Business Situation
In April 2003, the company changed its name from Vivendi Environnement to Veolia Environnement, a move designed to reflect its independence and changes in its ownership structure. To coincide with this name change and, as a result of rapid business expansion, the company decided that it needed to enhance and bring some standardization to its internal global communications . It therefore decided to develop and implement an Employee Corporate Portal. This solution had to be global in scope, and, therefore, the portal had to be multilingual. The timeframe from design to implementation of the solution was extremely short – 4 months.

 

Solution
Avanade developed a solution which is an intranet Multilingual Employee Corporate Portal based on SharePoint 2003. SharePoint 2003 was chosen for its scalability and its multilingual capacity. The solution was developed by Avanade using SharePoint 2003 beta version. Avanade used .NET to develop multilingual web parts supporting multilingual content and indices. Avanade also undertook the indexation of the existing 8 intranet sites as part of the project. The solution demonstrates the strength of the Microsoft Platform combined with Avanade’s technical expertise and ability to deliver solutions within a short timeframe.

 

Results
Avanade delivered a multilingual, scalable solution within the 4 month timeframe required by Veolia Environnement. Handling in excess of 1 million documents, the portal is on target to have 35,000 users by 2004. The Corporate Portal, will allow Veolia Environnement to leverage its name change and will facilitate enhanced communication within and across the group’s companies.