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BarcelonaSpain 5-8 May 2014


AWARD WINNERS 2014

Winning SharePoint Solutions from GRADIENT, |create|it|, PDF Share Forms, KanBo

and ClearPeople - The Crown Estate

We would like to extend a huge congratulations to each of the crowned winners of the European SharePoint Community Awards 2014 announced during the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona!

Thanks to everyone who took part in the awards, to all those who submitted entries, the runners up in each category and especially to the European SharePoint community for casting their votes and selecting the winners. This eBook brings together the winning solutions in the following categories.

Best Mobile Solution 2014

This award was presented to the company in Europe that describes how their mobile solution is an industry leader in facilitating the use of SharePoint on mobile devices to make it easier to work while on the go! Find out what made this solution stand head and shoulders above the rest?

Runners Up: AvePoint, harmon.ie, Raona & K2

Best Search Solution 2014

Search technology is at the heart of SharePoint, from every release to the new 2013 release. The winner of this award delivered a solution which is the best in Europe and as such enhances the search experience providing users with the content and the people they need quickly and effectively.

Runners Up: GSoft & Adidas

Best SharePoint App 2014

One of the most exciting features of SharePoint 2013 is the App model.

Find out what makes this stand alone application the Best SharePoint App in Europe.

Runners Up: BPA Solutions, Dell Software, ELEARNINGFORCE, OneBit Software & K2

Best Social Strategy 2014

This award looks at our industry, in Europe and asks where are all the great social ideas and forward leaps coming from? This award showed how companies deployed SharePoint social to deliver real innovative and practical benefits.

Runner Up: Peaches Industries

Most Innovative Cloud Solution 2014

- The Crown EstateThis award was presented to the company that describes the effort and hard work poured into delivering not just good, but great cloud solutions on SharePoint. This award was open to those who have deployed on either a private cloud or a public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Office 365) or perhaps some combination of both.

Runners Up: Volvo Car Group Intranet, create|it & KanBo

2014 Awards Overview

BEST MOBILE SOLUTION 2014


http://www.gradientecm.com

http://www.gscanonline.com

BEST SEARCH SOLUTION 2014


Best SharePoint Search Solution: CIMAC Multi-Portal Platform 1

BEST SHAREPOINT SEARCH SOLUTION

CIMAC Multi-Portal Platform

summary The Intermunicipal Community of Central Alentejo (Comunidade Intermunicipal do Alentejo Central, CIMAC

– www.cimac.pt – in Portuguese) is an organization comprised of councils in the Central Alentejo region, in

Portugal. It aims to promote the planning and management of economic, social and environmental

development of the covered territory, joint municipal investments of intermunicipal interest, the

participation in regional development programs (particularly under the National Strategic Reference – NSRF),

and planning of public authorities’ actions of supra municipality nature.

Focused on technology infrastructure optimization, CIMAC’s vision and strategy resulted in rebuilding all of

its 14 associated city council web portals, 2 aggregation web portals and a tourism and natural resources-

focused web portal on a single platform. This approach brings together citizens and city councils, allowing

them to share information among them, in an easy and natural way.

The Multi-Portal Platform supports multiple independent portals, built on SharePoint Server 2013, where

each portal has its own domain, look & feel, and providing a common set of functional components that are

used across portals.

Besides developing a cross platform for multiple web portals, one of the most important goals was to

provide content management users a simple, user-friendly and easy way to share, filter or search content

between 17 portals.

The solution was built using SharePoint 2013 Search features and taking advantage of its powerful crawl

component together with Cross Site Publishing, Managed Metadata, Content Search Web Parts and Display

Templates, all working together to create a great user experience unified by the powerful search features of

SharePoint 2013.

about |create|it| Founded in 2001, |create|it| is a company that strives for excellence in every project executed. In 2011 and

2013, it earned the PME Excelência status, awarded to the SMEs with the best financial results in the

country.

A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with a clear focus on Microsoft technologies, specifically SharePoint,

BizTalk and Windows Azure, it was the first partner in Portugal to attain the Gold level in the Content

Management and Application Integration competencies. It was awarded Microsoft Portugal’s Portals &

Collaboration Partner of the Year 2011 award for the Corporate Segment and in 2013 it was considered the

Solutions Partner of the Year in Portugal. It was also the first Portuguese member of the SharePoint

Interoperability Solution Architecture (SISA) Standards Group. In 2012, |create|it| won the European

http://www.cimac.pt/


SharePoint Community Award for Best SharePoint Public Website and in 2013, won the European SharePoint

Community Award for Best SharePoint Search Solution.

