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ITD to begin introducing new Intranet portal June 21

Relatively unchanged in the last half-decade, ITD’s Intranet site will assume a new identity with introduction of a site built on Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology.

Enterprise Technology Services began laying the foundation for the new site nearly three years with the introduction of MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) as part of the Office 2007 suite. Sharepoint puts development tools in the hands of users and enables them to manage and share documents.

As ETS professionals learned more about the new technology, they recognized its potential value as a backdrop for a new internal website to replace the standard Intranet portal. The MS Office 2007 suite and Internet Explorer 7 feature a web-based framework that provides ITD new capabilities to achieve operational efficiencies, explains program manager Martin Chaney.

The new tool will increase efficiencies through: contextual information management, workflow monitoring, real-time metrics reporting, work collaboration and knowledge sharing.

“All users of the ITD intranet will benefit from the improved information sharing tools,” Chaney says. “Team managers gain an enhanced capability of refining workflow within their area of responsibility as well as across functional organizational lines. Project stakeholders may closely monitor the status of project metrics as a means of ongoing risk mitigation.”

The goal of the MOSS 2007 deployment is the enhancement of the department’s enterprise IT infrastructure through the integration of a collaborative, service-oriented, flexible and extensible information management system, Cheney says.

“The enhancement envisioned through this project implementation supports ITD’s strategic goals of improved efficiencies and customer service through an expected reduction of the information management costs while enabling a consistently more reliable, accurate customer service experience.”

General business objectives of the MOSS 2007 deployment include:

Enterprise, division and team-level sites will be published, accessible and searchable using common user desktop applications
Knowledge sharing through web pages, blogs, wikis and document collaboration will be available across business areas, and
Business process control improves information flow through the use of workflow templates, task lists and status monitoring

Sharepoint technology also prompted discussions about changing the look and feel of the Intranet – the opening page ITD employees use to access internal information – from Human Resource Services, to forms and personnel directories, to emergency plans and many other repositories of valuable information.

Webmaster Tony Garcia began creating a new “shell” for the Intranet that incorporates the weekly employee newsletter, the Transporter. The redesigned Intranet portal, based on Sharepoint technology, will be introduced June 21 to employees at Headquarters and Aeronautics. Other ITD users will continue to see the old Intranet portal and Transporter as the rollout continues through early August.

Chaney said the new technology and access to the new Intranet portal will be introduced according to the following schedule:

Monday, June 21, Headquarters and Aeronautics
Tuesday, June 29, District 1
Tuesday, July 6, District 2
Tuesday, July 13, District 3
Tuesday, July 20, District 4
Tuesday, July 27, District 5
Tuesday, August 3, District 6