How Aufait helped a Chamber of Commerce to migrate its large SharePoint portal

Client Profile

The customer is one of the oldest Chamber of Commerce in middle east and a well-established service organizations devoted to the cause of promotion of the private sector contribution to the economy. The Chamber has devised a number of promotional and developmental services to provide support to the private sector initiatives in industry, trade and services.

The Chamber has extended dedicated service to the private sector and the community in general during the last fifty years in the following areas.

• Liaison between the business community and the government.
• Promotional agency.
• Promotion of fellowship among businessmen.
• A medium for the private sector to perform its social obligations.
• Provision of information on investment opportunities and changes in economic and commercial policies.

Aufait Solution

Aufait provided a Custom Solution built on top of SP2013 platform to allow the chamber’s registered members to login, create, view, and update their member information and service information in a secured and efficient. The application exposed only relative information to the Members and complete business logic was encapsulated using a Service layer on top Siebel CRM backend. All middle tier information is stored in SharePoint Lists to facilitate Administrators to manage the content efficiently and perform better analytics. We provided both English and Arabic UI for the members with required validations and checks.

SharePoint 2013 is very scalable platform, which can handle relatively any number of request, hits, data growth, etc. Eservices usage would increase by 125% due to availability in English / Arabic languages along with Desktop / Mobile UI. With SP2013 it became relative easy to manage such load and develop statistical / analytical to give a clear picture to chamber for planning.

Benefits

• Reducting Heterogeneous Applications / Systems: Aufait converted all heterogeneous solutions into SP2013 Custom Solutions and migrated data for each application into 1 single platform.
• Board of Members: Our custom solution displays hierarchical board Members information in a Graphical interface throughout the Chamber’s history. The backend information in stored in SharePoint Lists made it easy for Administrators to maintain the data and reduced the efforts spend by 40%.
• Timeline History: The Chamber had practically 10,000 images, 900 XML files, which contained the information about various events organized and publish throughout 50 years of Chamber’s operations. Our custom solution displayed the data in an organized and easy manner with back-up information being stored in SharePoint lists and libraries, which reduced the process efforts by 70%. (Name, Date, and Description) in English / Arabic language. By providing multi-lingual capability the effort to retrieve information was reduced by efforts by 90% (time taken)
• Man Power required for maintenance: As all systems were developed / integrated into a single platform the effort (manpower) spent by the client to maintain the website and its contents was reduced by over 80%.
• Response Time / Performance:The response time and performance of the application drastically improved due to Scalable System architecture of SP2013 and the solutions provided by Aufait.
• Date Security / Data Pilferage: Aufait developed the website with granular Security implementation of information available in the site. For Eservices a middle service tier was implemented. We extended the website in Intranet, Internet and Extranet using AD authentication, Custom Membership, etc. to allow the website to be available with required access for different parties (Administrators, Eservices Members, and General Public). This meant the Administrators no more needed to be in Office network or VPN to access and work on their daily activities. Which means their productivity went up manifold.
• UI / UX User friendliness: Aufait developed the website with HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design to make sure the website, its content, its applications are available in Desktop, Mobile, Tab, etc. in a seamless manner. This again improved the usability and user friendliness of the website by over 90%.
• Data Publication: With a scalable architecture in SP2013, all custom solutions in a single platform and backend information residing in SharePoint it became just hour’s job rather than day’s job to manage, publish, maintain dynamic contents of any areas available in the website. Overall the cost of operations was reduced by over 50%. The productivity, accuracy, efficiency improved by over 75% in all areas.