Situation Assessment

McHenry County, located 60 miles northwest of Chicago, is the sixth largest county in Illinois with over 300,000 people living in multiple townships, cities and villages. With a rapidly expanding population base, the mission of McHenry County’s 70+ departments and agencies to continually deliver essential services and programs is more important than ever before. County employees require effective tools and technologies to address the growing challenge of providing solutions for their constituents’ evolving needs- tools that must be designed to leverage timely information and empower employees and teams to be as productive as possible.

Risetime’s initial assessment determined that McHenry County departments were seeking to improve their approach to managing working documents and forms. They identified the limitations of their existing tools (file shares, email attachments and local storage) and recognized the potential for SharePoint 2007 to help them advance their document collaboration practices.

In addition, the county’s Employee Resource Center intranet was not effective in distributing timely content, events and key dates because only IT staff had approve and publish rights. Additionally, site organization was not optimal for employees to quickly locate key content or documents; commonly used forms were buried deep in the site. A lack of automation required a user to download, print, and fill out a paper form followed by inter-office delivery and manual re-entry of form data by the recipient into the appropriate system.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007/InfoPath Solution Overview

Risetime focused on working closely with key McHenry County stakeholders to gain insight into their processes to best define an intranet solution that also provided document collaboration and forms automation functionality. By building consensus early on with clearly articulated goals and objectives, Risetime was able to formulate a solution that addressed both the needs for an improved intranet experience and department document collaboration practices.

• SharePoint enabled Employee Resource Center intranet
• Department specific SharePoint team sites
• InfoPath forms 

 Information Architecture Deliverables

Responding to McHenry County’s need for an intranet where key information components are easier to find, Risetime created detailed information architecture artifacts to capture key site structure and content organization details upfront:

• Detailed site map
• Content inventory
• Page-level wireframes
• Security groups and permissions hierarchy
• Department team site templates

Development of these information architecture deliverables helped to optimize placement of frequently used content elements and establish the intranet’s security groups and permissions. This process allowed Risetime to gain sign-off from McHenry County stakeholders prior to development efforts, thereby reducing need for rework and revisions during construction phase.   

SharePoint Extensions

To meet the specific needs of McHenry County, Risetime identified several areas where SharePoint out-of-the-box functionality needed to be extended:

• Third-party Web part integration was needed for creation of an easily manageable “FAQ” drop-down box feature using a Bamboo™ Web part and a custom calendar module.
•   InfoPath forms and workflows were developed to provide automation of document approval and routing for forms used by all McHenry County employees submitting information to Purchasing, HR and IT departments.
• Custom notifications for the Employee Resource Center intranet home page allowed department liaisons to get approved or rejected messages after submitting content to the employee resource intranet site administrator for publishing.
• Team site templates were created for both large, multi-tiered departments and smaller ones with less content. Both provided the core web parts necessary for document collaboration and storage functionality along with approval workflows incorporated into the templates. 

All features were designed to be extensible for future personalization and application integration. Risetime also delivered targeted training sessions for team site owners and provided McHenry with direction on conducting their internal team site planning sessions.

Risetime developed a balanced SharePoint Governance Checklist to help ensure that consistent rules and guidelines would be instituted to mitigate the risk of uncontrolled team site proliferation. 

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