Davidsons IFA

The Challenges

The staff at Davidsons IFA, like many growing businesses, utilised shared drives for storing most of their documentation and for carrying out their day-to-day working. While their data was regularly backed up, it wasn’t particularly efficient. With the opening of a second office they decided to look for a partner who could provide a more robust and usable solution. This would not only enable the team to manage their documentation, it would  also backup their files automatically. As SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service with multiple levels of redundancy, it ensures that files are accessible both in and out of the office. OfficeLabs’ experience in implementing SharePoint intranet and document management solutions meant that they were the ideal partner to help bring Davidsons’ existing files fully online and provide a secure, user-friendly solution to manage them. The key requirements for this project were: 

• The creation of a brand-new intranet split across multiple subsites tailored to each department.  
• The migration of all existing files to the new intranet, as well as enabling versioning to provide a full audit trail of changes. 
• Improved security to ensure that staff were able to restrict access to individual document libraries and files.
• Collaboration on existing documents simultaneously as required, negating the “read-only” messages they received when working from a file server. 
• The ability to manage their own departmental subsites, create new libraries and add news bulletins and calendar events. 
• The construction of tailored alerts for libraries when files are added, deleted or amended to help with workflow management.  
• Full integration with their existing Microsoft Office product suite. 
• Training of all company staff on the new intranet before go-live. 

The OfficeLabs Solution

OfficeLabs gathered a list of requirements from Davidsons including the departments and staff to be added to the new intranet. The key deliverables for this project were:

• Corporate Intranet homepage 
• Permission-restricted document libraries 
• Events calendars and quick links 
• Self-help tools & reference centre
• Group collaboration tools 
• Subsites for departments, policies and templates including: 
  • Mortgages 
  • Administration Support 
  • Regulated 
  • DPM 
  • Directors 

Business Benefits

After OfficeLabs was chosen to deliver the project, consultants worked with the Managing Director to determine a structure for the intranet alongside users and permissions. Once this was fully scoped, the FastTrack SharePoint service was implemented quickly, incorporating all required departments and libraries mapped to the permissions specified by the client. Following sign-off of the structure, it took less than 10 days to complete the intranet build, migrate the entire file server and carry out the introductory training session for all Davidsons IFA. Davidsons also took advantage of the OfficeLabs support service for 12 months’ further assistance with any SharePoint and Office 365 queries.

Comments: 

“Working with Davidsons was effortless, thanks to fantastic communication between Craig and our team. OfficeLabs provided regular progress reports to the client, while updates from both parties ensured that it was easy to plan in the migration with zero impact, alongside a go-live date and training. The staff provided some very positive feedback on the intranet and new ways of working when compared to their existing file server solution, which demonstrated a successful project had been delivered – and OfficeLabs is delighted that we will continue to work with and support Davidsons for the foreseeable future.”
Graham Bidwell – Managing Director – OfficeLabs 

“The starting point for us was an old small business server where we kept all our important files. As always with these things, we felt it worked fine – until it didn’t! Losing access to your server really highlights how important it is to keep your data safe and accessible. Dealing with Graham and Rob at OfficeLabs was a pleasure. They explained how SharePoint worked with clarity and patience and the migration of our data was problem-free. We are now learning to work in a different way using our intranet site and that is proving to be an eye-opener. I would certainly recommend any growing business to seriously consider this type of tech solution, and I would not hesitate to recommend OfficeLabs as your install partner.”
Craig Davidson – Managing Director – Davidsons IFA