Beneficial Bank Launches New Intranet

The first week in October, after several months of development, WWWC launched a SharePoint Intranet for Beneficial Bank.

Beneficial Bank is a full service bank that has been serving the Delaware Valley community since 1853. Headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, the company has 70 neighborhood branches and provides a modern work environment for over 1,000 employees.

Beneficial previously had an Intranet, but it was primarily made up of static HTML files. Every time Beneficial wanted to add or edit content it required the department managers to write tedious HTML code, which took a great deal of time. Consequently, the Intranet was not being kept up to date.

Another downside of Beneficial’s Intranet was that its look and feel had not kept pace with the bank’s branding so it looked out of synch with the public website and the bank’s marketing materials.

Beneficial Bank’s senior management decided to use Microsoft’s SharePoint server for the new Intranet. As SharePoint experts, we were chosen to customize the Intranet to meet the bank’s needs. Beneficial had learned about WWWC from management who had previously worked at Commerce Bank, whose entire Intranet, used by the bank’s thousands of employees on a daily basis, was developed by WWWC.

WWWC first set up the SharePoint portal server. Taking advantage of SharePoint’s built-in security, content management, and document management features, WWWC was able to establish sites specific to each department. This allowed department managers to maintain their own Intranet content without the need to know HTML or other programming technologies.

Beneficial’s new Intranet looks nothing like a traditional SharePoint website. With workflow, departments, and permissions in mind, WWWC started with a planning stage before the software was installed and followed the process all the way through configuration. By writing actual tutorial documents with screen captures, WWWC showed Beneficial Bank how it could configure departments by using the software. WWWC also set up a branded interface, which required the bypassing of the pre-made templates offered by SharePoint.

Some of the benefits Beneficial is now realizing with its new Intranet include:

• Customized and optimized employee-centric software for the company’s needs
• Improved standard template layouts and user-friendly, branded interface
• Accessible tutorial documents on configuration for bank employees for easy updating
• Improved and streamlined department collaboration for increased productivity

Tags: beneficial, business, computer, design, development, entrepreneur, hosting, internet, intranet, marketing, media, networking, online, owner, Sales, social, software, technology, web, website

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Client Corner, Sales, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.