Sales & Marketing Collaboration Portal
The commercial customer division of a US Cable Company offers a full complement of business communications tools to small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprise organizations. Its data, voice, video, and security solutions are enhanced by award-winning customer service and local support teams. Founded in 1998, the commercial customer division of this US Cable Company started out offering high-speed Internet service. Today, it provides a full set of business communications tools to more than 280,000 business customers across 23 divisions.
Business Challenge
The client required a new sales and marketing intranet site to deliver the latest marketing and technical information to users throughout the company. The existing intranet needed replacement due to increasing complexity, high maintenance costs, difficulty of use, and poor search functionality. Additionally, the existing intranet did not provide a suitable set of collaboration tools.
The client needed a solution manageable by non-technical users. The new solution needed to provide content management, document management, enterprise search, and collaboration tools to the end-user while remaining extensible for future development efforts.
Solution Approach
The client selected Northridge to design, build, and deploy their new sales and marketing portal solution. After a thorough analysis of the business and functional requirements, Northridge recommended SharePoint as a solid platform on which to build the new sales and marketing portal. The client's solution leveraged the content management, document management, and enterprise search capabilities of the Microsoft SharePoint platform. In addition, Northridge extended the capabilities of the Microsoft SharePoint platform through the creation of custom web parts specific to the client's needs.
Results Delivered
Northridge successfully delivered the new sales and marketing portal, allowing the client to decentralize content management roles and responsibilities, giving more responsibility to non-technical users. The solution dramatically improved the user’s search experience, providing more relevant search results through an intuitive interface. The portal also improved group collaboration by providing the ability to create workspaces for communicating and working on documents. The solution has proven itself as an extensible platform on which other business applications can be built. The client, in partnership with Northridge, continues to expand the capabilities offered through the sales and marketing portal.