All the members of the team are either Microsoft Certified Professionals, Certified Project Managers by the

International Project Manager Association (IPMA) and Certified Scrum Masters by the Scrum Alliance. João

Pedro Martins, the company’s CTO, is the founder of the Portuguese Software Architecture Group (GASP),

the chairman of the board of the Portuguese Usability Professionals Association, and was a Microsoft MVP

for BizTalk Server from 2006 to 2011. Most of the team has a blog at http://blogit.create.pt.

For more information about the company and other projects, visit http://www.create.pt.

about CIMAC The Intermunicipal Community of Central Alentejo (Comunidade Intermunicipal do Alentejo Central, CIMAC

– www.cimac.pt – in Portuguese) is an organization comprised of councils in the Central Alentejo region, in

Portugal.

Geographically the region has 14 city councils: Alandroal, Arraiolos, Borba, Estremoz, Évora, Montemor-o-

Novo, Mora, Mourão, Portel, Redondo, Reguengos de Monsaraz, Vendas Novas, Viana do Alentejo and Vila

Viçosa.

At the base of CIMAC’s work are the following areas that can be extended by delegation from the

municipalities or by transfer from the Portuguese Government:

Promote planning and strategic management regarding economic, social and environmental

development of the territory;

Integrate and articulate municipal investments with a focus on synergies between projects;

Participate in the management of programs to support regional development (for example ERDF

funds);

http://blogit.create.pt/

http://www.create.pt/

http://www.cimac.pt/


Planning and development of public bodies at regional level;

CIMAC also addresses the articulation of the relation between local municipalities and the national level

administration in the following areas:

Water supply, basic infrastructures, waste management, waste water management;

Health equipment in the region;

Education/schools network and professional education/training;

Territory planning and management, nature conservation and natural resources;

Security and Safety;

Mobility and transportation;

Public equipment network;

Promotion of economic, social and cultural development;

Networks of cultural, sports and leisure equipment;

In order of the achievement of its goals CIMAC also develops other activities:

Develop and manage specific services in the organization;

Develop and participate in associations, companies, cooperatives and foundations;

Associate with other organizations (public authorities, private, social sector and cooperatives);

Constitute and manage Inter-municipal companies for common purposes;

Delegate through concession the management and exploration of services;

the challenge Following its modernization strategy, CIMAC decided to rebuild all of its 14 associated city council web

portals, 2 aggregation web portals and a tourism and natural resources-focused web portal on a single

platform. This approach brings together citizens and city councils, allowing them to share information among

them, in an easy and natural way.

Besides developing a cross platform for multiple web portals, one of the most important project goals was to

provide content management users a simple, user-friendly and easy way to share, filter and search content

between all 17 portals.

Building such a platform on SharePoint presented more than a few challenges, most of them related with

the way content editors are able to manage, share and filter all the contents. Some of these challenges were:

All the portals will be hosted in the same SharePoint farm, taking into account the native platform

limits and boundaries;

Any portal can share content pages with all other portals on the platform, and any portal can import

or reference any of these shared contents (like News, Events, Points of Interest, Persons or Articles);

Once imported, a shared content can be further manipulated by the content editor of the

destination portal;

When importing contents shared by another portal to a specific area of the destination portal (e.g.

News), the system should allow only compatible contents to be selected and imported. Compatibility

is validated through the Content Type associated with the content being imported.


The aggregator portals must be able to display content from any other portal without having to

import it, as if these contents were stored inside the aggregator;

The homepage of the portal must list a subset of the available articles, selected by the content

editors in an easy and straightforward way;

The portals will be available in several languages and the shared contents must be presented in the

right language;

All listing areas must be paged and should not contain duplicate information, after a content editor

have shared or imported content to the portal;

All of the portal areas should support data filtering based on the taxonomy applied to either an

image, document or page. All content can be classified by location or category, but it should be

possible to have more content classification groups;

The content editors can add an image map refiner in the top of all portal areas to ensure that end-

users are properly redirected to the information that he wants to access.

the solution The Multi-Portal Platform (also called MPP) is a platform that supports multiple independent portals, built

on SharePoint Server 2013. Each portal has its own domain name and look & feel, which give them their

own identity. The platform provides a common set of functional components that are used across all portals.

