Ballard Chalmers delivers SharePoint solution for Talk Talk

The Talk Talk Group (comprising of The Carphone Warehouse and AOL Broadband) decided to implement a group-wide intranet based around Microsoft SharePoint. Ballard Chalmers were the company who made this happen.

Talk Talk, launched in February 2003, is the home phone and broadband company from The Carphone Warehouse, the third-largest broadband provider in the UK (with 2.7 million broadband customers signed up to Talk Talk and AOL Broadband, which it acquired in October 2006).

Following The Carphone Warehouse's acquisition, the group decided to implement a group-wide intranet based around the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Although Talk Talk had in-house SharePoint expertise, its internal capabilities were lacking in design capabilities and so approached Box of Blue with the brief to conceptualise a look and feel for the entire intranet. According to Mike Aston, Box of Blue's Managing Director, once the new portal designs had been presented to Talk Talk, the group recognised the benefits of rolling the new designs out across the entire SharePoint portal.

"One of our first projects was to generate the designs for Talk Talk's online staff magazine called 'Up to Speed'", explained Mike Aston. "The magazine had been a printed publication with staff news, stories and internal promotions and was distributed throughout the various offices. Talk Talk decided to move this publication online."

At the same time, Talk Talk was in the process of implementing its internal SharePoint portal and, recognising that it needed external expertise, particularly in the more advanced processes asked Box of Blue to identify a suitable partner. Box of Blue recommended Ballard Chalmers.

As with many organisations, Talk Talk had thousands of documents residing in various locations throughout the group. Many were already stored in disparate central databases but users accessing these documents had no way of knowing whether these documents were the most-up-to-date or whether they had been superseded by later versions residing on PCs to which they had no access. This lead to the same documents being recreated over and over again.

Collaboration was another issue that Talk Talk needed to address. With over 4,000 employees spread not only through the UK but also internationally, there was a clear need for employees to come together to collaborate on projects and exchange information on their own areas of interest.

Talk Talk's objective was to develop a complete intranet solution under SharePoint. Although the internal IT team had the necessary in-house expertise, the group realised that many of its employees would have little or no knowledge of, or experience in the use of SharePoint. With Box of Blue having completed the overall designs of the SharePoint pages, Ballard Chalmers created both master page templates and Content Layout templates in SharePoint to simplify the entire process of entering and uploading new information into the SharePoint intranet.

Working in close collaboration, Ballard Chalmers and Box of Blue integrated the new templates onto Talk Talk's servers. Once the system went live, Ballard Chalmers then held half day training sessions to bring Talk Talk staff up to speed on the new technologies, as well as providing the IT departments with extensive documentation on SharePoint implementation.

"The explicitly clear layout templates were customised based on the type of content that Talk Talk administrators wanted to enter," said Ballard Chalmers' CEO, Andrew Chalmers. "These templates greatly streamlined the processes as Talk Talk staff could simply select the layouts that they wanted. SharePoint would then present a template view with all the columns and titles in place ready for them input their live content. It was a very intuitive solution."

From the very first stages of the process, Talk Talk's objective had been to implement a group wide intranet solution that would improve internal collaboration, provide a centralised data and document management repository and allow corporate and divisional information to be easily and effectively communicated to relevant employees. All employees now have access to the Talk Talk intranet and Talk Talk is in the process of developing a more flexible and user-friendly document management and search solution which will go live in the next few months and which will extend SharePoint's capabilities even further into the group.

Although it has internal SharePoint expertise, Talk Talk still regards Ballard Chalmers as its SharePoint IT partner. And with its SharePoint intranet now live, Talk Talk continues to roll out new developments to improve group wide efficiencies and streamline processes.

If you would like to know more about our SharePoint services please contact Andrew Chalmers on andrew.chalmers@ballardchalmers.com or call 01342 410223.

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