Axceler ControlPoint Success Story
Steelcase Inc.
The Business Challenge
For nearly 100 years, Steelcase Inc. has provided innovative products and services that define where and how people work. With a portfolio of solutions that address the core elements of an office environment – interior architecture, furniture, and technology – Steelcase has approximately 13,000 employees worldwide. Just as Steelcase streamlines the modern workplace, they decided to streamline the way information is shared and collaboration takes place for their knowledge workers. To this end, they introduced SharePoint. They have set up MySites for some 4,600 knowledge workers, eliminating use of personal drives for any files that should be shared.
As part of Steelcase's Global Platform Services group, John Finch is the architect and technical lead for SharePoint and a member of the 5 person implementation team. Finch also provides Tier Three support.
With 4,600 MySites, containing over 3 million documents, Finch and his team faced the challenge of supporting a system that is essential to the day to day work of so many of his company's employees. To help them with their administrative tasks – and to ensure that they can provide proactive, and not just reactive, support for their SharePoint users - Steelcase chose Axceler's ControlPoint.
The Axceler Solution
ControlPoint gives SharePoint administrators and support personnel the ability to explore, protect, analyze and control their SharePoint environments, providing better control through comprehensive permissions management, in-depth activity and storage analysis, SharePoint content management, governance policy enforcement, and proactive management with alerts and notifications.
"We looked at Axceler and one other solution provider," Finch said. "And a number of things about Axceler stood out. For one thing, we liked that ControlPoint is its own web application, and that we wouldn't have to muck around with any configurations. We also liked that we could use ControlPoint to delegate permissions to site administrators."
"Equally important for us was Axceler's history," he continued. "Obviously, they haven't been in the software business for as long as we've been in the office furniture business, but we liked their more seasoned résumé as a company and the greater experience they have as a software provider than that of the other company we considered."
Moving Forward –
Taking Advantage of ControlPoint
Steelcase has big plans for SharePoint, and ControlPoint factors into those plans. While to date they have only a handful of publishing sites that are available to everybody, and several personal collaboration sites that are being set up, these initiatives will be expanded over time. The company's website – steelase.com -will be on SharePoint, as well. "Down the road," says Finch, "We will be using ControlPoint extensively," Finch said, "Making it more accessible to our helpdesk. We also intend to make reporting more widely available, and like the fact that we will be able to do so without extending full farm administrative privileges to those who just want to run some reports."
Results
"We're still in the early stages with both SharePoint and ControlPoint," Finch said. "Because ControlPoint uses its own SQL database, we're able to run reports based on history, without having to impact overall SharePoint performance while the reports are being run." These reports are used to help proactively manage SharePoint, helping Finch and his team anticipate problem areas before they become issues that could impact employee productivity. Reports are also used by the business side of Steelcase. In one instance, Finch was able to quickly and easily generate a key, HIPAA-related report for the Steelcase finance team.
"As someone who provides support as part of my work, I want to mention that Axceler has a great technical support group," Finch said. "They're very responsive and very quick to get back to me when I have an issue. ControlPoint has great potential for us, and so far Axceler has lived up to our initial impression that they are an excellent software vendor to do business with."