Utilizing SharePoint to Collaborate Worldwide

With full ownership of a new system to meet collaboration needs to support their mission of bringing peace through cooperative solutions to violence ridden countries, internationally recognized non-profit Search for Common Ground (SFCG) is now able to share information worldwide in real-time.

TerpSys worked with Search for Common Ground to stand up the organization’s first implementation of SharePoint and build tools on the platform to expand their capabilities to support operations while minimizing the time needed to do so.

Jack Deeds, former CFO of SFCG, successfully presented the solution at a number of Microsoft events. The media overviews of the solution can be viewed online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-NI1LIL3Rw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pFVVDHB28

• Saving Time and Money - The resulting solution reduced general ledger account updates from 120 days to 10 minutes, reduced accounting and financial reporting costs by reducing manual labor, and cut lead time for Financial Statement preparation by 90 days.
• Connecting the World - TerpSys designed a highly available instance of SharePoint to support collaboration of SFCG’s 400+ worldwide users including employees and partners in real-time.
• Integration of Tools to Meet Business Needs - SFCG needs to report in the currencies of the multiple countries they operate in, as well as combine the financial information into a single currency for organization-wide reporting. TerpSys integrated Microsoft GP with SharePoint to help SFCG meet these need.
• Streamlining Business Processes - TerpSys developed a standardized content management structure to support SFCGs non-financial needs like contract management.
• User-friendly - Users at SFCG were comfortable with Microsoft Excel, so TerpSys implemented the Microsoft GP/SharePoint system so financial data going in and coming out was in excel.