Portals and Collaboration

Portal applications allow you to consolidate business processes and information into a single place to allow people to collabarate and communicate using information relevant to the processes / roles they are currently operating in.

KnowHow can help you implement your portal and collaboration applications by providing advice, design and implementation to achieve your goals.

Solution Benefits

Using a single desktop interface to view, access and interact with multiple line-of-business applications, the portal user can then collaboratively and securely share information with team members, customers and external partners. As information is shared electronically, the information collaboration system enables team members to be physically dispersed or even within different countries and time zones – the result is the same - accelerated time to project completion, higher productivity and lower project costs. The production and completion of the following documents can all be successfully undertaken using the advantages that a collaborative approach brings: contracts, bids, designs, drawings, projects, proposals, etc.

Experience and Capability

KnowHow Consulting has implemented a number of collaboration projects, including systems for D Young & Co and Wragge & Co.

Examples of our work

• D Young & Co - Client Collaboration System 

  All professional practice firms are striving to establish a competitive edge over other firms. Providing a superior service through increased online services and convenience is a key component of their strategy. Such a move can be relied upon by customers and the firm can even begin to be viewed as an extended part of their customer's organisation.

  For D Young & Co, a firm of Patent Attorneys in Southampton, KnowHow has implemented a highly secure Collaboration system, where they and their clients can access the same collaboration site to share and exchange documents. An integration with their Document Management system was also provided, where attorneys can mark both documents and case folders for sharing, where those documents and folders are replicated to the Collaboration site.

Intranets

A private communications network within an organisation that provides information to employees and helps them to carry out their daily activities. 

Using the Intranet, employees can find and access information held within the enterprise to assist them to undertake tasks much more effectively and productively. We establish an internal web technologies network within our Client's organisation, single or multi-site linked and connected to line-of-business and office applications. Remote employees and external partners can be given limited, controlled access rights to connect to the Intranet and business applications through a secure , browser based platform. 

Collaborative Workspaces

Structured areas created on the Intranet to provide spaces for users to share knowledge. In practice, information sharing can be between individuals or groups, business and social, and can extend to remote access users.  Typical uses of workspaces are, for example, for sharing information when organising company events, for exchanging information threads when resolving technical issues in design and development work, and for exchange of information between business driven project contributors. Use of workspaces is considered to be a valuable tool for driving efficiency when undertaking multi-contributor project work.

An Integrated View of Business Applications

We can costruct an intelligent presentation layer to provide integrated and customisable views from multiple applications and information sources. By pulling information together in this way from a raft of business applications such as CRM, Practice Management, Service Management systems, document stores and financial applications, muti-source information can be controlled at the Desktop for higher productivity and better user experience.

Dashboards and SharePoint

Rapid access to information resources across Intranets and collaborative workspaces between groups means that multi-contributor projects can, using this technology, be more easily undertaken to deliver output more productively, in shorter timescales.  However, in order to schedule work effectively, the progress achieved by each contributor at each project phase needs to be both well controlled and easily understood.

To achieve this, we can provide custom "dashboards" to view key metrics displaying information in a graphical, easily understood and rapidly assimilated form, to  enable managers to understand key milestones, stages, progress and results achieved within a business process, project, or set of objectives.  

How can we help?

For further information on how you can improve your competitive edge by collaborating more effectively with your customers and partners, please contact us by phone or email using the contact details at the top of this page, or click here.