SharePoint Intranet Portal Development For A Full-Service Commercial Banking Institution [Case Study]

With changing times, even the banking & financial services sector are adopting next-gen tech solutions like intranet portals. However, considering the rigid nature of the industry, the credit unions & financial institutions are often compelled to practice age-old colossal software solutions with limited scope for upgrades. This results in banks going away from progressive ways of working while sharing & accessing data, documents & other crucial information. Therefore, to address this challenge, the need for a messaging and collaboration environment becomes a dire necessity. It helps increase efficiency by eliminating tactical tasks & enhance focus on business innovation by using data to drive business agility.

Learn how Hash Bang Team assisted a Middle East-based full-service commercial banking organization to revamp its SharePoint-based intranet portal by building a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution. This enabled the financial institution to drive agility and workload consolidation from IT. Further, it optimized business processes & improve communication across levels.

Project Overview

As the pivotal financial institution from Saudi Arabia, the client wanted to upgrade its SharePoint 2013 intranet portal in terms of design and functionality. Their existing solution was used for internal collaboration and data-sharing. And, it was in use by both internal employees and associated network bank users. It enabled the end-users to collaborate, share feedback, participate in surveys & discussion forums, access news & announcements, schedule calendar events, and share confidential data over a secure and compliant environment. From a business standpoint, the client wanted to increase efficiency and optimize operations by eliminating tactical tasks & focus on business innovation by using data to drive business agility.

Challenges

• Disparate data sources that are difficult to access, organize, manage & share in different locations
• Ensuring rapid scalability and high availability of the SharePoint server at all times to meet dynamic business needs and fast-paced collaboration
• Ineffective search of files and documents in the absence of search and retrieval functionality that is much needed nowadays

Solution

Being a Microsoft Gold certified partner and having vast experience in SharePoint online intranet solution development, Hash Bang helped build an HCI solution for Intranet Portal to improve performance, better the capability of managing demanding workloads & increase availability. Our team thoroughly investigated the customer’s infrastructure, installed and implemented a SharePoint server environment.

Here are the core elements we helped with;

Sharepoint Implementation:

We focused on restructuring the portal and choosing the most appropriate SharePoint version upgrade to SharePoint 2019 (from 2016) with the required code redesign.

Listed are collaboration features we introduced;

• Single Sign-on Enabled User Permission: Securely authenticate & access the functionalities of the Intranet portal using just one set of credentials. Admin users have individual menu permissions to site contents while standard users can only access the portal.

• Secure Hub: Replaced the client’s legacy FTP capabilities with SharePoint’s secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) to provide a higher level of data protection while:
  • Uploading and downloading files
  • Role-based file-sharing files within the teams
  • Document classification
• Intuitive Search: SharePoint’s search engine enabled quick and effective content search based on keywords & tags across the intranet and for other corporate resources.

Infrastructure Design & Implementation:

• Architecture Re-design: Helped redefine the global navigational structure, hub structure & organization to improve the search experience.
• Backup & Recovery: Integration between existing storage server infrastructure and Veeam Backup & Replication allowed non-disruptive backup of VMs to external, disk-based systems via snapshots, shortening backup run times.
• Load Balancing: To ensure high availability, Citrix Netscaler VPX load balance service was deployed to balance the load between the Front-end VMs and the Intranet Portal.

Intuitive Design

Keeping in mind user adoption and enhancing the experience we created an out-of-box design based on the bank’s branding guidelines for the portal that is highly intuitive, interactive and beyond SharePoint’s conventional design schema.

Benefits

• 63% optimization of business processes
• 40% reduction in errors with improved internal communication
• 50% faster TAT for collaborative document management & sharing

Customer Profile

A Saudi Arabia-based full-service commercial banking organization.

Technologies

NET, MySQL, SharePoint Server 2019, SharePoint Online