100+
Hours of development
time saved
400
hours quicker to
overhaul intranet
How DSOA saved
10 weeks and $10k+ designing their Intranet
ShortPoint reduced the time it took to rebuild our intranet from 3 months to just 2 weeks.
It really is a must-have for every company that uses SharePoint.
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Rami Abdulkarim
Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX
content
customer
Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority is a leading technology park in the Emirate of Dubai. It mixes residential, recreational and commercial spaces, allowing its community to live and work side by side.
Challenges
Creating an engaging intranet site, but frustrated by the complexity of SharePoint
Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA) needed an easy-to-navigate and interactive intranet to keep their staff informed and efficient and the business productive and competitive. But their existing site was missing the mark. The inaugural portal had been built with out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities.
But DSOA, at that time, had lacked the in-house knowhow to do the complex custom coding that’s required in SharePoint to create functional and engaging sites.
We wanted it to enable a self-service approach to finding answers to employee questions, but it wasn’t functioning properly and usage was very low.
- Rami
So what should have been a central hub packed with content to help staff carry out their daily tasks had turned out to be functional, but unengaging. Of the 350+ people working in the business, just a handful were opening up the intranet each day.
The impact was being felt across multiple departments. Employees were wasting critical hours searching for forms, information and documents. When they couldn’t find them, they were peppering the HR department and other business functions with calls and emails 24/7 looking for the answers.
Workflow and productivity were being hit.
“Our existing intranet environment just wasn’t usable,” explains Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX, Rami Abdulkarim.
Maintaining the site was expensive and complex, too, with high-cost developer hours required to adjust even the smallest component. Something had to change. And Rami an experienced SharePoint developer—was given the task of radically overhauling the portal. His goal? To create a site that was functional, attractively branded, and employees would love to use.
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But there was a problem. Because SharePoint required a lot of custom coding, implementing the new portal was going to eat up most of Rami’s time, for several months. Every tiny update to branding. Every change of content. Every optimization and added feature would mean digging into code, editing it and then facing a frustrating wait to see if that update was successful.
Every month in development meant more hours wasted by employees using an inefficient intranet, where finding the right information was a challenging task. All that changed when Rami heard about the powerful SharePoint plug-in, ShortPoint.
In fact, it’s so complex and time consuming that I predicted it would take myself and another outsourced developer up to three months to get the work done.
- Rami
I needed to make significant changes to both the design and user experience of our intranet, and make it beautiful and engaging. And that was going to be a nightmare in SharePoint.
Rami Abdulkarim
Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX
Solution
Rocket-fueled rebrand with zero coding or complications
When Rami looked into ShortPoint, it seemed to have all the answers. The add-on massively extended SharePoint’s normal features and enabled him to redesign, rebrand and rebuild the site with zero coding required.
Onboarding was fast. ShortPoint’s business support team gave Rami a personalized one-hour training session. And because the software is so intuitive, Rami was ready to go.
He also felt reassured that if he had any questions, at any point in the process, ShortPoint’s responsive support team was always on the end of the phone or email.
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Onboarding was fast. ShortPoint’s business support team gave Rami a personalized one-hour training session. And because the software is so intuitive, Rami was ready to go. He also felt reassured that if he had any questions, at any point in the process, ShortPoint’s responsive support team was always on the end of the phone or email. With all the skills and tools to do the overhaul in super-quick time, Rami got started:
Used Tools
ShortPoint has led to a more streamlined process, refined our workflow, and enabled us to bring more money in.
-Milton
First, he used the system’s Theme Builder to quickly apply an overarching design that matched DSOA’s branding. Rami suddenly had a site that felt more familiar, engaging and on-brand.
Next, he restructured the site’s navigation and used ShortPoint’s
Page Builder to build out new pages in a fraction of the time it took to create them in code-heavy SharePoint. With a library of 50+ design elements that you just drag and drop, the process of creating eye-catching, custom pages was fast and frictionless.
Rami used ShortPoint’s Connect capability to create a beautiful project dashboard that connects multiple data sources to show up to-date summaries of all key projects. This has become a valuable, go-to resource for the company’s managers and employees, who can see what’s happening on everything from construction projects to wi-fi upgrades without making phone calls or playing email tennis. They can even drill down into the details of every project, see who key actions are assigned to, and learn where any delays are and why.
In a matter of days, he’d rebuilt everything from the ground up, including:
Changed the design of the homepage and split links in a logical, color-coded way to make it easy for users to navigate seamlessly and find the right content in a flash.
Created a featured links section that provides instant access to every system, document, app, form and project that employees need.
Streamlined all relevant social feeds into a single destination. So staff no longer need to jump in and out of different social apps to keep up with the latest news they can see everything from one window on the homepage.
Created a variety of new portals for different departments and teams to display photos from events, host up-to-date news, and connect relevant documents.
So within just two weeks, Rami had overhauled their previously under-utilized intranet—and turned it into an interactive, visual and user-friendly work of art. Handling stakeholder feedback on the new design was equally fast and stress free. Where previously, implementing changes to components in SharePoint would have meant lots of frustrating coding and delays, ShortPoint made it code-free and completed in a few clicks.
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In just two weeks, I’d done everything on the project alone, and all thanks to ShortPoint. It made the project so easy to handle and I could do it without disrupting what really matters—business continuity and workflow.
Rami Abdulkarim
Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX
Results
$10k of developer time saved and 1,000 daily visits
By using ShortPoint, Rami stripped astonishing time and cost savings from his business.
A project that would have typically taken up to three months using SharePoint alone took just two weeks with no-nonsense, no-coding plug-in ShortPoint.
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“That’s a staggering 10 weeks—or 400 hours—of valuable developer timethat DSO saved by investing in ShortPoint,” said Rami.
Every one of those hours gave Rami valuable extra time back for other priorities, including improving key technologies and systems in the business like mobile apps, customer website and chatbot. Those time savings also added up to major cost savings.
Not surprisingly, Rami’s management were as thrilled as they were astonished with the project’s lightning turnaround and five-figure cost savings.
With average developer hours typically charged at 25$+ an hour, DSO saved at least $10,000 on the project.
ShortPoint reduces the cost, time andeffort for developers and is a must-have for every company that has SharePoint.
Rami Abdulkarim
Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX
“When I told our management that I’d already finished the project, theywere stunned,” said Rami. “The expectation was this project would takemonths—and be expensive. “They were just astonished that a small investment in ShortPoint had been so beneficial to the business.”
Even more crucially, user adoption has soared. Where as few as 20 people a day used to use the old site, 350 employees use the new one, recording a phenomenal 1,000 visits daily.
ShortPoint continues to make life easier for Rami. Where ongoing content updates or design changes used to feel like a huge task and took a day to open code, edit and deploy, with ShortPoint each change takes only 10 minutes. Rami recommends ShortPoint to any business using SharePoint, whatever their industry or size.
He added: “You really don’t need to spend big budgets to build your new intranet—just use ShortPoint. And with all the new integrations with Microsoft Teams and the ongoing list on the roadmap, this would be the go to solution without a doubt.”
It reduced the time it took to rebuild our intranet from 3 months to just 2 weeks. The support is great, the team is responsive, and the cost and ROI are just fantastic.
- Rami
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