Case Studies

JAS was seeking to create a unified brand experience and set of common capabilities for their employees, current clients, and prospects. With a geographically diverse set of offices around the globe and a recently formed unified corporate entity in the U.S., JAS wanted to implement a series of communications and collaboration tools on a common platform to empower the company to better communicate internally, with clients and to new prospects. Historically, this was done in a fragmented manner at the country office level. Also, the marketing and business units were overly reliant on the IT department to make any updates or enhancements which impacted their ability to be nimble and responsive to employees, prospects and clients.

Northridge initially engaged with JAS to develop a proof-of-concept to allow the JAS executive team to visualize and understand how a JAS public website, client portal, and intranet could be combined on a common platform to create a unified brand experience and capability set. Following this stage of the project, Northridge recommended Microsoft SharePoint Server as the common platform for all three solutions. The content management and collaboration tools inherent in SharePoint allow the appropriate staff to manage various websites and relationships. Other key elements of the overall JAS solution include the ability to manage Adobe Flash content on the JAS public site through SharePoint, providing an enhanced end-user experience while providing administrative flexibility. For the client portal, Northridge deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) in conjunction with SharePoint to allow clients to instantly collaborate and communicate with their team as well as with key contacts within JAS.

The JAS rollout of the public website, client portal, and intranet were met with immediate success. By providing a centralized platform to manage the various internal and external relationships, JAS can more effectively communicate and collaborate across the organization eliminating redundancies while providing more timely information and services to their clients.  In numerous instances, what used to take days or even weeks now takes hours.