L-3 Communications is a prime contractor in Command, Control and Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Government Services, Aircraft Modernization and Maintenance. See www.l-3com.com.
One of their activities is system design, and this involves running a highly structured Quality Management Process, underpinned by thousands of documents. One of L-3's businesses in the UK wanted to use SharePoint to manage these documents and share them amongst the project teams. For this type of use, it is very important to structure SharePoint libraries correctly from the outset.
Spark was able to help in the following ways:
- Structure the libraries meta data to make SharePoint work well for L-3
- Develop a utility to upload documents and attach the required meta data tags
- Use SharePoint features to deliver the right information to each type of L-3 user
With Spark help, L-3 now has a very successful SharePoint installation
Important Points
- SharePoint has a lot of great features, but they have to be used in the right way. If not, the implementation can be clumsy and less likely to be accepted by the users
- SharePoint is like any other intranet implementation and has to gain momentum with the user community for it to be accepted, so think seriously about an adoption plan: how will users be introduced to the site, and how can takeup be monitored and guided.
- Loading information into SharePoint can be a serious undertaking. Spark can write utilities that load information from spreadsheets and file shares into SharePoint lists and libraries, and attach the meta data tags