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Issue 21

SharePoint a "platform for the future"

<P>New Zealand Trade and Enterprise's winning site sets them up for the future.</P>

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise website

In this year’s Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards, Intergen won the Business Productivity Enterprise Content Management Partner of the Year Award, based on Intergen’s work on the development of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s website.

 For New Zealand businesses operating internationally, one of the most accessible vehicles for information is NZTE’s corporate website: www.nzte.govt.nz.

As the government’s national economic agency, tasked with improving the international competitiveness and sustained profitability of New Zealand business, NZTE needed to consolidate several existing websites into one in order to interact with businesses on the most customer-centric footing.

Replacing ageing homegrown technology whose maintenance costs were mounting, NZTE needed to select a strong technology foundation for their path ahead, with national and internationally targeted websites on the cards. In making the decision to go with SharePoint, rather than simply selecting a content management system, they thought it more important to look for a platform that set them up for the future.

NZTE’s Applications Architect, Mike Gilbert says: “SharePoint stands out as a single enterprise-wide solution that delivers on so many levels, be it internet, intranet, shared information or business intelligence applications.” Now supported by a robust and extendable SharePoint platform – one of the first SharePoint public-facing internet sites to be developed in the country – the new website has provided a single, integrated and content rich platform, refl ecting the diversity and complexity of the various business streams underpinning it.

NZTE project sponsor, Julian Moore, says: “The new site is all about the users, about the market information, products and services that our clients require, and meeting the needs of other New Zealand businesses. The SharePoint platform enables us to do this today, and gives us tremendous capability to build on this in the future.”