Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

How We Did It: Christian Children’s Fund extranet powered by SharePoint

Overview

Ironworks Consulting, a management and web consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Partner, recently launched a new global extranet for the Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), which is one of the most respected child development organizations in the world that has been a non-sectarian global force for children, working in 31 countries, assisting more than 13.2 million children regardless of race, creed or gender since its inception in 1938. CCF has provided more than $2.7 billion in services to children, with most of the funding coming from individual contributors in the form of child sponsorships.

As a leader in child development and protection issues, CCF’s programs provide practical assistance to impoverished communities and plant the seeds of self-sufficiency to create an environment of hope and respect for children in which they have opportunities to achieve their full potential and effect positive change in their communities. These comprehensive and sustainable programs incorporate health, education, nutrition and livelihood interventions that serve to protect, nurture and develop children.  CCF employs a child-focused development approach that includes the voices of children, as well as their families and communities.

With a workforce geographically dispersed across over 33 countries worldwide, CCF faced significant challenges with usage and adoption of its existing intranet site and sought a more reliable and extensible solution to disseminate and share information across these offices, as well as to provide a platform for improving social networking and organizational connectivity.

The purpose of this project was to develop and implement a new CCF extranet, known as "The Hub", that would be used by all CCF employees worldwide as the single source for information, content and document storage, as well as a means for collaboration internally and externally.

Figure 1: Home page of CCF extranet.

Delivery Methodology

The project began with Assessment and Design phases, during which requirements were documented, site architecture was determined via the development of a site map and wire frames, and navigation, page layout and graphical designs were developed and approved to give the site a new look. During these initial phases the development of a prototype site was completed to help users better understand the new technology, as well as to provide interactive context to the requirements and design discussions. The chosen architecture was one that significantly leveraged MOSS 2007 technology, which was identified by CCF as the technology platform of choice for future business growth and team collaboration needs worldwide.

Ironworks was responsible for the installation and configuration of MOSS 2007 and SQL Server 2005 in the CCF production environment as well as the development and deployment of custom web parts, site templates, master pages, page layouts and custom HTML styles in support of a MOSS 2007 site collection consisting of over 75 sites. Once development began, Ironworks used an iterative development and deployment approach, which allowed CCF to gain access to the developing site much earlier to review and provide feedback as well as to begin the content migration process as soon as possible.

Lastly, Ironworks worked with CCF’s Interactive Communications and IT groups to provide training and documentation to prepare "The Hub" end-users, super users, and administrators for production deployment.

Governance Framework

Due to the strategic importance of CCF’s extranet initiative and the truly global presence of their personnel, Ironworks followed an aggressive approach to establishing a governance framework for The Hub prior to actual site implementation. Indeed, the extranet implementation necessitated a level of governance that was new to CCF’s dispersed organization. Ironworks worked with CCF to establish management policies and standards related to extranet content, sites, and objects managed within their MOSS based platform.

The heart of the governance framework was the definition and implementation of more than 100 custom content types. Standardizing document formats and metadata collection paved the way for improved retrieval, reuse, and ongoing information management. SharePoint's out-of-the-box approval workflows were associated with the various content types.

In conjunction with the definition of customized permission levels and security groups, the well defined taxonomy provided CCF with the tools for making and enforcing decisions related to the creation and management of content while at the same time enabling content development to be efficiently distributed to CCF subject matter experts. SharePoint’s extensibility also helped to reduce the dependency on IT processes and resources, creating an opportunity to smooth change acceptance and accelerate the transition to the new solution.

User Management

The view towards empowering business stakeholders extended to the creation and ongoing maintenance of new user accounts both in SharePoint and in Active Directory.

The functional requirements for the CCF Hub extranet site called for the creation of custom web parts that could be used by a select group of users to provision new and edit existing Active Directory accounts and SharePoint profiles. To meet this requirement, Ironworks built upon the membership controls included in the Solution Sharing Network (SSN) project that is part of the open source Community Kit for SharePoint as well as overriding and extending SharePoint's profile editing page.

Figure 2: Create Account page.

The account request control created by Ironworks was a pared down version of the one that is included in the SSN Portal. It consisted of only 5 fields that had to be filled out to request an account. Upon submitting the request, an item is generated in a custom list, and a workflow is kicked off whereby ultimately the request is approved or rejected by the designated Approver for the Active Directory OU that the requestor is a part of.

