Providing development support for client's customized and collaborative SharePoint portals on Moss2003 and Moss2007 in order to customize them as per the requirements.

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

The company provides customized and collaborative SharePoint portals to various clients as per their requirements.

SharePoint technology includes browser-based collaboration and a document-management platform. These can be used to host portals that access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications like WiKis and blogs from a browser. SharePoint is targeted as a collaborative workspace, a tool for the management and automation of business processes, and a platform for social networking.

SharePoint has been tremendously successful for collaboration and intranets, and has emerged as the next generation Web solution. While there are good reasons for the popularity of SharePoint, it is certainly not as friendly and risk-free as many like to think.

Business Situation

Client required development support for its SharePoint portals on Moss2003 and Moss2007 in order to customize them as per the requirements. One such requirement is the complete development of time tracking tools with options to analyze the time sheet in different formats.

Apart from this, a few bugs are reported every now and then, and they need to be fixed dynamically. The big challenge is that most of these portals are live and running portals, and while fixing the issues or configuring a portals, any existing functionality should not be broken.

In addition, the quality and speed of the development and maintenance tasks are major concerns as these portals are live portals and their criticality cannot be ignored.

Technologies

• .NET Framework 3.0
• SQL Server 2005
• Sharepoint Server 2007
• C#, JavaScript language

Solution

• Q3 realized that it was important to consider and maintain quality and accuracy. The majority of tasks were to be done on the live portals so Quality Control was deemed extremely important.
• The SharePoint technology experts at Q3 thoroughly studied the client requirements and investigated the various features provided by the application. The IT team was approached, and replicas of the portals to be managed were hosted at the local domain so that each issue could first get fixed at the corresponding replicated portals.
• The portals maintenance operation was planned so that a bug is first fixed on the replicated portals, the Testing team performs the test cycle on the replicated portals, and thereafter the development team directly integrates the fixed codes in the running portals. After integrating the changes in the live portals, the testing team again performs the test cycle in the portal in order to ensure total quality.
• A dedicated team of SharePoint experts has been provided to the client with the option of working in flexible hours, if needed.
• For the Time Tracking tool, the database experts studied the existing SQL database. During investigation, it was found that the database was not normalized and appropriate normalization of the database was done apart from adding new tables in order to match the requirements.

Why Q3

• Q3 has a dedicated team of professionals in SharePoint technology.
• Q3 is committed to help clients achieve their goals and maximize their long-term systems potential.
• Q3 treats each project as a unique one.
• Q3 works closely with clients to ensure that all needs and objectives are understood.
• Q3 continually reviews its working methods to provide improved standards and innovative solutions.
• Q3 acts with integrity and honesty to develop trust in working relationships with clients.
• Q3 is capable of meeting the criteria requested by clients in order to make projects a success within the stipulated time frame.

Benefits

• Shorter time to market due to highly flexible business model and work culture at Q3. The client used to get continuous feedback and customization requirements from companies, trade shows, and partners and all this went on during the course of development process. Q3 ensured that these requirements were processed efficiently, well within the allocated timelines.
• The business model and culture at Q3 entails ownership of the development process. It is not only the team members who are dedicated to a client; it is the whole company management, which works in complete tandem and efficiency to ensure that the relationship is seamless and successful.
• Client takes pride in being able to add the customizations of its users in a timely manner and that too at a much lower cost, while the work practice still complies with ISO and SEI CMM standards.