Figure 1 – Conceptual Architecture

To manage and control all these requirements and challenges, the solution leverages SharePoint 2013

Search due to its extreme scalability, extensive feature set and high performance. Specifically, the following

features were used:

When importing and referencing contents shared by other portals, the Search Service is used to find

compatible contents shared anywhere on the platform.

Defining a custom query for the Content Search Web Parts as well as custom Result Source allowed

us to fit the results to almost any content structure, taking into account the content editors’ needs;

The usage of the Display Templates allowed us to style the search results of all portals and pages

using HTML5 and CSS3;


Using the Managed Metadata features and Managed Properties allowed the content editor users to

categorize content and decide how and where to share content;

The users were taught how to use the Keyword Query Language, with property restrictions and

logical operators, and managed properties were configured accordingly to support such advanced

queries to display intended results in Content Search Web Parts.

Figure 2 - Content sharing between portals

In the diagram above, Portal 1 is sharing contents A, B and C. These contents are picked up by the search

crawler and indexed along with a few managed properties that allow other portals to identify it and content

compatibility matching rules to filter it. Content editors for Portal 2 have selected contents A and B from

Portal 1 do be imported and displayed, and content editors for Portal 3 have selected contents A and C from

Portal 1 to be imported and displayed on their respective portals. Leveraging Display Templates the same

content (A, for instance) can be presented differently on each portal.

Figure 3 - Content selection screen

Besides content sharing, SharePoint’s Search features are also used for free-text searching (see Figure 4),

content presentation via Content Search Web Parts and Display Templates (see Figures 5 and 8), location-

based content filtering (see Figure 6), company search (see Figure 7) and map view for geographically

located search results.


Figure 4 - Free-text search through all the portals and results with hover panel

Figure 5 - Aggregation portal homepage


Figure 6 - Aggregation portal homepage with location-based content filtering panel

Figure 7 - Company search in aggregation portal


Figure 8 - City council portal homepage

Figure 9 - Geographically located search results

results The Multi-Portal Platform is already deployed to the production environment and the contents for all 17

public portals are currently being provisioned. It is expected that these portals will have a first release

available in March 2014.

The project was a success and the features were very well received by the content editor users, as a result of

the agile teamwork and brainstorming sessions that ensured the new SharePoint features were used in the

right way.


The results achieved using this search-based solution gave the content editor users the possibility of easily

creating new areas in each portal for news, events, articles and points of interest and have them displayed as

a list without having to worry about building the list or a custom API to access data from the UI Layer. It is

possible to decide which news and events should be available in the homepage of each portal only through

simple search-related configurations, which led to a custom code decrease of about 75% (taking into account

previous similar website projects), decreasing the effort and cost required to fix issues too. It is also possible

to configure areas in a portal and then decide to display content from other portals on the platform.

about the team |create|it|’s team was composed of Nuno Guerra (Sponsor and CEO), Carolina Torres (Project Manager),

António Vargas (Solution Architect), and Luís Rato (Developer Lead).

BEST SHAREPOINT APP 2014


PDF SHARE FORMS Online, Offline, OnDemand PDF forms and SharePoint are better together

Ultimate Form Solution

The most complete form tool set and unprecedented level of PDF integration into the SharePoint

Online, Offline, OnDemand PDF forms and SharePoint are better together

PDF Share Forms for SharePoint (PDF SharePoint) enables businesses to create and manage PDF forms in Microsoft SharePoint without additional development or constraints of HTML forms. It is the only out of the box solution of its kind that enables integration of industry standard PDF forms with the Microsoft SharePoint platform and free Adobe Reader. Many organizations use PDF Share Forms to extend their forms with bi-directional PDF fields mapping to SharePoint columns, integrate with Business Connectivity Services and workflow solutions, support external SharePoint data, and customize scripting to assure high quality performance. There is no easier solution to integrate existing business forms with SharePoint.

European SharePoint Community selected PDF Share Forms Enterprise for SharePoint 2010 as the Best Intranet/Extranet SharePoint solution in year 2013.

Challenge As had been speculated for a while, Microsoft is discontinuing its InfoPath electronic forms product. With deep respect for InfoPath’s accomplishments, we would like to make a business case for PDF forms in SharePoint.

Solution

Standard vs Proprietary Software retirement has many potential issues to consider. One of these issues is handling proprietary data formats. While InfoPath stores data as XML data files, InfoPath form layouts are defined in proprietary file formats. As a result, it is easy to extract data but form layouts are very obscure without Forms Services running.

