Mint receives second Microsoft Winning Customer Award for Sappi solution

Mint, a local Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was recently presented with its second Winning Customer Award for Enterprise Search at the Microsoft Partner Summit held in August.

Only a month before, the company received the Regional Winning Customer Award in Enterprise Search for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.

The accolades have been awarded for Mint`s work at paper giant Sappi, where a global collaboration and enterprise search solution was built.

"It is an acknowledgment of the work Mint does in helping entrench the Microsoft platform at customers," says Grant Hodgkinson, business development director at Mint. "It is recognition of our leadership in the enterprise search arena, and it highlights that we understand what is required to deliver such a solution from both a business and technical perspective."

Sappi has been working with Mint since the release of Microsoft Office 2003 to help improve staff productivity through the implementation of an SPS (SharePoint Portal Server) and CMS (Content Management Server) based solution that allows collaboration and information sharing between users from the company`s mills and regions.

The challenge facing Sappi was global search across several locations, all storing document and Web-based content. A centralised index was not possible due to the manner in which content was stored and made available to users.

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"When a Sappi user now wants to execute a global search, the request is farmed out across many portals and aggregated to provide complete results," Hodgkinson explains. "As security was also a major consideration, the solution was designed to ensure, on a global level, that users are never shown information they do not have permission to see."

Mint helped Sappi to put a rich data definition model in place to help describe information and improve the company`s ability to profile information correctly, and search for it afterwards.

"Mint is a close Microsoft ally in the enterprise search space and through its implementation at Sappi, believe that it has demonstrated the criteria of The Winning Customer Award. This award recognises Mint`s success in winning customers onto the Microsoft platform in a competitive situation," says Pfungwa Serima, MD of Microsoft South Africa.

Mint received both awards for expertly developing its enterprise search solution at Sappi, thereby exemplifying the benefit of working on the Microsoft platform rather than any other technology.