Kinko's was faced with increased technical support costs from the employees in the branch offices. They had an antiquated KM system that was hard to update and did not allow them to include rich text, images, etc. that could be used to provide detail in solutions. The content creation and management tools were outdated and inefficient. They wanted to improve content authoring efficiency, and reduce the cost of phone support by improving end user self service support.
Avanade leveraged the latest Office System products including Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Visio 2003, InfoPath, Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server 2000, Exchange Server 2003, and the .NET Framework to create a self service help desk portal. The technology support team now has the ability to create multiple types of support content. These include a wizard based diagnostic tools that helps a user troubleshoot a software or hardware problem at their branch. The diagnostic wizard links solution content to specific problems. A solution consists of rich text guide that walks a user through the mitigation of a specific problem. The portal is role based (based on AD) which manages work done by administrators, approvers, authors, and public/private (to tech support) readers. A workflow engine was written leveraging MS Exchange as the messaging infrastructure to facilitate content creation and approval.