MiX Telematics Group Intranet by bSOLVe gets thumbs-up

When the communications team at MiX Telematics reviewed their existing Intranet, they realised the site was under-utilised and was not as inclusive as was needed. There was also a need to bring the user base from across the MiX Telematics Group closer together, due to geographically dispersed offices across the globe.

After thorough investigation in partnership with bSOLVe, it was found that the structure and functionality of the site didn't align to current business needs and goals, resulting in few users finding the site useful or interesting.

Utilising its experience in SharePoint Enterprise Architecture planning based on its renowned SharePoint Enterprise Framework, bSOLVe assisted the MiX team with aligning the site structure and data locations with their identified business needs and architecture.

Through collaborative planning, the teams identified a strong requirement for social networking, due to the dynamic and tech-savvy culture within the company. To address this social networking requirement, strong focus was placed on utilising the MySites and User Profile capabilities of SharePoint 2010.

“MySites provides you with an easy-to-use base for personalised social activities. Once you've created your own brand by presenting a personalised profile of yourself, it lays the grounds for you to connect with likeminded colleagues, share information of interest, and highlight certain skills and projects relevant to your role. You can also share ideas and stay up to date with business activities via your network. MySites is a great tool for colleagues to interact with each other on a business level, using similar functionality to the well-known social media platforms,” says Simon Hepburn, Director at bSOLVe.

While planning MySites, bSOLVe worked alongside the MiX Telematics IT team to identify employee information which existed in Active Directory, while adding further information gathered from employees via their profile pages within MySites. The focus was placed on employee communication on all landing pages, as well as integration of information from user profiles to reflect an employee information-rich approach. Functionality like “MiX Newbies”, which automatically displays employees who have recently joined, birthday greetings and picture galleries scattered across the site, all contribute to create a socially-rich information platform.

In addition to the above, bSOLVe provided the solution architecture for the planning and deployment of the physical topology of the environment, the content deployment process, and the permissions implementation.

This all culminated in the launch of iMiX Net with a social nature, which was met with a thumbs-up by all MiX Telematics staff.

Leanne Jory, Communications Manager at MiX Telematics (International), had this to say about bSOLVe regarding the project: "bSOLVe has solid SharePoint expertise and it's been great working with their team. The result for MiX Telematics is a system that's customised to our organisation's current communication needs. iMiX Net represents a significant improvement to what we had before - a tool that's certainly helped bring our staff together from across nine offices."