When the request is approved, the information is then sent to Active Directory where an account is created, and the information is also sent to the SharePoint profile store, where a profile is created for the user. The user then receives an email stating that an account has been created for them.

For editing existing profiles, including fields mapped back to Active Directory properties (e.g. email address), Ironworks developed a second custom search and edit control. Using the control, authorized users can search by username, or first and last name. A simple query is done against Active Directory for matching users, and the results are returned in a grid. For each record, the username is a link that takes the user to the details page for that user.

Figure 3: Search and Edit page for user profiles.

The details editing page is a SharePoint page (ProfAdminEdit.aspx) that has been copied from the context of the SSP and hosted directly in the layouts directory with custom authentication and data storage. Upon saving the revised form, the information is sent to both Active Directory and to SharePoint, overriding the form’s original method of saving exclusively to SharePoint.

Content Migration Support

During the requirements gathering phase, Ironworks provided CCF content managers with planning worksheets to catalogue content sources for each of the various departments and business units. This provided CCF with an early understanding of the scope of their content migration effort and allowed them to plan accordingly.

Because the level of effort associated with content migration can be significant, Ironworks identified opportunities to engage CCF personnel responsible for content migration during the site development and configuration phase. CCF had a large image repository with extensive metadata that needed to be migrated to MOSS. Ironworks completed the styling and build out of custom photo library functionality in the first iteration of site development. With this done, the photo library was opened to CCF personnel during development in order for them to start populating content several weeks prior to the production launch.

Figure 4: Photo Library with captions and custom viewer and styling.

Information Architecture Challenge

The CCF extranet project presented a number of challenges and opportunities in terms of creating a more intuitive Information Architecture (IA) for the audience, starting with the high level structure and including sub-site and page layout considerations.

High Level Structure

Because of the collaborative nature and capabilities of SharePoint, Ironworks worked to understand not only how CCF was organized, but also how they were sharing information across the organization. To determine the organization’s needs, Ironworks held a number of requirements sessions with the different internal groups to help determine site columns, content types, and understand CCF’s internal taxonomies.

CCF’s previous intranet had been built around a 5 year plan, which became outdated and hampered "findability" especially for newer employees within the organization. For the new extranet, Ironworks built a more general structure that supports scalability over time. Using high level categories such as "Groups" and "Offices" enabled users to quickly identify relevant sub-sites and drill down to find the necessary information.

To further improve "findability", Ironworks created custom navigation controls to expand upon the number of visible site map nodes and enable fly out menus, giving users a glimpse of information within lower levels and allowing them to jump directly to it.

Pulling from alternate language titles specified for all of the site collection’s pages, the custom navigation controls also provided end users with navigation text targeted to them based upon a "Preferred Language" property specified in their profile settings (English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese). Given the user’s preferred language, a call is made to the appropriate PortalSiteMapProvider (there is an overridden version for each language). The called provider takes each site map node and converts the title for that node into the language-specific equivalent for the user’s selected language. The conversion is really a substitution process whereby the provider retrieves the ‘Spanish Title’, ‘French Title’, etc. within the page record applicable to the current site map node. For the left-hand navigation menu, there is a control adapter that is implemented that intercepts the rendering of the menu, and replaces the HTML with tags and class settings that allow the design team to manipulate the look and feel with cascading stylesheets (CSSs). The control adapter parses the nodes in the menu and writes the appropriate HTML, which can be customized as necessary. This gives the developer great flexibility and control of what is rendered.

Figure 5: The Groups page in the French language.

Consistent Section Templates

Ironworks wanted to maintain an intuitive structure at the lower levels of the site, specifically within the "Units", "Groups", and "Offices" areas where the majority of the content exists. To achieve this, Ironworks created site templates with a consistent structure for the sites within these sections. The templates are general enough to support the different areas of the organization and provide the users with a consistent structure so that they know where to look for information.

Even as the sub-sites were standardized to a common look and feel, a unique visual branding was achieved through a custom header image control that was included in the site collection’s master page. The control pulled a distinctive header image for each sub-site based upon "Header Image Url" column stored in the site collection’s Sites listing.

Creating site templates for the different sub-sites had the additional effects of speeding the initial build-out of the site collection and easing site future site maintenance by allowing administrators to easily and quickly create new sites.

