Case Studies

Implementing SharePoint 2010 to Build a Unique and Scalable Web Presence

Full Spectrum Digital Strategy
Baltimore Gas & Electric's (BGE) public site had an outdated design that did not represent their innovative and dynamic culture. The site included a lot of important information, but it was not structured in a manner that was intuitive to their end users, making content difficult to find. Content contributors were using a CMS platform that was complicated to use and did not allow site owners to easily contribute content. In addition to their public site, the client had eight other client or partner-facing web properties that all had disparate site structures and branding.

Ironworks was challenged with developing and implementing a digital strategy for the BGE's web, social media and mobile channels. The goal of the solution would lead to a unique and scalable web presence for all of the client’s web properties that was easy to maintain and integrated the use of social media tools.

​New Look and Feel, Plus Features
Ironworks conducted stakeholder interviews, focus groups, competitive site reviews, and market research that focused not only on the BGE's web presence, but also on their social media and mobile approach. Ironworks presented a comprehensive digital strategy that visually depicted the BGE's potential digital presence both short term and over five years using a phased approach, including strategic and tactical recommendations.

Ironworks designed and implemented the solution on SharePoint 2010 and started the process by gathering detailed requirements, defining the BGE's new taxonomy and creating the wireframes and site map that would drive site structure. A prototype of the new site was created and usability testing was conducted to ensure that the new site structure was intuitive and meaningful to the BGE's customers.
Ironworks designed a new look and feel for the BGE website based on stakeholder feedback and the vision developed during the digital strategy.

Ironworks implemented several features for the client including:

• Custom page layouts. Contributors can enter specific content directly to the page ensuring consistent styling from one page to the next and incorporating fields for metadata related to the content type.
• Search Capabilities. SharePoint’s out-of-the-box search capabilities now present results faceted by content type and topic area to make it easy for customers to find content.
• Meta dropdown. Meta dropdown provides site visitors with an at-a-glance view of items under top navigation.
• Twitter web part. The custom coded Twitter web part displays the BGE's latest tweets from their Twitter site based on keyword.
• Flickr web part. The Flickr web part displays selected image sets from the BGE's Flickr site.
• Internal Systems web part. The internal systems web part pulls data from the client’s internal systems to display number of outages and restorations.
• Multi-category blog: A multi-category blog allows for two-way, transparent communication with customers.

Unique and Scalable Web Presence
Meeting Customer Needs. With the new site structure, mega dropdown, and SharePoint 2010 search capabilities, site visitors can now find the content that they are looking for more easily. Social media integration gives customers more options to connect with BGE and learn about their latest news, including current outages and storm watches. The new blog and Twitter web part act as an online customer service channel for customers, allowing them to comment on topics and news presented by the client.

Meeting Staff Needs. The implementation on SharePoint 2010 and the creation of easy to use page layouts allows content contribution to be dispersed across the organization, which streamlines the process for making quick site updates about time sensitive storm events.