How NIFTIT Helped Synergy Improve Its Internal Collaboration

“It is the long history of humankind that those who learned to collaborate have prevailed,” Charles Darwin once remarked, and his musings continue to carry weight today — even in realms outside of the natural sciences. Consider business management, for example; although competition makes organizations adaptive to market conditions, it is collaboration that allows some to reign supreme and a lack thereof that causes others to falter.

Collaboration is never easy, especially as more and more people become involved in a project. Even more difficult is when businesses must conduct projects with individuals from different areas and focuses within the company; if these people have rarely interacted with those outside their departments, how are they going to come together as one unit for your project? There is hope, however, with NIFTIT’s specialty: SharePoint. SharePoint aims to fix this problem by improving collaboration and communication between employees from different projects, departments, teams, and even time zones.

Synergy is a leading manufacturer and supplier of flavorings, extracts, and essences. Synergy came to NIFTIT with the wish to improve its internal collaboration and communication using its SharePoint application. To learn more about how NIFTIT made this happen, read on to hear from Synergy Flavor’s IT Manager, Jeff Zerwer.

What were the challenges faced by your organization prior to the setup of the NIFTIT SharePoint solution?

We had very little means of document collaboration between our multiple sites. Regular network file shares didn’t work because the file was always locked by someone else using it.

How has NIFTIT’s SharePoint solution met your organization’s needs?

Creating separate sites for all our R&D project groups has allowed them to work collaboratively and create project tasks for the group to afford transparency in the progress of the project. Also, overall corporate communications have increased as there is a News feed that Marketing updates so all employees are aware of what is going on with the different companies [with which we work].

How has NIFTIT’s SharePoint solution helped your organization (with reporting, management, visibility, etc.)?

Phase 1 was mainly based around document collaboration, and in the coming weeks we will see how that increases productivity.

How was your experience working with NIFTIT?

NIFTIT was very easy to work with. Shawn creates a sense of calmness around the SharePoint architecture and puts everyone in the room at ease that the solution will fit the business needs. Khoa is a great designer and developer; he was very quick to respond to my emails and all new requests throughout the project.

What went well?

Everything went well. NIFTIT was aggressive with their timelines and stuck to their deadlines. Change requests throughout the project were done with ease and accuracy. The weekly check in calls were great to keep everyone on the same page as far as progress and current roadblocks.

What could have been done better?

My organization could have made decisions and testing faster. Once I got an answer from the business, NIFTIT was quick to react and create the solution or change requested. I think we all learned something about user integration between Azure Active Directory and SharePoint. The replication of user data to SharePoint was limiting as to what we could do, but Khoa had a solution for every roadblock Microsoft threw at him. I feel the knowledge around getting Guest Users into our SharePoint portal could have been a bit more advanced, but it’s still something new. Phi Lac did everything he could to automate the process of importing users from our parent company, but in the end, we didn’t need to import them. It was some trial and error with what was required on the Azure side to bring the users into the SharePoint portal.

Would you recommend NIFTIT Services to your colleagues or business partners?

Absolutely yes.

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