As a means of better organizing the presentation of information within each site, Ironworks developed a custom "Tabstrip" web part to allow designers to create a tabbed web part zone interface. The web part reads configuration information out of an XML configuration file stored within a document library in the site collection. It uses this information to determine the number and order of tabs to display, what names to display on the tabs, and what method to use to render the contents of the tab (iframe or div). When used in div mode, the Tabstrip works in conjunction with specialized SharePoint page layouts that include multiple div elements all appropriately named. When used in iframe mode, the Tabstrip can be added to any page layout given that the iframe element is added via the code in the Tabstrip solution. The Tabstrip web part supports audience targeting of tabs as needed based upon the inclusion of an "audiences" property in the XML configuration file.

Social Networking and Communication

By nature, CCF’s business requires that it be spread out across many regions, countries, and time zones. In many cases, employees who have never met face to face are required to communicate and collaborate on a daily basis. Additionally, as needs arise in different regions, new CCF staff assume responsibilities and communicating those changes can sometimes be a challenge.

To help accommodate these needs, Ironworks implemented and expanded on the social networking capabilities built into SharePoint. In addition to providing each user with a profile and profile photo, configuring People search, implementing an employee message board, and creating a wiki site for documenting organization-specific terminology, Ironworks also implemented several custom components to help acquaint users with their colleagues around the globe. These included:

• AA OrgChart Web Part: An expandable/collapsible organization chart with employee photos and reporting structure at the company, region, country, group and unit levels.
  
• Meet Your Colleagues Web Part: A custom-styled Content Query web part that highlights a selected "Meet Your Colleagues" article page from the "Community" portion of the extranet.
  
• World Time Zones Web Part: A custom web part that uses UTC offset information and an image URL stored in a SharePoint list to display the current time and a map applicable to a particular locale. The web part can be configured to display information for a single region or it can be connected to a filter web part that allows users to select a country from a pick list.
• HotSites Web Part: Based upon the web part of the same name that is a part of the SSN.WebControls.General of the Solution Sharing Network project, this web part provides a ranked listing of the most popular sites in the site collection based on user hits. The Ironworks version of the control is optimized for performance, offloading the crawl of the site collection’s audit logs to a nightly process that caches the results for display.
• Outlook Inbox Control: Integrated into the site collection’s master page is control that displays a link to the user’s Outlook Inbox and indicates the current number of unread messages. The web control does a WebDav query that both checks if an inbox exists for a particular user and gets the number of unread messages. The output is then rendered as straight HTML with a Javascript call that opens a new window for Outlook Web Access.

The Importance of Search

As a final comment on the CCF case study, it should be noted that SharePoint’s Enterprise Search capabilities deserve a fair amount of credit for the successful adoption of The Hub. MOSS Search, augmented by the implementation of the Ontolica Search product, played a tremendous role in demonstrating the power of SharePoint to improve information sharing across a large and diverse organization.

Within the site collection’s search center, Advanced Search pages that were extended to include mapped metadata properties yielded tangible benefits to the business users that had invested so much time in defining custom content types. Likewise, the same metadata was put to good use through the implementation of Ontolica’s Search Summary Web Part, an easily configured tool for the display of faceted search results.

Figure 7: Advanced Search page.

Figure 8: Search Results page with configured facets provided by Ontolica Search.

Search Result web parts were used outside of the Search Center as well as a means of efficiently rolling up content across sub-sites based upon canned search queries. Ontolica's Search Results Web Part provided an easy to use interface for generating custom formatted lists of various content types including Announcements, Contacts, and News Stories.

Conclusion

For Ironworks, the implementation of the CCF extranet highlighted SharePoint’s role as a powerful platform and framework for robust application development. The Hub’s success came as the result of the union of SharePoint’s core strengths (Content Management, Search, Collaboration), key third party tools (AA OrgChart and Ontolica Search), and custom development by a Microsoft Certified Partner.

Blog Authors from the Project Team

• Mark Gallagher - Project Manager, Ironworks Consulting
• Sean Kesler - Business Analyst, Ironworks Consulting
• David Perkinson - Lead Architect, Ironworks Consulting
• Marissa Johnston - Information Architect, Ironworks Consulting
• Bill Cavender - Assistant Director, Interactive Communications, Christian Children’s Fund