Founded in 1856, Newbury Building Society has grown considerably and now has assets of £675 million. The Society is committed to the values of a traditional building society, with a focus on providing its borrowers and savers with both a professional and personal service. To help maintain these excellent standards of service, the Society recently completed a review of its existing IT systems to identify potential opportunities for development.

One priority area for improvement was the corporate intranet, with staff in particular finding it difficult to quickly retrieve documents. Following their success in delivering a similar project at Coventry Building Society, PointBeyond were invited to lead a one day workshop looking at how Newbury’s challenges could potentially be met using Microsoft SharePoint. PointBeyond were thrilled to subsequently be engaged by Newbury to implement the new corporate intranet.

‘We were impressed by PointBeyond’s understanding of how Building Societies work,” said Rob Thomas, Assistant General Manager of Finance. “The one day workshop gave us a clear roadmap of how we could introduce SharePoint and use it as a platform for future upgrades.”

Newbury Building society had been working with a bespoke intranet package that, whilst originally appropriate, was now seen as inflexible, difficult to customise and only capable of providing basic search functionality. Together, these factors were making it increasingly difficult for staff to find information quickly.

PointBeyond therefore recommended a replacement intranet solution based on Microsoft SharePoint. The new intranet would be designed to maximise the use of out of the box functionality together with only light branding to allow Newbury to easily upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint at a later date.

PointBeyond recommended deploying SharePoint with Search Server Express 2007 to enhance the new intranet’s search capabilities. To further improve the accuracy of search results, PointBeyond worked with the Newbury staff to implement a standard document structure with appropriate headings and metadata, combined with keywords and ‘best bets’ search functionality.

The Newbury staff have quickly became confident at using the new intranet and have benefitted from the significant time saved in finding information and documents, further improving their ability to deliver excellent service to their members. The speed that search results are returned means that users are much more inclined to access information via the intranet whereas before they would call other staff.

“The staff buy-in to our new intranet has exceeded my best expectations”’ said Rob. “We are very impressed with the speed and accuracy of our search results. PointBeyond really helped our staff to access the right information, making finding answers for our customers a smooth and efficient process.”

PointBeyond partnered closely with Newbury’s IT department throughout the project to pass on the skills and knowledge they would need to manage the system going forward. Users also worked with our consultants to learn how to structure the site, edit and migrate documents.

By enabling the teams at Newbury to organise their data more efficiently whilst handing over maintainability of the sites to the process teams, the intranet has also become much easier to navigate.