Situation Assessment
When Lake County sought to redesign their public facing website, they faced a huge challenge in having to establish a rapid content contribution and approval process for dozens of the county’s departments and divisions without increasing the workload of the IT staff. They selected SharePoint 2007 for its rich feature set and its tight integration with existing Microsoft Office software, as well as its out-of-box content approval workflow.  SharePoint’s Web Content Management solution would address Lake County’s organizational challenges and would allow them to leverage existing investments in their infrastructure, including Active Directory to authenticate their internal content editors.

The county issued an RFP for a website redesign and implementation of a web content management system.  Lake County was very pleased with the selected vendor’s visual design of the new website, but they were soon faced with major headaches when it came to troubleshooting content deployment activities from their authoring server to the production environment.  Lake County quickly realized that they would need another partner experienced with SharePoint 2007 server farms for Internet sites.  To make the situation more urgent, besides being behind schedule, the funds and budget for the project had been exhausted, and the site had not yet been deployed to production.

After first consulting their Microsoft account manager, Lake County resolved the problem by taking advantage of Microsoft’s SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS).  As one of Microsoft's elite Gold Certified Partners, Risetime was certified to offer additional planning and troubleshooting services through an SDPS engagement. Lake County applied their existing Microsoft software benefit vouchers to a 15 day SDPS engagement allowing Risetime to address and solve the deployment issues without spending additional money.

Solution Overview
After an initial assessment, Risetime consultants rebuilt the SharePoint server farm and made configuration changes to reflect Microsoft best practices for SharePoint 2007’s web content management solution. In addition, Risetime worked with Lake County to configure and thoroughly test the approval and publishing workflows so problems would not resurface after the site was launched.  Risetime also applied critical SharePoint 2007 updates to the server farm, including the 2007 Infrastructure update.

In addition to addressing functionality and stability issues related to SharePoint’s content deployment process, Risetime was able to help Lake County evaluate and implement a search solution for the new site.  SharePoint Enterprise Search was determined to be a better fit than the Google Search Appliance, and it allowed Lake County to save on additional licensing, hardware and consulting costs by further leveraging their SharePoint investment.

Value Measurement
Lake County has derived many benefits from its SDPS engagement with Risetime:

• Stabilization of the system through rebuilding of the SharePoint farm and installation of critical updates and patches in preparation for the site launch.
• Decreased reliance on IT and streamlined control of site content, pages and files by internal department staff.
• Customization of search results pages has improved the overall user experience of the site, especially the ability of users to find content on the new site.
• System capacity planning ensured system readiness for significant traffic increases during the county election season.
• Full utilization of SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites capabilities, which includes Enterprise Search functionality.
• Comprehensive audit trail and version history from the SharePoint solution, which allows Lake County to track who made which website content changes and at what time, as well as provides the capability to rollback changes if necessary.
• Documentation and training for Lake County’s IT staff on SharePoint best practices, which has increased their ability to support the solution and respond to system issues.

To find out more on how Risetime can provide similar high-quality results to your business, contact us.