Achieves innovation through dynamic collaboration and increases productivity up to 20 percent by adopting SharePoint Server 2010.
L&T Infotech, a global IT services company, used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create CliquePoint, an enterprise social collaboration platform to foster the culture of innovation through dynamic collaboration, reducing email usage dramatically, increasing business agility and thereby increasing active user’s productivity up to 20 percent.
L&T Infotech evaluated many commercial and open source options but eventually decided to build CliquePoint on Microsoft SharePoint as the ability to leverage existing social features, metadata services, integration with backend systems, and out-of-the-box communication tools were extremely beneficial. The entire solution was developed in 4 months by leveraging .NET framework.
“We wanted to provide a platform where everyone, including enterprise business systems, could come together and share information. To get there, it needed a technology platform that would facilitate collaboration across the organization in an easy, responsive, and accurate way,” explained Abhay Chitnis, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, L&T Infotech. “We concluded that Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 was the best fit for our needs and an excellent technology foundation on which we could build. CliquePointTM was designed to connect easily to our existing IT environment. It offered many out-of-the-box features as well as the flexibility and customizability to develop a comprehensive enterprise social collaboration. We also tried to make it very easy for users to jump right in and find the required information,” said Mr. Chitnis.
The enterprise social collaboration tool, CliquePointTM, is split into communities, personal collaboration and business events. Communities help people with common interests to exchange ideas and best practices and the personal collaboration features provide people with comprehensive tools such as micro-blogs, blogs, and wikis; enabling them to connect and follow others. The most important feature introduced is tracking business events and involving enterprise business systems in collaboration.
L&T Infotech has received highly affirmative feedback from employees using CliquePointTM. The enterprise collaboration portal gives the employees streamlined access to information, helps them know and understand each other better and ultimately work better together. This has helped foster innovation through dynamic collaboration.
L&T Infotech has provided a common platform for collaboration between Business Units. CliquePointTM has enabled teams to consolidate all information and made it readily available to consumers. They have access to communities, can initiate blogs, contribute to wikis, and share files; including documents, videos, and audios with other members. This has led to an increase in employee productivity by 20 percent.
CliquePointTM has given L&T Infotech employees a new way to engage, learn, and disseminate information. Employees can access knowledge artifacts & expert guidance and collaborate over business events. They are embracing the solution, which is similar to popular public social-networking sites. All information is available on the wall. The adoption of enterprise social collaboration as a part of core business processes has led to dramatic reduction in the usage of email.
The turn-around time on RFP’s has reduced considerably as users collaborate using CliquePointTM which, in turn, is integrated with other applications, thus making information available through a single window. Integration of business events on the wall and ease of tracking initiatives has helped improve business agility and resource fulfillment.
“We are thrilled about the impact that SharePoint Server 2010 has made for L&T Infotech employees,” said Sanjay Manchanda, Director – Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India. SharePoint Server 2010 enables companies to quickly respond to changing business needs, its employees to share ideas, create custom solutions, and helps the IT – at the same time – to cut training and maintenance costs, save time, and focus on higher business priorities.
