Migrated Providence Health and Services's Oregon region intranet from a regionally hosted Microsoft FrontPage website to an enterprise-wide SharePoint platform.

The SharePoint platform, called "One Intranet" internally, was a formal rollout of v2010 across five enterprise regions. Among all the regions, Oregon's investment and effort set the most precedents. It engaged the most publishers and generated the most content, both casual and vital, for over 65,000 employees.

Our team included only three contractors - a product manager, a solutions architect, and a SharePoint builder. When we started, the enterprise's confidence across in its ability to roll out a unified SharePoint platform was low. Similarly, perhaps because of our size, our team was expected to fail and/or exceed our 12-month contract.

Nonetheless, we made the Oregon region's build/rollout succeed in just six months by helping departmental publishers organize content into wireframes, build with a standard set of well-styled web parts, and learn how to self-manage their content.

As soon as Oregon departments began discovering how their site could reliably serve as the face of their front office, they began using it as a tool to reach, serve, and increase their internal customer base. Most importantly, however, departments began trusting the intranet enough to share vital organizational materials such as nursing practice alerts, emergency management resources, governing policies, safety surveys, and security forms.

List web parts supported a wide variety of presentation modes.

The precise enterprise value of the resulting improvements was difficult to calculate in dollars. But the overall value could be evidenced through platform metrics as an increase in intranet usage, a steady stream of ongoing content updates, and efficiently performing sites.

All told, our work more than doubled employee intranet usage and participation. It was so well-received, several Oregon departments funded us through a second year just to create additional features.

Key to the team's performance was its ability to:

  • think creatively and drive process.
  • produce a high volume of value in a short amount of time.
  • shorten product development lifecycles from months to days and weeks.
  • reduce support calls by building with few bugs.
  • train power users and enable immediate user consumption of content.

Guiding principles

  • Maximize the use of out-of-the-box (OOTB) parts
  • Build on live platform
  • Develop using client-side code only

Sites

In addition to the main Oregon region home site, we built over 150 subsites.

One Intranet made the intranet more usable by eliminating redundancy and improving the content update process.

Users could quickly navigate through a maze of content and find what they were looking for, while content publishers could keep things current without interrupting their main day-to-day responsibilities.

This cross-section of site thumbnails visually illustrates the intranet framework's ability to support both consistency and creativity in the Oregon region.

Build Stats

Count Feature
12 Page layouts (Tabs, 2 & 3 columns, Search)
14 Code-behind pages
20 List and library templates
15 Calculated columns
10 Site columns
3 Content types
3 Alert web parts
40+ Data view web parts (XSL, XSLT)
4 Filter web parts
40+ JS webparts
1 Survey web part
3 Workflows (OOTB and Nintex)
10 InfoPath Forms (integrated with Microsoft Access 2007
10 Script libraries (jQuery, jQuery Tools, SPServices)
10+ Custom display/edit forms
1 Custom JS files (Tabs)
3 Custom CSS files (Oregon region, PHP and Tabs)
10 Custom XSL files
35 Custom graphics (Photoshop/Inkscape)
Animated content-rotator web parts at the top of landing pages highlighted current information from lists when set to "show" between specific dates.
Leaders leveraged the messages data web part to deliver messages across to one or more sites.
List-based web parts with icons enhanced communication of links.
Mission leaders curated, scheduled, and preserved an archive of daily reflections that appeared on multiple hospital sites from a single list.
Database-driven status web parts filled a status visibility gap until formal enterprise-wide metrics and notifications were available.
Twelve variations of a tabs web part allowed publishers to control tab names and place content in zones under each tab page. Browser cookies preserved a user's last visited tab.
Videos played inside the web part without requiring users to leave the page.

Protocols used

  • Javascript
  • jQuery
  • jQuery Tools
  • jQuery Library for SharePoint Services
  • XSL
  • XSLT
  • CSS
  • HTML

Tools used

  • Access 2007/2010
  • InfoPath 2007/2010
  • Inkscape
  • Nintex
  • Photoshop CSS3
  • SharePoint Designer 2007/2010

Responsibilities

Designer and builder of sites, layouts, lists, libraries, web parts, forms, connections to databases, etc. using out-of-the-box webparts and a mix of client-side code.

  • Involved in initial interviews, creative build, roll-out, support, and continual improvements.
  • Assisted enterprise SharePoint team through several platform version upgrades, maintaining stability of Regional build.
  • Authored content for business units.

Role: SharePoint Builder

Setting: Vanderhouwen Contractor - Providence Health & Services

Location: Portland, Oregon

Year: 2010 - 2013