Concurrency Develops Custom-Branded SharePoint Blog to Boost Knowledge Transfer at Industrial Supplier

Summary

With 16 distribution centers around the world, IEWC serves a diverse customer base as a premier stocking distributor of industrial wire, cable, and wire management products. Naturally, IEWC’s sales force covers the widespread geography represented by the company’s clients. When IEWC’s Marketing Department launched a new sales initiative, they wanted to foster internal information sharing to enable sales teams to share successes and, therefore, enable other sales teams to emulate those successes and benefit from lessons learned. The solution would be a custom internal blog site where sales representatives could post market and customer information, photos, and other key sales-related information. Other sales and marketing employees could then post comments, ask questions, and offer feedback. Non-sales personnel, as well, would be encouraged to access the site to stay abreast of what’s happening across the client base. The blog site would facilitate internal discussion, reduce inefficient email traffic, save time, support improved customer service, and support revenue growth.

While SharePoint does offer basic blog functionality out of the box, IEWC recognized that for the project goals to be met, the new blog site needed to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible. IEWC contacted Concurrency to design, develop, and to help deploy a custom-branded solution.

“Our sales directors and U.S. president came to me with an idea. I drew up a vision of what the end result would look like and shared that vision with Concurrency. They took it and ran with it. Concurrency understood our vision and created exactly what we wanted.” – James Pellizzi, Marketing Coordinator, IEWC.

Solution

Using a contemporary less-is-more approach to design, and based on input from the IEWC staff, Concurrency’s Business Productivity practice group developed screen shots for a custom-branded blog site. Once these were approved, the team wrote XSL, CSS, and JavaScript to drive the blog design, as well as other code to manage custom features. For example, Concurrency developed a custom feature to allow marketing employees to “ghost write” blog posts for sales representatives, on an as-needed basis. Another feature is automatic posting of author photos to accompany each post. Concurrency worked closely with IEWC’s IT staff to provision the SharePoint blog site and then progressively deploy the custom-developed design features. This knowledge transfer will support IEWC in the future, should the company wish to apply the custom SharePoint features to other corporate blog projects.

“The Concurrency consultant was good at managing the relationship with us. We explained our vision to him. It clicked. Everything moved very fast after that.” – James Pellizzi, Marketing Coordinator, IEWC