PDF forms are part of the PDF specification defined in the ISO 32000-1:2008 standard. It means that PDF forms are supported globally, for as long as we can foresee. In addition, many government agencies around the world require long-term storage requirements to be in a PDF format (PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b).

If you decide to choose a forms solution for SharePoint, consider standardization as a way to minimize future risks and to maximum your investments in fillable forms. Do not choose solutions that are based on proprietary formats.

TRUSTED BY OVER 500,000 PEOPLE AND ENTERPRISES

2

780 Roosevelt, Irvine, CA 92620 • Tel +1 888 792 7871 • Fax +1 949 861 6447 [email protected] • www.pdfshareforms.com

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.pdfshareforms.com/

http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51502


Focus on reusing existing forms Today, most organizations strive to have a uniform approach to their forms. It simplifies management, allows for re-allocation of resources of forms designers, and keeps familiarity of interfaces for end users. However, it is impossible today to live in a closed business environment. We work with other organizations and government entities, which provide their forms in PDF forms (i.e. IRS, FDA, FCC, etc. within the United States; and many local and federal agencies throughout the European Union).

As your organization interacts with these agencies, you have to enable PDF forms operability or duplicate forms creation and maintenance. Alternatively, as a smarter approach, you can also embrace PDF forms technology and adopt it within your enterprise.

Our customer — Aera Energy — had many Word documents, before they start using PDF Share Forms. By simple conversion existing forms to PDF format, company quickly migrated its business processes to PDF forms. Hundreds of forms were implemented in few months.

Focus on quick implementation PDF forms emphasize two important aspects when it comes to implementing forms fast and efficiently. Primarily, you can design forms in the tool of your choice. Should it be Microsoft Word, Excel, or professional Adobe InDesign software – you can easily make your form a fillable PDF form and integrate with SharePoint in minutes. PDF Share Forms Enterprise provide its own PDF designer browser based tool as well. Secondary, rather than focusing on separate form layouts for different devices and printing needs, you design your form only once. Your PDF forms are always displayed exactly the same way on all devices, as well as when they are printed.

Educational organizations, mostly higher education institutions have hundreds or even thousands of already existing PDF forms. One of many ours .edu customers, Texas Tech University, provided an unbelievably convenient tool for the academic staff. With PDF Share Forms new and existing questionnaires, forms, and surveys could be integrated in minutes.

Data Integration / Field Mapping PDF form fields are easily integrated with SharePoint columns. This synchronization is bi-directional, which means data is always up to date in your SharePoint list items and document library. In addition, you can pre-populate PDF forms with data from other sources like SQL Server, other CRM/ERP systems, or context specific information. PDF forms workflow actions allow data to also be extracted from the form and used throughout your business processes.

For such big organizations, like British Petroleum, unobstructed data flow from one data warehouse to another is more than important. Form prepopulation technics save time and money, reduces data duplication or loss, eliminates human factor influence.

PDF FORMS ARE A NATURAL FIT FOR SHAREPOINT

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End to End Forms Solution Any our customer appreciates PDF form integration with SharePoint infrastructure. As a result, each company or organization gets a cohesive solution that spotlights all benefits of SharePoint and PDF forms technologies:

Easy to locate forms. A centralized interface where end user can access all form templates that he has access to.

Offline capabilities. You can use free Adobe Reader Mobile or ShareSync iOS application to manage your offline capabilities. Forms can be submitted outside your SharePoint network and integrated into your business processes.

Compliance and long term archival. While different fields are editable during your collaboration and business processes, we offer a locking down of the PDF form once your workflow is completed. It ensures that form is not editable and it can be preserved for archival purposes.

Digital Signatures. PDF forms natively support Electronic and Digital Signatures. Signed PDF forms address numerous security standards within select industries.

Your choice of workflow provider. PDF forms are vendor independent when it comes to your SharePoint workflow provider. Whether you use out-of-the-box SharePoint workflow, K2 workflow, or Nintex workflow – PDF forms are integrated with all of them.

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BEST SOCIALSTRATEGY 2014

KanBothe Art of moderation

What is KanBo?

KanBo is a co-working environment that goes beyond the typical document exchange scenario. Through its simple UI-Design users do not need any training – they can immediately start working together.

