Ultra Electronics

SharePoint On-Premise Intranet

Ultra-Electronics is an electronics and engineering company based in the UK who mainly work in defence and other highly regulated markets. Other markets they work in include energy transport and cyber security. 20% of their business is through the US DOD and 7% through the UK MOD, Other clients of theirs include Boeing, Rolls-Royce and EDF Energy.

Ultra wanted to evolve their internal IT system and gain the advantages of utilising an internet hosted on a SharePoint Server. As a company with offices all over the world, a solution that helps the business become more connected and aid employees’ collaboration was definitely needed. Furthermore, even though the system needed to be an on-premises environment, it still needed to be accessible from anywhere at any time. The deadline was only four weeks, a challenge our experts were ready to face head on!

The Solution

After reviewing the business requirements and expectations of the client, our expert SharePoint developers began creating the bespoke SharePoint Intranet solution, based on a design provided by our partner MK Brand. As previously mentioned, the biggest challenge was the delivery deadline which was only four weeks. To ensure we completed the project on time, we had two developers dedicated to working on the project full time, with two additional developers taking on the project part-time. By the set deadline, Dolphin IT Solutions delivered a fully tested solution, ready to be presented in front of 200 people in Canada.

The solution was built on SharePoint Server 2019, however, to give the users the ability to access the system from anywhere and at anytime, a public domain was used and set up on the server. The reason behind this was that employees from different departments needed to be able to collaborate on projects whilst preventing duplication of work.

To help the business to become more connected, and help employees collaborate easily, our SharePoint Intranet developers made full use of the various SharePoint features which allow sites to be customised according to the needs of the client. Having this in mind, a site collection named “Ultranet” was designed, which unlike other SharePoint sites, allows pop up notifications, built as a bespoke addition to the site as per the client’s request.

Following the security requirements of the company, a complicated permission system was also implemented. Permissions were set to lists by grouping users into security groups across the site collection. In addition, to empower the team collaboration, our developers created a tool for employees to connect and collaborate, called 'Search For People'.

The whole intranet solution, including the various page layouts and the master page template, was designed to match the company branding, based on a design provided by Ultra. Custom page layouts that could be configured by site administrators for news articles, blogs, and events, were also added as part of the solution.

Finally, multiple bespoke web parts were developed across the sites, based on the project requirements, including image galleries, news feeds, a live share price indicator, people directories, and a press release feed.