CASE STUDY
SharePoint 2013 Upgrade
Delivers Globally
Dispersed Sales and
Marketing Teams Quick,
Relevant Custom Search
Results
About the Client
The client is a U.S.-based global
investment firm with over 8,000
employees, $800 billion in assets
under management and offices in
over 30 countries around the world.
The Challenge
The client’s global sales and marketing groups had to
spend a significant amount of time searching for
information they needed. This included internal
proprietary information as well as externally available
data on investment products. Sales representatives
actively engaged with customers on the phone could
not quickly and easily access essential data to answer
questions and resolve issues. The content that the
sales team required was stored in several different
locations but the sales team needed a single,
consolidated view. There was also a requirement to vary the way in which the data should be
displayed based the needs of the different user groups within the organization.
Given the significant amount of content and data in the various repositories, the client wanted
to enable the sales and marketing teams to easily find what they need in order to share
information with their clients.
The Solution
Portal Solutions developed a custom search solution initially using Microsoft FAST Search and
recently upgraded to SharePoint 2013 Search to take advantage of the new features available in
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the latest release. The solution is designed to quickly return relevant results tailored to the
specific user.
The search solution crawls over 15 different content sources to allow all users to find
accurate, contextual information from across the organization. It integrates a large
number of business rules including adding an “expiration date” to information so only
the most recent and relevant information would show up at the top of general searches.
This dating of materials helped meet a SEC regulatory requirement that marketing material
presented to consumers must be up to date. User driven search results includes different
content based on the user, different prioritization, and refiners. The various content sources also
show different metadata in the search result so that a user can sort on the most relevant data.
For example, press releases will display the date and company name, and events will show the
date and location.
Another highly customized option was the need to search on specific content types and insert
contextual metadata into content types. For example, a user can find and insert “type of fund”
and add it to properties. Once implemented, users could not only search for documents but also
for groups of data within documents. Additionally, synonym management functionality was built
into the user interface so that users could add new synonyms to the solution to further improve
precision of search results.
Portal Solutions also implemented a social search function which enabled users to rate the
relevancy of the materials to their search. These ratings help to improve the relevancy of future
searches. This capability also included scoring data that lived outside of SharePoint. The system
also allowed users to adjust the relevancy by tagging data with keywords that were commonly
used in day-to-day work.
Project Benefits
The search solution implemented on SharePoint 2013 provides users with the ability to quickly
search and find relevant information in order to be more responsive to client requests, improve
the quality and accuracy of information, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
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