No training required

KanBo – the balance between simplicity and effectiveness

With KanBo we provide one of the lowest entry levels to the world of SharePoint for users. After 30 Minutes of explaining the principals of Kanban (only 3 basic principles) the users that have never used a collaborative environment before are able to work with each other using SharePoint. By working, we mean far beyond check in/check out of files which make about of 80% of all SharePoint scenarios. The UI of KanBo sticks to the principal of “design follows function” that results in an incredibly intuitive user experience. Besides other aspects, the UI is the main reason why organizations get very high user engagements within very short time after introducing KanBo to users. That again, is the most critical aspect of setting up a social strategy based on SharePoint. Since the fuel for any collaborative environment is fresh content and up to date information it must be provided by its users,

Screen 1. All your boards with interaction counters since your last visit.

Natural and intuitive user interface makes people immediately understand how to use it – higher productivity and satisfaction among employees guaranteed.

Capture the current reality of projects or teams. Base your decisions on real-time figures. Manage changing conditions. Use the power of Kanban.

Instant Clarity

European SharePoint Community Awards 2014 2

but how to convince them to put the content into the environment? After 3 years of development and various installations of KanBo all over the world we found that the secret of success of a social strategy lies in a balance of simplicity and effectiveness for business.

KanBo – SharePoint translated to end users

There is no question about it, SharePoint is a perfect platform for co-working and information exchange for companies. The investment in the SharePoint infrastructure will have a much quicker ROI with KanBo as it engages users faster and brings real business benefits to business like:

• less coordination overhead (less meetings)• real time information• enables mobile productivity• makes users abandon email as their primary communication

channel voluntarily• exposes bottlenecks• brings total transparency into organizations

Furthermore using its API KanBo visualizes information from other on premise like SAP, CRM, etc. and dissolves technical boundaries between them. In this way information workers can interact with the information itself instead of losing time and energy on jumping between systems. Additionally KanBo brings the right combination of collaboration around actual work, extracts knowledge out of activity streams (new approach of knowledge preservation) and enables SharePoint to be used in mobile scenarios effectively.

With the universal approach derived from Kanban the true value of KanBo for mobile scenarios lays in the simplicity of its UI. It can be used for many purposes starting at project management (any methodology like Prince2, PMI, Kanban, etc.) through any team collaboration ending

Screen 2. A board representing your events along with cards and responsible users.

All people are on the same page, always!

Adapts the flow to any situation, process or project

Visulization of work

Flexible structure


at very specific processes or workflows. Everywhere you want to have the same picture of something to all people involved in it – KanBo is the right choice.

We also think that collaboration still takes place in areas where people come together. What about a table (www.surface.pl/en) that senses the presence of people around it and compiles a unique stream of information based on the information stored in KanBo that is relevant to these people. What about a touch wall where you can use touch gestures of your both hands and use speech recognition to communicate with KanBo in a more human way. Is this still SharePoint? YES! This is all possible because of it – we give it a pretty face so people love to use it.

KanBo – productivity on the go

We understand a mobile solution as one that empowers user’s productivity while away from desk. On top of this it embraces the possibilities of a mobile device instead of seeing them as limitations. When it comes down to building real world solutions SharePoint does not support mobile scenarios well and that challenge is tackled by KanBo in a reusable manner.

SharePoint is a powerful platform and gives us endless possibilities to build solutions on top of it. In order to support these solutions on mobile devices each time dedicated apps must be built to represent meaningful added value. With KanBo we provide one of the lowest entry levels to the world of SharePoint for desk and mobile users.

KanBo can visualize any work or process and provide the appropriate communication channel required to get work done collaboratively. With this universal approach derived from Kanban the true value of KanBo for mobile scenarios lays in the simplicity of its UI. This balance between effectiveness and practicality allows KanBo mobile users to use each device in its native way (gestures, physical buttons, camera, GPS,

Screen 3. The card holds the information and communication together.

Self-Organizing collaborative knowledge management ensures no extra effort for employees. Start to profit from your organiza-tion’s knowledge today.

Collaboration takes place in the context of a card, no repeating or redundant information, all in a single place.

Full scope of functionality available on mobile devices like tablets or smartphones. Profit from mobility and speed of today’s workforce.

Collect and reuse social knowledge

Improved communication quality

Enable mobile workers


accelerometer). That is only possible because KanBo represents a set of very few but highly universal functionalities, which have been adapted to fit the native usage philosophy of any device type. Furthermore it results in very quick adoption cycles not only for a dedicated use case but also empowers the SharePoint social and collaboration strategy.

KanBo – where Cloud is just the next logical step

Two aspects of KanBo make it a perfect fit for Cloud. One is the technological stack and the other is the business value it adds because of being able to utilize the Cloud.

