SharePoint 2013, 2016
Customized webparts
Automotive, Information Technology, Rail Transportation
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary
10 MDs
In order to improve the awareness of employees, about planned or unexpected disturbances, our L3 support clients have decided to revise their disturbance notification system.
The goal was to find new channels to inform the employees about all disturbances, that will have a direct impact on their ability to work (e.g., availability of IT systems, electricity in office, water, etc.). The company SharePoint intranet has been selected as one of the main communication channels. And since intranet updates are the responsibility of our team of SharePoint experts, we have been tasked with expanding it for a disturbance notification feature, that would display up-to-date information about what is happening, for how long, etc.
Based on the client's requests, we first had to design a graphic layout for the notification UI, that would be clearly visible, but at the same time not too distracting from the other content on the intranet homepage.
When our design got approved, we have prepared SharePoint workflows for entering disturbance reports into the system. After competing the new system's integration solutions, we have defined a list of users, that have the permissions to enter data and prepare notifications for their departments.
We have created a custom webpart and implemented it into the homepage of our client's intranet. Here are the main features of our solution:
Disturbance announcements appearing on the homepage
Event list with scheduling feature for planned disturbances
Definition of start date, length, and scope (Company, building, office, system...)
Showing the notification to the affected employees, based on previously defined parameters
Automatic formatting/highlighting of notifications
Notifications automatically disappear, after a previously defined period of time
Manual notification trigger, in case of an unexpected event
Our Microsoft developers have created and successfully implemented a new communication tool for employee notifications, within the intranet environment, that the users already know. Our solution simplified the knowledge management system of disturbance updates and helped to transfer this responsibility from SharePoint it support administrators, to authorized personnel from individual departments within the company.