Electrum Case Study: IICORR

Key Benefits: Brand awareness Builds iicorr’s reputation as an industry expert Documents are targeted and discoverable. Layered access control – valued clients can be given access to more documents, and some documents can be public publishes as a “teaser”. Extra income stream, and automates administration Sharing internal knowledge, and improving internal communications and process Key Features: Customer extranet with strong brand and visual design Knowledge bank document library Full text search of documents. Document categories, tags, and audiences for navigation. Site membership & subscriptions Document purchase and access control Internal document management & workflow

Company Profile

iicorr are a knowledge based company, providing consultancy services to the oil and gas industry. As industry experts in corrosion, erosion, and materials degradation, they help their clients maintain the safety and integrity of pipelines and offshore assets.

The iicorr team comprises of over 100 people worldwide, with offices in the UK, Malaysia, Austrailia, USA, Azerbaijan, and the Netherlands.

Project Brief

iicorr wanted to launch a new knowledge portal website, which would cement their reputation as a leader in oil & gas asset integrity. They already had a large collection of technical documents, research whitepapers and cases studies, which they wanted to open up to their existing customers and use to attract new customers.

They also wanted to make their team of consultants more accessible to clients, providing CVs and details of past projects, but also providing a way for customers to pose questions to the experts and commission consultancy.

Finally, with a team distributed around the globe, they wanted to use a similar system internally to improve document management and workflow.

Our Solution

Electrum implemented a solution based on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform, delivering two systems:

• A public website https://www.centreofexcellence.com/ with a highly customised visual design
• An internal intranet for document management and an approval workflow to publish documents on the public site as PDFs

The Microsoft SharePoint platform was an excellent match for iicorr’s requirements. Its document management, full text search, workflow, and access control features meant that many of the requirements could be met out of the box, keeping costs low.

Two key customisations were made to the standard platform. The visual design of the site was heavily customised as befits a public website, and the site was integrated with PayPal to take credit card payments for access to some documents.

The internal site started as a standard SharePoint Team Site. We added a custom document workflow which automated iicorr’s existing document approval process. Once an expert has created a document it is sent for review to an editor before being made generally available.

Users can also use this workflow to publish documents to the public site – during this proces we automatically convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF format.