“The solution provides us with a powerful integration capability and platform that easily exposes productive information to our knowledge workers that was previously locked away in our legacy systems.”
Amanda Phillips, Project Manager, Broadcast Australia
For more than 70 years, Broadcast Australia and previous owners of the transmission infrastructure have been dedicated to extending the reach of radio and television airwaves throughout the country. Today, the company has some 600 transmission facilities and brings radio and TV programming into more than 99 percent of the nation’s households. To enhance operational efficiency, the company needed a better document sharing and collaboration environment for hosting the 100 gigabytes of technical and administrative documents required for operations. Broadcast Australia is deploying Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 running on Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 Enterprise Edition. With the deployment still in the pilot phase, the company already is enjoying the benefits of having a single source of information, collaboration support, scalability, security, and ease of deployment.
The Situation
Broadcast Australia is the country's leading broadcast service provider, owning and operating the most extensive land-based broadcasting network in Australia, which covers more than 4.5 million square miles. The company, which has 130 employees in three main offices, provides transmission services for radio and television (analog and digital) broadcasters and offers facility sharing and infrastructure services.
The company's network includes some 600 strategic transmission facilities across metropolitan and rural Australia. The facilities are used to transmit the publicly owned television and radio broadcasts of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), as well as commercial programs, to over 99 percent of the nation's households. Broadcast Australia has more than 70 years of broadcast transmission experience and is dedicated to harnessing the full benefits of communications technology to provide its customers with world-class broadcasting solutions, now and into the future.
At the heart of the company's infrastructure is a sophisticated, round-the-clock network operations center that allows it to provide customers with exceptional performance and real-time service monitoring. The company requires a substantial library of technical, administrative, operational, and reference documents totaling more than 100 gigabytes (GB) to support its operations.
Providing document access is so important to the organisation that Broadcast Australia was an early adopter of Microsoft® SharePoint® Portal Server 2001 running on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system. Broadcast Australia was impressed with SharePoint Portal Server but found that the company needed a solution that would scale better to handle its vast collection of documents. The company also wanted a more complete solution for integrating disparate data sources, including several third-party software programs such as SAP for finance and administration, and Remedy for technical fault issues.
The company found the early version of SharePoint Portal Server was labor intensive in its collaborative authoring processes. The authoring experience could not be tailored to align with the user's work functions and engineering processes. It was difficult to work with large engineering files such as AutoCAD, mapping data, commissioning reports, and images in SharePoint Portal Server 2001. For example, users in the Canberra office found that the time it took to open these files was prohibitive to their workflow, and this was eroding their commitment to embracing a collaborative environment. Too often, engineers had to spend time shifting between multiple systems to retrieve valuable and frequently used information.
Broadcast Australia also believed that its existing solution lacked the ease of use and security required to allow important external partners to access and share product knowledge through extranet capabilities.
The Solution
Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner livePoint, Broadcast Australia is upgrading to the Web-based collaboration solution provided by Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 running on the Enterprise Edition of the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software. Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 is used for the data store, and Microsoft Web Parts are used for integrating third-party programs, such as SAP and Remedy, to provide seamless access from SharePoint Portal Server. Desktop computers are being upgraded to Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 from Microsoft Office XP Professional.
livePoint, a professional software development company that specialises in delivering software development services using Microsoft technologies, is assisting Broadcast Australia in deploying a broad pilot project, to be followed by rolling out access to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to all the company’s locations. The Active Directory® directory service in Windows Server 2003 is providing the granular role-based security that the company needs for extending extranet access to partners.
Benefits
Broadcast Australia is enjoying multiple benefits from upgrading to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 running on Windows Server 2003, including a single source of information, collaboration support, scalability, security, and ease of deployment.
Single, United Source of Information
Broadcast Australia’s deployment of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 gives the organisation a single, integrated site for accessing documents from a spectrum of sources, including third-party applications and a multitude of legacy systems. Accessible across the Web from any Broadcast Australia facility, SharePoint Portal Server helps the company use its existing information more effectively, create new documents more easily, and deliver relevant content to employees and partners.
The company uses SharePoint Portal Server to present information in an intuitive intranet hierarchy based on Broadcast Australia’s 600 transmission facilities. Previously, document management and collaboration were difficult, because document storage was spread across multiple authoring environments and segregated by disciplines and departments. The result was that it was extremely difficult to search for data and for physically separated teams to collaborate efficiently.
“The solution provides us with a powerful integration capability and platform that easily exposes productive information to our knowledge workers that was previously locked away in our legacy systems,” says Amanda Phillips, Project Manager at Broadcast Australia.
Collaboration Support
Collaboration is extremely important to Broadcast Australia operations, because each year the company is responsible for authoring thousands of engineering documents for its 600 transmission facilities. Documentation frequently involves multidisciplinary teams—including application engineers, planning engineers, estate management employees, and project delivery staff—working on a project, often from separate facilities.
“SharePoint Portal Server 2003 helps team members collaborate more effectively on the creation of documents, because our engineers, project managers, finance, and property people now have certainty that they are all working with the correct version,” says Peter Freer, Property and Environment Manager at Broadcast Australia. “This is because there is now just one place to author, find, and collaborate on transmission site documents. Having multiple documents in different storages regarding the same facility in the past was very confusing.”
The company uses SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to give each department its own custom view of the document storage site, making it easier to locate and work with the most commonly used data and helping employees complete their work more efficiently. SharePoint Portal Server also has freed users from the lengthy document check-out and check-in procedures previously required.
Scalability and Security
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is meeting the demanding requirements of Broadcast Australia by scaling to meet increasing demand and providing reliable, secure portal services. The collaboration and information-sharing portal uses a distributed server architecture based on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000. SharePoint Portal Server uses Windows Server 2003 security features and Active Directory to protect documents and information from accidental or malicious harm.
“This solution addressed concerns we had about the earlier version’s scalability and performance.” says Thomas Roch, IT Manager at Broadcast Australia. “With SharePoint Portal Server 2003, we have the scalability to grow and the security we require to extend access to our partners.”
Ease of Deployment
The solution has proven easy to deploy. “Broadcast Australia is a document-rich organisation full of knowledge workers,” says Sergio Otoya, Professional Services Manager at livePoint. “We faced the challenge of simultaneously migrating 100 gigabytes of Broadcast Australia documents, while completely changing the corporate file-naming taxonomy, and integrating corporate legacy systems for the whole organisation. Though a seemingly daunting task, we were able to accomplish the tasks quickly, thanks to the robustness of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and the integrating power of Microsoft Web Parts.”