Apparatus Drives Employee Collaboration At Gene B. Glick With SharePoint 2010

Client Profile

Gene Glick—featured in Tom Brokaw's best-seller, The Greatest Generation—started his Indianapolis company in 1947 as a young WWII veteran eager to help his fellow GIs build homes for their families. Today, the Gene B. Glick Company is an award-winning property management and development company known for its beautifully landscaped and well-maintained communities, which comprise more than 18,000 apartment units in 10 states.

Challenge

Curtis E. Taylor, Gene B. Glick’s VP of Information Technology/CIO, decided the company could benefit from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to help its 600+ employees find and share information quickly and easily.

Why SharePoint? “It was the whole collaboration aspect of it,” he says. “The ability to share information across teams and in one central location helps us be more efficient.”

But Taylor realized that once the SharePoint platform was in place, he would face a second challenge—getting employees to actually take advantage of its features.

Our goal was to start small,” he says, “making sure SharePoint was a success within the company before rolling other applications and functionality into it.”

Taylor realized he needed an IT partner who could not only deploy the infrastructure and enable its out-of-the-box features, but one who could also handle customized projects that would introduce employees to SharePoint’s capabilities in a manner that would drive significant adoption.

Solution

Taylor chose Apparatus based on the company’s reputation for successfully tackling large, complex projects.

“We were looking for a team that could build the hardware and software environment—and get us up and running on those first few sites,” he says.

Apparatus started by deploying the SharePoint 2010 infrastructure and helping to develop a workflow for the company’s performance evaluations. Next came a more complex project intended to solve a long-standing problem while encouraging employees to start making the most of SharePoint’s collaborative functionality.

Prior to the SharePoint deployment, Gene B. Glick was using a website to provide its employees access to internal company documents, such as manuals, policies, and procedures. But employees were having trouble finding documents on the website, which had a weak searchcapability. Additionally, updating documents was a cumbersome, labor-intensive process that required editing HTML code. That left document maintenance to the IT staff and a small group of departmental users rather than to content experts.

“What I wanted was a mechanism that would allow multiple people to make updates,” says Taylor. “The maintenance experts would update the maintenance documents, the leasing experts would update the leasing documents, and so on. And then we’d have a workflow that would send the documents to the appropriate editors and approvers before being republished.”

After meeting with Gene B. Glick representatives to learn how they wanted the new sites to function, Apparatus used elements of the company’s corporate branding to give them the same look and feel as their external website.

Results

Gene B. Glick’s dispersed workforce now has quick, easy access to company documents thanks to a more user-friendly, more intuitive website with simplified navigation, better organization, and robust search functionality. Authorized users are now able to edit documents in Microsoft Word, and a streamlined workflow ensures that all changes are reviewed and approved through the proper channels.

“Part of the reason we selected Apparatus is we needed the implementation phase, the first couple of sites, to be home runs,” says Taylor. “The last thing you want is to roll out a piece of technology that doesn’t perform and then have your organization decide it’s not going to use it.”

Taylor says he was impressed by Apparatus’ flexibility in helping his IT department to understand the new infrastructure. “The Apparatus team not only deployed SharePoint,” he says, “but they also helped educate our IT department on the overall product and its functionality. Now, our IT staff can start building on what we have learned, expanding the scope to include additional business applications.”