Starting with the technological maturity of KanBo it can be deployed in these permutations:

• Office 365 + app in Azure Websites • On-premises + app in Azure Websites• Office 365 + app in on-premises server• On-premises + app in on-premises server

KanBo utilizes several additional data services offered by the Azure Data Marketplace while performing semantic analysis of sentiments and extracting knowledge out of content (documents and streams) stored in SharePoint or generated by KanBo users every day. Since KanBo has an email integration by which emails can be easily transformed into cards and vice versa the Exchange integration plays also an important role.

The other, more business related value comes into play when KanBo is being used in Extranet scenario. Making use of Azure Active Directory integration, KanBo installed in the cloud can become a real advantage covering many scenarios where communication and exchange of data with external partners is accomplished in a secure and KanBo-intuitive way. If two companies should happen to work together on a project and both have installed KanBo in their private environments there is even a deeper integration possible. KanBo allows to securely connect the

Screen 4. Use your device in its native way.

Minimize waste of time e.g. waiting for someone who does not know about it.

Reduce TCO and reuse established organization’s infrastructure.

Supports Office 365 as well as hybrid scenarios.

Productivity boost

Works SharePoint on premise

Azure compatible


KanBo notification channels of both companies using cloud as shared connection space. This way building cross-company teams and having them work together does not suffer from redundancy and coordination overhead because KanBo creates a virtual shared space where team members work in their physically separated environments and KanBo securely exchanges project related information making the physical boundaries disappear.

Based on the before mentioned technological stack almost any cloud (migration) strategy is supported by KanBo since its architecture was designed to utilize and have customers benefit from cloud resources from the moment they start using KanBo. Rolling out SharePoint to be your Social Strategy platform that also covers mobile device access, KanBo is a component you should consider as your Joker in your success story.

People behind KanBo

Our principles: Realize what is most important and remove the unnecessary. Question the State of the Art, take myths apart and redefine communication. People behind KanBo believe in authentic, digital design where new potentials of digital media e.g. SharePoint leverage visibility and productivity. Main focus is on user adoption so less but good features are the key to success in our information overloaded world.

Challenge us!

Screen 5. Meaningful social statistics and gamification as motivation driver.

Find real problem solvers, number crunchers and other high potentials inside of your organization.

Want to know more about KanBo?Visit us at booth 16 or onwww.kan.bo

[email protected]

Start Measuring Business Impact

Curious?

Write us

MOST INNOVATIVE CLOUD SOLUTION 2014


“The combination of a strong SharePoint Data

Management tool and Windows Azure infrastructure

allows The Crown Estate to scale up easily to meet

demand."

Nigel Spencer, Head of Information Services, The Crown Estate

The Crown Estate, which is responsible for managing the U.K.

seabed, faced the challenge of managing up to 1 petabyte of

data originating from various sources. Via a Business-Critical

SharePoint solution, ClearPeople connected Microsoft

SharePoint with Windows Azure to share and exchange Big Data

with marine renewable energy developers and the public. The

processes of managing, releasing, exposing and delivering data

have been greatly optimised, with SharePoint acting as the hub

orchestrating these processes.

Business Needs

The Crown Estate is a commercial property

organisation charged with the managing

an £8billion portfolio on behalf of the

nation. This includes urban real estate,

rural land and almost all of the UK’s

seabed.

Due to its ownership of the seabed, The

Crown Estate plays a crucial role in

enabling the advancement of the UK

offshore renewable energy industry. As

well as investing alongside developers, The

Crown Estate also utilises its expertise in

the field to develop solutions that drive

growth in the industry, whilst also

protecting the marine environment. Part of

this process has seen The Crown Estate

establish a data management repository—

the Marine Data Exchange—for managing

and storing up to 1 petabyte (one million

Solution

Case Study

The Crown Estate Shares Big Data to support

Research in the Marine Environment

Company: The Crown Estate

Website:

http://www.marinedataexchange.co.uk

Country or Region: United Kingdom

Industry: Professional Services,

Commercial Real Estate

Partner: ClearPeople

Partner Websites:

http://www.clearpeople.com

Company Profile

The Crown Estate is responsible for

managing almost the entire seabed

around the U.K. and is custodian of an

estate valued at £8 billion (approx. U.S.

$12 billion). It plays a major role in the

development of the U.K. offshore

renewable energy industry.

