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IP Commercialization Firm Improves SharePoint Adoption Among Mobile
Project Teams
PDF VersionTim Wright
Head of KM & ICT
ITI Scotland Ltd.
About ITI Scotland
ITI Scotland Ltd. was founded in 2003 by Scottish Enterprise to drive Scotland’s ambitious plans to identify, create, and commercialize valuable technology-based intellectual assets. The company has three operating divisions known as ITI Techmedia, ITI Life Sciences, and ITI Energy. ITI Scotland’s aim is to bridge the gap between publicly-funded early stage research and privately-backed commercial development. Its activities are intended to help stimulate and benefit the Scottish economy, contributing to a high-value, knowledge economy over the long-term.
Application
ITI Scotland deployed Colligo Contributor Pro for its internal and external project managers and consultants – to extend the efficiency of its project teams and to increase the adoption of SharePoint for enterprise content management.
Business Challenge
Effectively managing information is business-critical for ITI Scotland, which has a significant number of research providers, commercial partners, external consultants, and three operating divisions – ITI Techmedia, ITI Life Sciences, and ITI Energy. Its consultants and project teams develop research to accelerate the growth of intellectual property in Scotland. A high level of collaboration on projects is important.
Due to intricate workflow requirements and the need to better share, store, and organize data among these project teams, ITI Scotland deployed SharePoint as its new content management platform. Tim Wright, Head of KM & ICT at ITI Scotland, explained: “We deployed SharePoint as our main collaborative environment because SharePoint provides a centralized, transparent, and easily accessible platform for our teams, project managers, and management to work effectively together on research projects.”
Yet with staff spending significant amounts of time outside the office each month, Wright found a great deal of sensitive information was still residing on laptops, never making it to company servers. “Our project teams and consultants spend as much as 2 to 3 weeks outside the office every month, at client sites or traveling. With SharePoint, they needed to remember to copy files from the server to their laptops prior to going offline. As a result, they found it easier to simply work from the start with files stored on their hard drives,” said Wright.
“Our organization is based on the protection and commercialization of intellectual property. It’s therefore critical that we secure our business information on central servers to prevent data loss, while also making it easy for teams to collaborate on projects, online and offline,” commented Wright. “It became clear that to better support adoption of SharePoint, we needed to offer our teams an easy way to cache SharePoint content locally to their laptops.”
Solution: Colligo Contributor Pro
ITI Scotland deployed Colligo Contributor Pro to provide project teams and consultants with offline access to SharePoint and to increase the adoption of SharePoint for collaboration and content management. Contributor’s ability to cache SharePoint locally means that all mobile professionals, particularly project managers, can access and update project information, including relevant emails, anywhere. They use Contributor when working from home, at client meetings, or while traveling, for example, by train between their Glasgow and Aberdeen offices (a three-hour ride). Changes made on laptops are synchronized automatically in the background to SharePoint when back online.
“We selected Colligo Contributor to increase the productivity of our project teams online and offline and, more importantly, to increase the adoption of SharePoint for document management,» said Wright. “Equipped with Colligo Contributor, our mobile professionals now have anytime access to their project files on their laptops. By making SharePoint content always accessible, Contributor has helped us increase the amount of content actually managed centrally, driving the overall return on our SharePoint investment.”
By deploying a server-laptop replication solution, ITI Scotland has also been able to reduce drastically the risk of data loss, theft, and corruption inherent with laptop-only data storage. Encryption of the local Contributor data store keeps intellectual property safe. With Contributor, if a laptop is lost or stolen, important information remains confidential. “This represents a huge win for ITI Scotland,” explained Wright. “More of our intellectual property is being centralized and backed up on SharePoint. This protects our intellectual property when laptops break or get lost.”
Contributor “very quickly met all the needs” of ITI Scotland, including the synchronization of document libraries and lists, the support for conflict resolution, and the ability to synchronize portions of a SharePoint site selectively.
When asked to comment on the return on his investment in Colligo Contributor, Wright said: “An ROI calculation was never required to purchase Colligo Contributor Pro. The cost was so marginal compared to benefits that it was really a no-brainer for ITI Scotland.”
Results
ITI Scotland has seen a significant increase in user adoption of SharePoint by using Colligo Contributor Pro. The company has been able to:
- Drive 100% adoption of SharePoint among project teams and consultants
- Increase the productivity of mobile workers with offline access to SharePoint content
- Facilitate centralized data management for project teams
- Reduce the risk of loss, theft, and data corruption of intellectual property
- Optimize the return on its SharePoint investment
