Royal Museums Greenwich comprises the Royal Observatory, Cutty Sark, National Maritime Museum and Queen’s House. Together they provide the public and organisations with a better understanding of the sea, the exploration of space, and Britain’s role in world history.
Many of eacs’ clients adopted Office 365 licensing to initially migrate their email into Exchange Online, providing greater resilience, security and ease of access to email for their staff.
Typically, the next step in this cloud journey is adopting SharePoint Online for file storage and collaboration. However, due to the highly flexible configuration permutations and options, many IT teams are unsure how best to start this project to benefit the business without jeopardising future capabilities.
Royal Museums Greenwich recognised that they could be getting a lot more value out of their existing Microsoft subscriptions, specifically SharePoint Online and Teams, which were already included with their Office 365 subscription.
Understanding what was required
Following a number of years working with its clients to understand their initial SharePoint requirements, eacs noticed a common theme with the majority of the projects we have worked on. The requirements generally are as follows:
• A branded central area for company news and information;
• Access to company resources, such as HR forms and
• Access to external links such as payroll and expense applications;
• A clear document library structure that is easy to navigate;
• Training to ensure administrators and staff can make the most out of SharePoint.
To assist companies in getting the most out of their subscriptions, eacs developed SharePoint QuickStart, which was exactly what the Museum stakeholders were looking for.
Making Collaboration Easy and Secure
When implemented and designed properly, SharePoint can provide companies with a mobile and user-friendly web-based internal internet and cloud document storage solution. The additional security features SharePoint offers also guarantees your data is safe and secure. It provides individuals with document versioning control ensuring compliance policies are adhered to, making communication and collaboration simple and effective.
After initial discussions, a design workshop was held with eacs in-house Apps & Data experts. During the workshop, the team worked with the Royal Museums Greenwich’s key stakeholders to produce an initial configuration document that would provide them with a foundation to start to maximise the benefits the SharePoint platform could bring.
During conversations, it was clear that it was important for the Museum to have a centralised platform to create and communicate visually appealing information across the business. The eacs team worked with the Museum staff to build a content structure that accurately mapped the information types being shared.
In addition, a visually attractive and easy-to-use home page was developed. The home page integrated tools and widgets such as Power BI reports, recent documents, and links to make collaboration and access simple and effective.
Areas were also developed that allowed news articles to be created within minutes and published newsletters to be emailed out to the relevant team or companywide.
Next, eacs created a dedicated workspace for each department which integrates all core activities of departments and provides staff members with all relevant materials in one place. Access to department web pages is only available to users from the respective department to ensure the security of the museums data.
Security and compliance was a key area of concern, therefore a comprehensive review of the current SharePoint security settings were carried out, and where necessary, adjusted to meet industry best practice and your business requirements. This included ensuring that permissions granted were in line with the Museums Security Policies.
Winning the hearts and minds of the staff was key so that they truly understood how important it was to the business. Training was therefore a key element to ensure that staff were able to make the most out of the new SharePoint Hub. Throughout the project, testing was undertaken to ensure that the impact on users was minimal, and regular project review meetings were held to report on progress.
At the end of the project, a further security review was initiated and presented to the Board once the project was completed, confirming that the previously highlighted gaps had been closed off.
Benefits
As a result of the project, the client enjoyed the following additional benefits:
• Simple, modern access to IT resources from anywhere;
• Scalable monthly costs based on staff numbers;
• Greater collaboration and communication between departments with specific tools for sharing documents;
• Maximised value of existing cloud licensing to reduce ongoing infrastructure costs;
• And finally increased employee productivity and general efficiency in their processes.