Ministry of Municipality and Rural Affairs-MOMRA

Objective:

To provide an efficient and easy-to-use solution responsible for facilitating MOMRA’s business activities.

Situation:

SURE International Technology proposed to design portal for MOMRA which could facilitate them to manage and monitor activities of different municipal councils all over the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In addition to provide a comprehensive user friendly content management solution.

The solution scope could be carved up into the following integral parts:

Automation of municipal council procedures.
Providing monitoring capabilities for GDCI to enabling them to monitor all the activities of different municipal councils.
Providing a communication platform between municipal council and supervised authorities.
Providing a comprehensive documentation management system.
Providing Citizens with a platform to communicate with the other relevant authorities and submitting complaints.

Solution:

SURE International Technology leverages the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint portal server 2007 to deliver its solution.

Content Authoring and Management:

The new solution uses the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) feature in SharePoint Server 2007. This feature provides the following benefits in the area of content authoring and management:

Content creation, editing, and formatting. New client-side tools improve authoring of content. Content authors have a better representation of how the content will appear on the site than in the previous solution.
Site creation and formatting. The site creation tools enable users to create sites and post content to the sites. Site templates make changes to the style, layout, and user interface of a site (through cascading style sheets). For example, themes can be applied to sites to change the color schemes.
Automatic content expiration and archiving. Content authors and administrators can set content expiration dates and set whether the content should be archived when it expires. This ability helps reduce the effort required to manage the content.
Content creation and approval workflow. The new workflow features of SharePoint Server 2007 enable the creation of complex workflow processes through minimal (or no) end-user development effort. The complexity of customizing the workflow is directly related to the complexity of the process being automated.
Collaboration. Employees can share their ideas and projects with other employees by using the collaborative features of SharePoint Server 2007. The new solution enables employees to connect with each other more effectively than ever before.
Content security. SharePoint Server 2007 helps protect access to content. Content owners can establish permissions to help ensure that only authorized users can view or modify the appropriate data. Content owners can apply security to data on an item-by-item basis.
Content update notification. Content update notification. Users can subscribe to notifications for content updates. If content is added or modified, users can receive e-mail notification of the changes. In addition, users can be notified when content they create is almost expired and soon to be deleted or archived.
Multiple-language support. Multiple-language support. SharePoint Server 2007 enables the display of content in the same format, but in different languages. The site hierarchy remains the same, but the content displayed is localized based on the language preferences of the user (when available).

Navigation and Search:

The following benefits affect navigation and search features:

Consolidated view of municipal councils. One of the key features of SharePoint Server 2007 is to act as an organization-wide portal. Supervising authorities can monitor and communicate with any municipal council all over the kingdom through a single interface.
Customizable hierarchy. Administrators can dynamically modify the structure of the site without modifying the content or the format of the pages where the content appears.
Content categorization and tagging. Content can be categorized and tagged to be highlighted in the search engine or through site navigation. Users can then find information faster with fewer results that contain unrelated information.
Content security. Search results include only results where the user has at least read access to the content.
Faster search. SharePoint Server 2007 has improved indexing and search capabilities. In addition, users can restrict the scope of searches to reduce the number of results, which reduces the time taken to search. Multiple search servers can be added to the solution to improve overall search performance. This feature of SharePoint Server 2007 requires no customization after the search servers are deployed.

Workflow

SharePoint Server 2007 builds on and extends the workflow development framework in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Workflow developers have access to the entire range of workflow development options in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. They can also use Office InfoPath 2007 to create forms that can be hosted inside applications such as Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint®, and Microsoft Office Excel®, as well as on the server.

SURE International Technology team developed the workflows by using the following applications:

Windows Workflow Foundation Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation in Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 to develop workflows that include custom code and InfoPath forms.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to develop declarative, rules-based workflows that contain no code and are developed for a specific SharePoint site.

Document Management

The solution uses the Microsoft SharePoint portal server 2007 document management features which includes following.

Office and Windows Integration: A complete set of document management functionality is accessible directly from the Microsoft Office 2000 toolbar and Microsoft Windows Explorer. This helps users manage documents with familiar tools.
Check-in and Check-out: Enables optional enhanced Web folders so that documents can be reserved by individual users for updating.
Document Versioning: Document changes, including metadata such as keywords, are tracked and assigned different version numbers for auditing and rollback.
Document Profiling: This captures optional and required metadata about customer-defined document types.
Document Collaboration: Use the Discussions feature in Office and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents for inline, content review.
Security: Using roles built on Microsoft Windows NT security, SharePoint Portal Server helps to ensure that only users with appropriate access can see a given document.
Lifecycle Management: Create private drafts, review and revise, then publish, with optional approval routing.

Uptime and Response Time:

The following benefits affect uptime and response time:

Clustered front-end and back-end architecture. SharePoint Server 2007 runs as a Microsoft ASP.NET application on Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0. The content and configuration database is stored in SQL Server. The solution uses a load balancing solution (such as Network Load Balancing in Microsoft Windows Server® 2003) to provide fault tolerance for the front-end portion that runs on IIS 6.0. Server clusters provide fault tolerance for the database's store in SQL Server.
Scalability. The solution uses the multiprocessor and enhanced memory features of Windows Server 2003 to scale up the solution to support a larger number of users per physical computer. The clustering technologies (Network Load Balancing and server clusters) enable Microsoft IT to scale out the solution.

Result:

SURE International Technology provided an efficient and robust solution to MOMRA enabling them to do their business activities in a more user-friendly and efficient way thus increasing the overall productivity.