Baqus brings together a group of surveying consultancies which operate across the UK and are experienced in every sector of the construction industry (see www.baqus.co.uk)
They have recently adopted hosted Exchange and SharePoint suplied by INTY (see www.inty.com). BAQUS needs SharePoint, just as they need hosted Exchange, to support a distributed business that operates from 10 offices around the country, and which has no established WAN. BAQUS asked Spark to look at their requirements and set up their SharePoint site.
Spark was able to help in the following ways:
- Initial Acceptance: We set up a prototype which was presented to the BAQUS board. This led to SharePoint being adopted as the BAQUS information sharing platform.
- Site Development: Spark looked at the BAQUS requirements and developed the initial site.
- Training and Handover: Spark trained internal staff to continue the site support.
- Contact database: This started life as a large Excel spreadsheet. We moved this to a structured set of SharePoint lists inside the SharePoint Contact Database application: one of the “Fab 40” provided with SharePoint. This included writing a utility to load data from the spreadsheet, re-organise it, and upload it to the SharePoint lists.
- The Document Libraries: We have helped them structure the document libraries and set up the meta data that goes with them
- Security: We have helped them structure the permissions so they can safely share documents amongs the BAQUS teams.