Sappi, the international paper and pulp leader headquartered in South Africa, has improved worldwide employee productivity and system reliability and reduced costs through the implementation of an enterprise search solution created by Mint, a South African-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
Mint has received two awards for the work done at Sappi, one of which is a global accolade.
The project was undertaken in phases, beginning with the implementation of a SharePoint Server- and Content Management Server-based solution to enable collaboration between users from Sappi's mills in eight countries and its three regional offices.
The second phase involved providing innovations to the search environment that enabled global search to be combined across the SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server environments.
"Before the Mint solution was implemented, Sappi faced a global search challenge across the organisation," says Berdine Truter, group e-business manager at Sappi. "When faced with content that is widely distributed across the world, facilitating a global search can be difficult. For various reasons, it was also not possible to put a centralised searching and indexing system in place. To address the problem, Sappi has been working with Mint since the release of Microsoft Office 2003."
Sappi operates across three continents. While connectivity between the head offices is good, bandwidth between the rural areas is insufficient to support a centralised portal. Therefore, Mint implemented portal technology at each mill.
Based on Microsoft's enterprise search platform, users have been provided with information that was previously inaccessible. Now, they can view shortcuts to the collaboration spaces they are involved in across the globe. Also, users can opt for an advanced search screen that allows them to search for information at a specific location, regionally and globally. Lastly, through Mint's Virtual Document Library components, the portal administrators have been able to configure automated searches that automatically target results to users without them having to key in search criteria first. This has reduced the effort expended by users to find information.
According to user feedback collected through an intranet survey:
* 36% of users feel they cannot do their work without the intranet;
* 65% feel that the global intranet keeps them up to date with information about Sappi;
* 44% are able to access other locations' information easily through the intranet; and
* 50% feel they are able to find information more easily.
"Mint focuses on helping customers such as Sappi reduce business costs by making employees more productive," says Grant Hodgkinson, MD of Mint. "We achieve this productivity gain by improving the way people work with unstructured data inside the organisation. Many employees are responsible for creating knowledge. We help organisations realise more value from that information by helping all the relevant people be more effective in how they find and process the knowledge that is created."
Before embarking on the enterprise search project with Mint, Sappi operated using fragmented collaboration and portal technology. It did not have the ability to share content between sites.
Since implementation, standardisation and greater scalability has been introduced into the organisation. Mint replicated the document metadata model into the Web content management environment in Content Management Server through its metadata placeholder, allowing Sappi to centrally control the metadata associated with Web content indexed in SharePoint.
"Users at all levels are now able to work together collaboratively by using SharePoint," Truter says. "Eventually, users will be able to select the destination to which they want to publish any documents. Documents are published in a pending state and an approval process is run through K2.net."
Partnering with Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK during the planning phase, Mint built a platform to integrate Windows SharePoint Server, SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server and K2.net. Integration development was done in .NET code and written in C#. The development included templates, placeholders, Web services, Web components, traditional ASPX pages, customised themes, and Windows Services.
Security was a major project consideration. Prior to implementation, Sappi had deployed a Microsoft Active Directory-based network. This was then leveraged by using Integrated Authentication and Kerberos at a platform level.
"The area of most concern at Sappi was information security," Hodgkinson says. "For example, when a user executes a global search, it is critical to ensure they obtain search results that point to information they are allowed to see. However, searching specifically was executed through multiple Web service calls in the environment. The problem was addressed by leveraging Sappi's security environment, which now forms the backbone of the entire security sub-system of the solution. It is used to identify a user to a local or a remote K2.net server, a remote SharePoint Server or the Content Management Server."
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