Software and Services

Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010

Windows Azure™

Bing Maps®

For more information about other

Microsoft customer successes, please visit:

www.microsoft.com/casestudies

SharePoint Customer Solution Case Study

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

© 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, [list other trademarks referenced] are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Document published 06/20/2013

gigabytes) of data cultivated from offshore

renewable energy developers. Making this

data easily accessible provides crucial

support for those looking to develop in the

marine environment as well as enhancing

the sustainability of marine businesses and

furthering our understanding of the

country's coastal areas.

The Marine Data Exchange provides anyone

with an interest in the marine environment

easy access to a wealth of data, ranging

from visual and landscape assessments to

bird studies. By making this data readily

available, the Marine Data Exchange aims to

support the creation of a sustainable blue

economy that includes development,

conservation and thriving marine

businesses.

This data originates from the various

renewable energy developers who have a

contractual obligation to collect the data.

The Crown Estate acts as a custodian of this

data, and further has a duty to make such

data available to the public; hence the need

for an online resource to publish this critical

information.

ClearPeople faced a number of challenges

in relation to The Crown Estate’s

requirements for the Marine Data Exchange,

some of which included:

Data originates from multiple sources

and continues to be fed into The Crown

Estate.

The authors of the data have no

obligation to deliver the data as an online

data source; data sets can be delivered

via live data connections, Extranet

uploads or simple USB drives.

Irrespective of the delivery mechanism,

the data does not need to follow the

same controls as any other Electronic

Data Interchange (EDI) integration,

meaning validation against a strict

document type definition would be

required.

Data needs to be shared with the public,

but it was not possible to predict the scale

of demand or consumption for this data.

The public visitor interface required

user-friendly search capabilities.

The Crown Estate required an internal

structured management interface.

The Crown Estate’s preference was a

SharePoint based system. This however

raised another set of challenges:

The existing SharePoint infrastructure

would not suffice due to the volume of

data.

An externally hosted SharePoint

infrastructure for public facing demand

– given the uncertainty of usage – was

seen as too inflexible.

Solution

The Crown Estate created a Business-

Critical SharePoint (BCSP) solution that

uses Microsoft SharePoint 2010 as the hub

for large data sets and reports that are

produced and managed by over 120 wind

farm partners who collect the data and

submit it to The Crown Estate. The BCSP

solution connects SharePoint with

Windows Azure to share and exchange Big

Data - in other words high-volume, and

high variety data1 - with energy developers

and the public due to its scalability and

elasticity.

The Crown Estate have no control over the

individual partner’s systems, machines,

technologies or data formats - so this

could be data coming from ultrasound

equipment, seismic equipment, video

feeds, via their own data management and

line-of-business systems, as well as

quantitative data sets in Excel.

To address this issue, and the estimated

7,500 hours it takes the Crown Estate to

manually process this data each year,

ClearPeople have developed a common

API for integrating and exchanging data

with The Crown Estate and its wind farm

partners. The common API requires

connections to exchange data in Marine

Environmental Data & Information

Network (MEDIN) data EDI standard. It is

up to the individual partner to either

automatically exchange data via this API

(“live connections”), or by manually

uploading data to The Crown Estate via a

new extranet. In this case, they must

supply a correctly formatted XML file in

MEDIN format describing the exchanged

data. Finally, the partners are in some

cases allowed to submit data directly to

The Crown Estate via USB drives (typically

a large backlog), using the same common

format, in which case The Crown Estate use

a “mock on-site data exchange client and

validator” to exchange the data, via the

common data interface.

In summary, all this data ends up within

The Crown Estate domain, and is managed

through SharePoint – which in essence

surfaces all the metadata and structure fed

into it from this large variety of source

systems. This is what is known as the

Marine Data Exchange (MDE). Staff at The

Crown Estate can therefore use MDE to

effectively collaborate, both within internal

teams and also external parties, by having

all the data relating to the wind farms

available through a single SharePoint

portal.

The Azure front-end is merely the “icing on

the cake” providing the public with access

to data, exposed via a search UI. There is

also an integration at index and data

exchange level between Azure and

SharePoint. ClearPeople’s Business-Critical

SharePoint solution exposed data deeply

nested within data sets hosted in the

various data repositories. By exposing the

data and data properties within

SharePoint, this could be efficiently

accessed by public users through search

indexes, facets and refined using a visual

geospatial Bing Maps search.


