Development of a multipurpose custom SharePoint intranet

Customer

The customer is an ISV that helps their clients optimize operations and business processes through boosting employee productivity and fostering organization-wide innovation. The software company offers several proprietary collaboration tools, enterprise portals, and ECM solutions, all based on Microsoft SharePoint.

Solution

The delivered custom framework enables SharePoint developers to provision SharePoint artifacts regardless of the deployment model. While developing the solution, the team utilized:

• SPMeta2 library with a set of APIs to create SharePoint artifacts in line with the Microsoft’s remote provisioning model.
• JQuery and AngularJS, which are the main frameworks for creating SharePoint intranet UI.

The key idea behind the solution is that it allows SharePoint developers to create sets of custom components, such as SharePoint sites, lists, and branding elements. All components can be used as templates and spread across the entire deployment. This is a great way for end customers to cut costs: instead of ordering multiple custom SharePoint sites, they can use the existing templates for a variety of business purposes.

Once Itransition finished their work on the custom framework, the SharePoint developers moved on with designing and implementing a set of SharePoint components to be used as the basis of a SharePoint intranet.

The final set of deliverables includes:

• The SharePoint homepage—a SharePoint site with news, tools, favorites, key figures, workspaces, and a search feature.
• The management site—a SharePoint site that contains configured site templates, permission templates, and SharePoint add-ins. It also enables the processing of scheduled tasks.
• Workspaces—SharePoint sites that can be created by end users to manage document libraries and organize collaboration spaces.

• Timer jobs site—a custom SharePoint site with preconfigured timer jobs that run at a scheduled time to perform recurring tasks (sending notifications, ensuring governance execution, etc.).

The solution supports the following user roles:

• Administrator manages user accounts, groups, and permissions.
• Site Creator makes requests for sites/workspaces provisioning.
• Site/Workspace owners are users responsible for the created workspaces. They can manage access rights, site users groups, and permission levels.
• Site/Workspace members can create, modify, and delete content.
• Site/Workspace visitors can view the content published on a site or a workplace but cannot edit it or add new content items. 

Apart from that, intranet administrators can add custom roles based on the particular business contexts of their organizations.

Results

Using their SharePoint development expertise, Itransition’s team helped the customer create a configurable and extendable SharePoint intranet that can be implemented in enterprises regardless of their size and business domain. The developed solution is compatible with SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online. It is based on modern development approaches such as remote provisioning and client-side object model (CSOM). The solution facilitated the custom development of SharePoint sites and collaboration workspaces.

The customer achieved the main project goal of ensuring a steady growth in the enterprise customer base. The solution operates in over 20 companies from finances, telecommunication, biotech and other industries.

Itransition keeps collaborating with the customer and assists them in supporting the implemented solutions and enriching them with new features.