrastructure

E-business Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Content Management, Small & Medium Business

Enterprise Business Value Assessment, Enterprise Content Management using Portals, Enterprise Portal Development & Implementation

IBM Corporation

Business

Our Client is one of the largest Caterpillar dealers in the world that sells and services new and used Caterpillar machines and engines and serves North Central and South Texas. YASH Client also fabricates its own line of land clearing equipment and water tankers.

YASH Client manages large networks of stakeholders through their homegrown intranet system. Employee portal provides information to employees and at the same time it gathers data from individual to furnish it into concrete information for business processes and assignments. Accessing employee information, entering data, sharing ideas makes this employee portal, a communication hub for our client.

Challenge

Client's Intranet Application: The current status of their intranet application is, it is using database server for data storage and couple of web technologies on Windows platform to run intranet. They also have homegrown content management system for creating page layouts for intranet site. Content authors are using basic word processor and authoring tools for writing the website content. Current process of publishing the content on the intranet site is, authors used to send the content as e-mail attachment to the publisher and publisher will upload the content to the intranet site.

Hence their system required some improvements so that user management, concurrent access and content handling can be fine-tuned and it must be able to utilize the resources at maximum and to it the challenge was "No further investment for new technology solutions would be done," as our client had resources, but sought a solution that could utilize the available resources at best". YASH client wanted to implement employee and business portals to restructure their existing intranet system to give maximum ROI. After discussion with client's IT officials, YASH team suggested that their employee portal needs to have communication and content management implementing workflow.

The challenge was to determine how to improve the existing intranet system in less than four months, and that must have content management with workflow implementing systems in place, provided the existing infrastructure to be used efficiently.

YASH client aimed at providing more effective user-friendly interface for their employees, that must include current industry features. These features were minimum requirements for smooth transactions of any enterprise. Some of them were SSO, Personalization and Collaboration, Intranet, Security, Document Repository and Rich User Interface. They were looking for a solution, that's easy for maintenance and suits their budgets and overall organization vision.

Solution

An enterprise portal no longer simply provides a web interface to business processes and information. Portals have grown from supporting the integration of corporate intranet to becoming the main vehicle within an enterprise for both internal and external users to access and share information and knowledge and collaborate about all aspects of business operations.

YASH recognized the value of developing portal environment by utilizing existing resources to implement content and document management with workflow implementation in both the management systems by the introduction of Single Sign-on and Directory synchronization.

YASH with its depth of expertise like JSR-168 and WSRP, SSO and Federated SSO, SOA with Portals, EAI using Portals, Basic, FBA and Digest authentication mechanisms to portal services provides the comfort at best while using any of such application. YASH value proposition includes increased ROI, reduced TCO, improved productivity, ensured scalability and fearless from any vendor lock-ins.

"The new system is just fantastic and faster. We now have all the templates to provide content to the system for processing single sign-on make life of users easy to access any information and implementation of workflow mechanism has made a smooth and timely flow of information to all concerned department", as said by client -side senior official.

Result

A successful and suitable implementation for the intranet systems - Single sign on, with advantage of "login once and access whole system and all applications", content and document management with workflow implementation to fine-tune the business processes were the key features of the project.

Extra Milestone

Implementation scenario of this project states how critical it was to implement when multiple and multi-location mail servers and other server were running to manage huge user set, and to configure it in the system. A need to put Domain users and Mail users directory in sync with each other in that environment to build a smooth portal with out-of-the-box features was achieved with extra mile.

YASH Products and Services Used:

JSR-168 Portlet Catalog: "You Name it & We Have it!" Enterprise Portal & Enterprise Content Management: Employee Portal, Portal Application Development, CMS and Portal Integration & Collaboration

Knowledge Share:

Employee Self-Service (ESS) portal with Content Management Solution using IBM WebSphere Portal Software

BM Workplace Web Content Management Document Manager implementation & migration of existing document repository into portal Custom TAI (Trust Association Interceptor) development for Desktop SSO Leveraging the existing e-business infrastructure for higher ROI and efficient usage Development of custom themes and skins for better end user experience Integration of IBM iSeries HATS applications with WebSphere Portal Development of JSR-168 portlets for employee self-service including mass messaging, web conferencing, team collaboration, enterprise search, global address list (GAL), dynamic digital dashboard with instant desktop alerts, reminders, events, poll and community news Virtual Portal Implementation Directory Synchronization for portal user repository and other enterprise user repositories Lotus Sametime integration with WebSphere Portal WebSphere Portal Single Sign-On implementation with desperate user repositories including MS Active Directory and Domino LDAP Using IBM WebSphere Role Based Access Control (RBAC) system for granular security and personalization Development of authoring templates, presentation templates, menu components and library components

Tools & Technology Used:

IBM WebSphere Portal IBM Workplace Web Content Management Lotus Sametime MS Active Directory Domino LDAP Maxware Directory Synchronizer IBM iSeries (HATS)

For more information

Write us at info@syncex.com or call us at 1.877.257.1343 -Toll Free:

Portal Business Value Assessment Employee Self-Service (ESS) Portals IBM WebSphere Portal Solution Development Enterprise Content Management Document Management Secure Portal Solutions Enterprise Integration & Collaboration Solution YASH Enterprise Portal Solutions YASH Consulting Services