About the client

NHS trust is an organizational unit within the National Health Services of England and Wales, generally serving either a geographical area or a specialized function (such as an ambulance service). In any particular location there may be several trusts involved in the different aspects of providing healthcare to the local population. There are altogether 217 trusts, and they employ around 800,000 of the NHS’s 1.2 million staff.

The Challenge

A leading NHS Trust needed to develop a common portal for its managers and different teams to help improve internal collaboration, communications, documentation and information distribution processes.

As part of the project delivery the client needed following activities to be completed:

• SharePoint Usage Optimization Consulting
• Study the ‘As Is’ scenario
• Understand the Customer requirements
• Provide the ‘To Be’ scenario
• Configuration and Implementation of SharePoint Enterprise Portals, Community Sites, Share Point Customization and Branding

The site had to be accessible compliant, responsive and engaging, providing users a higher level of interactivity and effectively increase user engagement. One key requirement was that content contributors can easily administer content in different areas of the site, while providing oversight on published content and making cross-promoting and tagging related content a simple task.

Our Solution

CoreFlex achieved all objectives through a very detailed and thoughtful information architecture, putting the target audience and content contributors at the center of the user experience requirements.

The team implemented SharePoint’s publishing infrastructure and group-based permissions to allow easy adding and removing of content administrators who could publish finalized and vetted content.

An intuitive page tagging was implemented, which web parts consume automatically to display related articles, blog posts, events, and theme experts. This provides a central point for managing tags and top navigation, and fully automates the related content streams to allow content contributors to focus on content rather than page configuration.

Image Renditions were used in SharePoint to ensure images are loaded at the correct resolution rather than putting extra weight on content contributors to provide images in the correct formats and dimensions.

We built the site using well-documented frameworks, to ensure the NHS Trust can easily extend the application if they chose to do so, without the need for heavy documentation or additional consultant cost.

Results

• Improved user adoption rates
• The trust got control over the content generation and distribution
• Flexibility and ease of access to the target users
• Trust did not have to deploy resources for infrastructure management
• The cloud based solution made the deployment process a breeze