Client

SRK Consulting is an independent, international consulting practice. SRK provides focused advice and solutions to clients, mainly from earth and water resource industries. For mining projects, SRK offers services from exploration through feasibility, mine planning, and production to mine closure.

Challenge

Mike Olsen, Global IT Manager of SRK, needed to roll out Microsoft SharePoint 2007 during a period of intense corporate activity.  Olsen realized that SRK’s SharePoint global deployment would require customization to satisfy the high expectations of SRK’s project-oriented consulting engineers and geo-scientists.

It was important that the new SharePoint tools be flexible, easy to use, scalable to global offices, and in compliance with ISO 9001:2008 quality management system requirements.

Solution

JDQ had been providing business process improvement consulting services to SRK in an effort to optimize processes for project document control, project acquisition and project execution.  JDQ was selected to assist in the customization of SRK SharePoint features for our understanding of SRK Business Process Improvement model and our experience in custom software application design and development.

JDQ provided:

• Design and configuration of SharePoint project site templates, including customization of lists and document libraries and their security groups and permissions,
• Custom web parts for list data display and navigation,
• Integration of a 3rd Party File Manager into SharePoint project sites to support fast uploading and downloading of large files (up to 2 Gb) that exceeded SharePoint file size limitations,
• A User Management Tool with seamless integration with Active Directory, to centralize and simplify user management across multiple Active Directory forests and SharePoint servers,
• An automated collection and enumeration of project data across multiple independent SharePoint sites, and
• The design and development of custom SharePoint list-driven ASPX web pages for use in SharePoint sites.

Results

Working with JDQ, SRK successfully enhanced the standard SharePoint features with unique but robust customizations that met and exceeded the requirements of SRK’s project management teams.

Mike Olsen comments: “Working with JDQ significantly accelerated our development and deployment of SharePoint. JDQ liaised with our executive group and project management teams from multiple locations and was invaluable in obtaining buy-in and a degree of consensus for the project from a group of strong-minded individuals. JDQ’s skilled developers assisted with our internal development and imposed a much-needed rigour onto our previously unfocused development process. Working with JDQ was simple as they could provide resources that spoke our language at every level, from the executive team to the developer.”