Collaborative Intranet for a 2,000-Employee Bank

Our Client

Our Client is a 2,000-employee bank in the Gulf Cooperation Council. For over 20 years, the bank provides comprehensive financial services to individuals and corporate clients.

Bank Needed a Digital Space for Team Collaboration and Corporate Culture Building

Our Client wanted to create a corporate intranet to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and corporate news announcements. In the future, the intranet would possibly cover more functions, so the Client chose SharePoint as an easily extensible and customizable intranet platform. Trusting ScienceSoft’s 17 years in SharePoint development, the Client chose us as a partner for this project.

Agile Development of SharePoint Intranet

Within a week of the Client’s request, ScienceSoft put together a team of a project manager and two SharePoint developers to deliver the project.

The team began by completing a short discovery to turn the Client’s high-level expectations into detailed and structured requirements. The rest of the engagement was completed in short Agile iterations: every week, ScienceSoft prepared a demo for the planned functionality, polished it according to the Client’s feedback, and proceeded to develop the component. Every two weeks, the team shipped new intranet features. By the solution acceptance stage, the Client had already reviewed and approved all solution modules, which prevented any delays with the intranet launch.

We built three core intranet modules to meet the Client’s goals:

• A collaborative space to plan, discuss, and launch new banking products and programs. We designed a custom product creation form and set up collaboration workflows (e.g., notifications, comments, approvals), allowing users from different departments to work in a single workspace. There is a common dashboard that displays all products and their statuses, and users can apply various filters to find products with required characteristics or those awaiting their input or action.
• A space where the Client can publish corporate news, and employees can share their own milestones, both personal and professional.
• A calendar to announce corporate meetings and events and send event invitations to employees.

To follow the bank’s security policy and implement role-based access to data, we integrated the intranet with the Client’s Oracle database, which stored the hierarchy of employees and their permissions.

ScienceSoft’s team designed a branded home page from where users can navigate to different intranet sections and set up individual Quick Links for the most frequently accessed documents or knowledge items.

Handy Banking Intranet for Team Collaboration

The Client got a well-designed intranet to share company knowledge and encourage productive cross-departmental teamwork. The intranet provides intuitive navigation and time-saving information search capabilities. Employees can share their opinions regarding the company’s activities via likes/dislikes and comments, which fosters a transparent and inclusive corporate culture.

The Client appreciated the integration of SharePoint with its Oracle database as a time-saving solution to implement access control in the intranet.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, Oracle.