Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007                          
in Euro-Centrum Group

Euro-Centrum Group focuses on developing technologies of recovering energy from alternative sources and its conservation in buildings. The Group includes, interalia: Euro-Centrum Science and Technology Park, Euro-Centrum Industrial Park and Euro-Centrum Cluster of Energy Saving Technologies. The offer of the Euro-Centrum Group is directed to companies, scientific and research centers, higher education institutions and sector associations. The target audience are any and all business entities that want to first develop innovative solutions in acquiring renewable energy and conservation thereof in buildings, and then introduce them to the market. Thanks to combining the power of business and science, such development can be faster, more effective and efficient, and indeed the products manufactured can be innovative in consequence.


Challenges 

Documents in Euro-Centrum Group were mostly stored in a paper form or in Excel files and emails without any synchronization. All paper documents were received by the customer service office where they were manually copied and distributed to the particular employees in their respective fields. Obviously, the whole process was inefficient and complicated. In order to improve the process i.e. control of the documents’ status and possibility to create workflows required by ISO, Euro-Centrum Group has chosen Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the main tool.    JCommerce was responsible for analyzing business processes, creating some Web Parts, customization and deployment of the SharePoint platform.

Solution

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server consists of software elements such as Internet Explorer based collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules and document-management etc. SharePoint platform can be used to host websites which access  shared workspaces, information and documents repositories, as well as defined applications (for example wikis and blogs). Programmers have possibility to write their own components called Web Parts  which can be added to SharePoint platform. In  this case JCommerce has focused on document-management functionality and writing specific Web Parts. 

Business benefits

Access to information
The solution provides an easy access to precise search results. Sought information may be located in various places such as documents libraries, repositories and other sources such as files, links to other websites or Microsoft Exchange public folders. Moreover, thanks to the flexible attachments solution it is no longer necessary to go through the vast number of documents to find sought information.

Communication and cooperation within the company
Thanks to the tools enabling information sharing - such as Wiki, blogs, calendar and implementation of workflow mechanisms - the platform enhances communication and improves communication. It is worth to say that workflow can be created by administrators or managers themselves without any support of programmers.

Control over documents flow
The SharePoint platform enabled formalization of documents flow within the company. It replaced a former paper version of the book in which all the incoming and outgoing documents had been registered. Currently, all the documents might be assigned to a particular employee or department. Moreover, the documents grouped in repositories are easily searchable.

Technologies

.NET Framework 2.0
ASP.NET AJAX
Microsoft SharePoint Library
SQL Server 2005