Australian Consulting and Technology firm Oakton has deployed its own social enterprise platform using a custom SharePoint 2010 intranet.

Oakton is a listed Australian stock exchange company with over 1100 staff at offices located in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane as well as a dedicated, unique development and support centre in Hyderabad, India.

As an established Microsoft partner and user of SharePoint since 2003, Oakton has been a long time user of SharePoint since its early versions and has recently implemented a new generation of an enterprise social collaboration platform on SharePoint 2010 named ‘Ozone’.

Principal SharePoint consultant Rita Arrigo said “Ozone” is allowing staff in different teams to be constantly connected and communicating across functional and location boundaries to solve the more complex problems.
“It’s a whole new way of working and drives great engagement, participation and social interaction.”

There are many ways to collaborate online, but Arrigo believes the important aspect of Ozone is that provides an opportunity for staff to work together without formal structural business process’s pre-determining how the work should take place.

Ozone replaced a previous portal, which was useful for documents and finding information, but did not provide networking and collaborative features or search.

Ozone provides typical social network functions a la Facebook and LinkedIn, with Activity feeds that can include attached links and images. It also allows staff to reply and interact. Activity feeds are placed directly on the Ozone homepage. Collaboration is extended beyond the standard SharePoint 2010 capabilities, with features such as micro blogging and following and tagging content.

Also users have the ability to get a personalised view of activity feeds, tag clouds and blogs. There is a self-service capability for creating collaborative sites that integrate with Oakton’s CRM.

Ozone uses a custom SQL Server database in the back end which stores all the feed information such as blog posts from Oakton staff. Having its own database of posts also allows for data mining.

“We had a limited ability to hold online discussions and share issues and work together in between teams. We also had a desire to use social computing and wanted a Web 2.0 feel like Facebook and LinkedIn so we didn’t have to learn something new,” said Arrigo.

The experience also needed to be integrated so that it was easy and nature rather than having to use a different tool.

“Knowledge management was a big part of it. One of the issues was it was difficult to find content and particularly to solve customer problems.”

All of Oakton staff are now able to author content and create blogs. Staff can also connect with peers in different geographic locations to form virtual communities. For example our SharePoint community expands across Canberra, Sydney, Victoria, Brisbane and Hyderabad, allowing the many different fields of expertise to be connected to deliver innovation faster to our clients.”