The Crown Estate saw the clear benefits

offered by ClearPeople’s unique solution

and SharePoint was connected with Azure

infrastructure for:

Delivery of user interface for the public,

integrated with The Crown Estate’s

existing web content management

system;

Public web visitors search;

Geo-spatial indexing of data using

Apache Solr ;

Geo-spatial search and integration to

Bing Maps; and

SharePoint Data Management Portal for

Marine Data Exchange partners to upload

data into the system in consistent

formats.

The Data Management Portal in SharePoint

provides extranet access for Marine Data

Exchange partners to upload and manage

their own data – all in consistent formats,

saving The Crown Estate valuable time,

resources and money by having this entire

process automated. The portal also allows

partners and Crown Estate staff to easily

locate content via a consistent structure or

via SharePoint search features. Data is then

automatically exposed within SharePoint, in

‘project areas’ for each renewable energy

developer. SharePoint thereby functions as

an effective management hub, while the

data continues to reside in external data

repositories.

It was extremely important to manage the

costs of collecting data. By adopting

ClearPeople’s BCSP approach, the project

has been effectively implemented, with

SharePoint acting as the heart of the

operation.

The solution also automates the process of

‘releasing data’ for public consumption

once no longer commercially sensitive. The

Crown Estate initially had anticipated this

would be a manual or semi-manual process.

Further, when users request large datasets,

the process of delivering this data is

automated through an integrated data

delivery mechanism that pushes data from

the internal data repositories to a public

Azure storage infrastructure acting as a

cache until the user has downloaded the

data.

Benefits Some of the many benefits of

implementing a Business-Critical

SharePoint solution include:

The Crown Estate now has an effective

solution for managing data in a single

repository originating from many

parties, through a central and consistent

SharePoint user interface.

Geo-spatial data hidden in XML data

structures from renewable energy

developer data repositories is now

exposed through a user friendly visual

Bing Map Search.

Data which would otherwise sit inside

renewable energy developer data

repositories is now exposed through a

user friendly structure in SharePoint and

through filtered searches.

The processes of managing, releasing,

exposing and delivering data have been

greatly optimised, with SharePoint

acting as the hub orchestrating these

processes.

By utilising the new SharePoint Data

Management Portal, The Crown Estate will

now save a great number of man-hours

that were previously spent manually

collecting, importing, converting,

collaborating, exporting and uploading

data to the Marine Data Exchange.

On average, renewable energy partners

would send The Crown Estate their data

four times per year. Each set of data from

each individual renewable energy partner

contains a structured index with associated

data in deeply nested data folders. Using

their traditional methods of processing

this data and previous systems, it is

estimated that The Crown Estate would

require 1-2 man-days for processing of

each data set. With 120 renewable energy

partners, this would result in 120 to 240

man-days required four times per year, or

a total of 480 to 960 man-days per year (or

more than 2-4 man-years per year just for

processing).

By building a collaborative platform, with

automated processing of index files, that

allows The Crown Estate partners to

upload and manage their own data, the

requirement for The Crown Estate to

manually process datasets has become

redundant.

“The combination of a strong SharePoint

Data Management tool and Windows

Azure infrastructure allows The Crown

Estate to scale up easily to meet demand,”

says Nigel Spencer, Head of Information

Services at The Crown Estate. He

continues, “Working with ClearPeople—a

leader in SharePoint based solutions and

early adopter of the cloud and Azure— has

been a very positive experience.”

Gabriel Karawani, Director and Co-

Founder, ClearPeople says: “By delivering

the public facing site through Windows

Azure’s ‘Platform as a Service’, ClearPeople

was able to provide The Crown Estate with

a ‘pay as you go’ model which can be

scaled up, both in terms of infrastructure

and budget, depending on demand and

success. The benefit to the public is a

highly accessible system with a user

friendly search and Bing Maps interface,

giving the user access to very large

datasets. It is quite unique.”

The Crown Estate has now adopted

SharePoint and Windows Azure as the

solution for another similar project, its

knowledge network for wave and tidal

energy in collaboration with the U.K.

Department of Energy and Climate

Change.


Spencer says: “Working with Microsoft and

ClearPeople—a leader and early adopter of

the cloud and Windows Azure— has been a

positive experience, so much so that we

utilising their support on another major

project, our wave and tidal knowledge

network.”

Business-Critical SharePoint (BCSP) is a

Microsoft partner program that includes

top solution and service providers who

focus on LOB integration with

SharePoint.

1http://blogs.msdn.com/b/discretemanufacturing/arc

hive/2012/03/10/microsoft-is-big-in-big-data.aspx,

March 2012

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/bcsp


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