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Non-Profit Professionals Gain Offline Access to SharePoint for Work in the Developing World
PDF VersionBryan Scurfield
Global IT Officer
Practical Action
About Practical Action
Practical Action is the operating name of Intermediate Technology Development Group Limited, a registered charity in the United Kingdom. It works directly in four regions of the developing world: Latin America, East Africa, Southern Africa, and South Asia. In these countries, Practical Action works with poor communities to develop appropriate technologies in food production, agroprocessing, energy, transport, water and sanitation, shelter, and disaster mitigation. Their consultancy and educational work extends the reach of their practical approach to tackling poverty. In total, in 2006 and 2007, Practical Action outreached to some 664,000 people.
Application
Practical Action deployed Colligo Contributor to give its staff access to critical project information stored in SharePoint while working in the field on non-profit projects in remote developing communities.
Business Challenge
Practical Action manages approximately 100 projects at any given time in various areas of the word, like Peru, Kenya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. To support these development activities, Practical Action has an office in the U.K., seven country offices, and 24 field offices. In addition to working from these offices, Practical Action professionals work in the field, managing projects in local communities and meeting with donors. Collaborating on projects and sharing best practices among remote offices presents IT challenges.
Practical Action professionals have amassed a dynamic and expanding set of knowledge and techniques. “It’s critical for our staff to be able to share new agriculture strategies or sanitary solutions. As a non-profit organization working on life critical projects, we can’t afford for each regional office to ‘reinvent the wheel’,” explained Global IT Manager, Bryan Scurfield. “So we initially implemented a document management system to centralize information and make it accessible to all employees so communities across the globe could learn and benefit from each others’ experiences.”
“We had initial adoption issues with our company intranet, due to performance and usability problems. Documents remained on remote machines, rather than on the intranet,” commented Scurfield. Looking for a solution that would provide a rich user experience and primary working environment, Practical Action deployed SharePoint. “Our vision was for employees to use SharePoint as their workplace to manage and collaborate on all field projects, rather than just as a repository for final documents that people remembered should be shared,” said Scurfield. An added benefit of storing all documents in SharePoint is the retention of intellectual property despite staff turnover.
SharePoint provided a much improved user experience, but had limitations: as a browser based solution it was only available to people working online. Project managers from the U.K. office spend as many as twelve weeks a year working outside of the office. Field offices encounter technological challenges inherent to a third world environment: dial-up internet access can be slow and often becomes unavailable for days or even weeks. Employees from the Chief Executive down needed offline access to their documents while travelling and working in the field.
Solution: Colligo Contributor
The IT department at Practical Action is currently managing 100 SharePoint sites, one for each active project. Document libraries hold project files, reports, and proposals. Budgets and monthly financial reports for each project are also updated in SharePoint. Practical Action uses custom and standard lists like contacts for projects. By synchronizing this critical content to staff laptops, Colligo Contributor allows Practical Action to guarantee constant access to project information, in offline and remote settings, regardless of field connectivity challenges.
“Contributor improves productivity because our travelling professionals have the information they need immediately. They can take SharePoint libraries and lists away, work on documents, and then push their changes back to the server when they return to a viable connection,” said Scurfield. “Contributor is easy to use. Our people have been able to start using Contributor with relatively little training and we’ve had no support calls.”
“For example, one of our Aim Team Leaders, Alison Griffiths, was carrying out an induction for a new team member in Kenya last year. With Colligo Contributor on her laptop, she was able to very quickly pull up each document she needed and show it to the trainee,” explained Scurfield. “She commented that when overseas Contributor enables her to work more or less as if she was in her office in the U.K.”
Colligo Contributor also supports Outlook and SharePoint integration. “With staff dispersed around the world, 80 to 90 percent of communication at Practical Action is via email,” said Scurfield. “Outlook integration with Colligo Contributor is a real benefit. Now, with Version 2.2 it is even easier to drag-and-drop attachments from emails in Outlook to SharePoint, online or offline, which is increasing the use of SharePoint for document management.” This feature has helped support the centralization of information in SharePoint.
By eliminating latency and connectivity challenges, Colligo Contributor is helping Practical Action actualize their vision for SharePoint. “Colligo Contributor is helping us drive adoption of SharePoint for collaboration and document management,” shared Scurfield. “If we didn’t have Contributor, people travelling with laptops would create documents on their hard drives and a significant number would never be added to SharePoint.” Colligo Contributor and SharePoint are enabling true centralization of data, helping protect intellectual property and promote dissemination of information.
“ROI is a difficult concept for a charity, you can only measure it as a saving of staff time. Colligo Contributor with SharePoint allows us to do more work and better quality work because it gives our project teams timely access to a larger wealth of information and reference materials,” concluded Scurfield. “A colleague recently took an overnight train from the U.K. to Rome and commented that with Contributor she had all the information she needed to make it a working trip. In this case, Practical Action saw a return on investment in one 24 hour train ride.”
Results
Colligo Contributor has enabled Practical Action to gain the following benefits:
- Enhance productivity with offline access to project information while travelling to remote offices and communities
- Increase adoption of SharePoint, improving its use as a primary workspace
- Improve IP retention, data centralization, and knowledge sharing
- Achieve fast ROI on the SharePoint and Contributor investment