Sunshine Coast Council (SCC) is a local government district in South East Queensland, a diverse region with picturesque hinterland towns, coastal urban centres, waterways, national parks, state forests, bushland, rural areas and scenic mountains, and is home to over 303,000 residents.
SCC wanted to implement a new Intranet and collaboration platform using Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint Online (SPO) and Microsoft Teams. The new solution allowed them to move away from their ageing internal SharePoint site.
The new Intranet has enabled SCC staff to collaborate and share knowledge easily across the organisation by configuring out of the box SPO features and functionality and by leveraging the emerging functionality of O365 Groups and Microsoft Teams.
AvePoint was engaged to provide a solution which would work alongside the SharePoint online environment and provide a platform for governance and self-service, with the aim to streamline IT support and reduce the burden/overhead on IT resources at the Sunshine Coast Council.
With the consultation of the Sharing Minds team, AvePoint Governance Automation was successfully implemented to meet the needs of the Council and ultimately provided a solution that enabled a smooth rollout to thousands of council staff.
“Some of our key considerations included improving the navigation and discoverability of sites and documents, pages, news and lists. We also wanted to align with Microsoft’s communication and collaboration models and leverage the capabilities of the cloud.”
Other considerations from the SCC team included:
Configuring Out of the Box Functions, Features and Templates and minimising custom development
Leveraging new O365 features and apps being regularly added by Microsoft
Integrating Communication Sites, Team Workspaces and Project Online records with Content Manager based on Site and Document Metadata and Labels
Ease of supporting and governing the platform long-term without the need for significant human resources
Ability to federate searching across multiple platforms and respositories
Could you explain some of the nuts and bolts of your solution?
The SharePoint online platform solution was built with:
Modern communication sites as basis for information sharing, eg. news and events, contact pages (uni-directional information sharing)
Microsoft Teams sites as a collaboration platform for teams within the council (bi-directional information sharing)
A document centre/library for fact sheets, guides, templates, etc. as a source of truth for council files
Intricate metadata schema to enable efficient labelling and searching of content
Delve personal profile sites to uplift personal brand at the council, enable easy collaboration between peers, and create connections more easily
Project online sites for project teams
AvePoint Governance was used to:
Provide access to SharePoint services via a request and approve method; council staff could enter the AvePoint portal, request the desired service (new comm site, new team site, change site owner, change site name or URL, etc.) and have this approved and provisioned automatically by the AvePoint platform
Govern the environment by tracking usage, give sites a ‘lease’ period which needed to be extended via request (stops unused sites hanging around forever unnoticed)
Manage the approval process of the creation of new sites
Have there been any surprising outcomes from the initial rollout of this solution?
“The AvePoint service can provide more functions than what is required currently but it will allow us to leverage this further in the future.”
Why did you choose Sharing Minds?
“We chose Sharing Minds as we were seeking a vendor who could deliver a complete solution. We wanted a system that was modern, smart, responsive and mobile whilst ensuring that our requirements for governance and information management were met.
Sharing Minds were able to demonstrate superior knowledge in the technical and information architecture design and a solid understanding of our specific requirements as a Local Government agency.
Their expertise combined with their Partner Product Suite meant we could get access to everything that we need with a single point of contact.”
How would you say this solution ties in with your overarching organisational values or goals?
“This solution is a significant stepping stone in building upon our value of Working as One Team. We have developed a modern, smart and responsive platform that provides our staff with the capability and tools they need to deliver high standards and service excellence.“
For further information on Microsoft collaboration tools and AvePoint Governance Automation, please send us your details below or call 1300 611 359 to speak with a team member today.