Ironworks Consulting, a management and Web consulting firm, has launched a global extranet for the Richmond-based Christian Children's Fund, a not-for-profit that has assisted more than 13.2 million children since its founding in 1938. The project was highlighted on the corporate blog for Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint software, which Ironworks used to build the Web site.

With a workforce scattered across 33 countries, CFF's old intranet faced significant problems disseminating and sharing information. The organization also wanted to create a platform for improving social networking and organizational connectivity. The CCF hired Ironworks to develop and implement a new CCF extranet, known as "The Hub," all employees worldwide could use.

To determine the organization's needs, Ironworks held a number of requirements sessions with the different internal groups to help determine site columns, content types and understand CCF’s internal taxonomies. The use of high-level categories such as "Groups" and "Offices" as well as flyout menus enables users to quickly identify relevant sub-sites and drill down to find needed information. The extranet also allows users to select English, French, Spanish or Portuguese as a preferred language setting.

But it's the social networking functionality that advances the CCF Web site beyond a fancy electronic brochure into a cool tool for global collaboration. The CCF enterprise is spread across many countries and time zones. "In many case," says the case study, "employees who have never met face to face are required to communicate and collaborate on a daily basis. Additionally, as needs arise in different regions, new CCF staff assume responsibilities and communicating those changes can sometimes be a challenge."

In such an environment, simply identifying the correct person in the organization to work with can be frustrating. Accordingly, Ironworks implemented and expanded on the social networking capabilities built into SharePoint. The extranet provides each user with a profile and profile photo, implements an employee message board, and creates a wiki site for documenting organization-specific terminology. Additionally, Ironworks implemented several custom components, including:

• Display of the current time and map of a particular CCF locale.
• A ranked listing of the most popular sites in the extranet based on user hits.
• A link from the master page to the user's Outlook inbox.