Author: Dr. Shu Schiller, Wright State University
March 2010
Peerless Technologies is an award-winning 8(a), small disadvantaged business (SDB) located in Fairborn, Ohio, whose primary focus is on government defense contracts. It has customers ranging from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security and others in the government sector. Peerless currently has approximately 60 employees. More than half of these employees work at various locations while the remaining employees work at Peerless’ corporate headquarters in Fairborn, Ohio.
Peerless at any one time, works on 20 different contract proposals and 10 project deliverables. The typical scenario for Peerless and its project management process is to utilize a number of closely affiliated team member corporations and leverage their knowledge and experience to offer the best possible solution to the customer. In generating the most robust product for the customer it has been discovered that collaboration plays an extremely important business role. Collaboration is especially for a company such as Peerless who has a business model and works on numerous proposals simultaneously with a number of team members. Peerless was experiencing a significant collaboration challenge: work in a structured collaborative environment that enhances workflow, document control and efficiency internally and with subcontractor partners. This creates reductions in productivity, miscommunication, and multiple versions of artifacts floating around in the mix and no one knowing that version is the most current.
To address the challenges to our business collaboration, Peerless Technologies conducted a Gap analysis of their crippling collaboration issues. These issues include:
A number of collaboration providers were investigated. The collaboration providers that were investigated were industry leading vendors in offering state-of-the-art collaboration solution packages to their customers. It was after careful analysis and a detailed feature benefit comparison that it was decided to base the collaboration solution on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 framework. The architecture of the Peerless collaboration system was designed from its infancy stages to completion in a manner with the desired end in mind. All aspects of the architecture were given careful consideration with a majority of the effort being spent on security specifics on the system.
In the initial project scope determination Peerless decided it would design this project a manner that had emphasis on phased approach. The first phase of the collaboration project would be the proof of concept phase. The proof of concept phase would be to design collaboration sites for each of the functional departments located at Peerless’ headquarters in Fairborn, Ohio. These department sites are; Human Resources, Finance, Contracts, Business Development, etc. The initial site mockups were then created and given to the department representatives. These sites went through a period of refinement where the department representative would communicate the changes that they wish to make the sites and these changes were then made.
Once the initial proof of concept phase was complete it was then time to move the development into a more global approach. To complete this initial proof of concept phase it included a number of steps that all required careful coordination. These coordinated steps were to: configure the internal network in preparation of the servers, configure and install SQL Server 2008, configure an Active Directory server and instantiate the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 instance. All server components were installed on separate physical resources to enable the environment to be scalable in the future. With the initial collaboration environment function Peerless was able to create the proof of concept, departmental sites.
The departmental sites gave Peerless a gauge as to what techniques were plausible and that were not feasible. Each of the sites were created, tested and deployed to the collaboration environment. With the sites created, department representatives were interviewed as to how the new technologies met their department’s needs and what aspects needed to be enhanced. After a few iteration of the interview process the department sites were well-developed and highly capable collaboration tools ready for use by their respective departmental units.
With the departmental, proof of concept sites up and running the next phase of the collaboration implementation was to make the environment functionality accessible by not only the internal Peerless employees but also team members. To accomplish such a feat Peerless had to utilize an Active Directory instance that was placed outside of internal network. This external Active Directory was used to house the team member’s user accounts. In addition to the Active Directory instance a medley of other technologies were also put in place for this project including an enterprise-grade firewall appliance and using Microsoft’s authentication server, Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006. This was a vital aspect to the project because it allowed the Peerless employees to be segregated from the non-employee team members; this ensured the security of Peerless proprietary resources and information.
With the proper security measures in place the next round of collaboration sites were architected. The sites were developed using techniques in mind that allow them to be rapidly deployed into the production environment. This phase of the project was to develop sites that would create new communication channels for contracts either owned by Peerless or ones they are submitting proposal on. These sites needed to allow a number of different user groups from Peerless team members and would require highly tiered security architecture. A template site was created for these contract sites with a baseline configuration that was determined to be standard among all contracts. The individual contract sites were then given customization changes and any other contract specific attributes that were specific to that contract vehicle.
With the completion of the contract sites architecture Peerless is now running both collaboration sites for its internal functional departments as those for its current projects. There will always be enhancements and upgrades that will be needed to be integrated to ensure the highest level of security and practices are in place. Peerless is reaping the rewards of a well thought-out standards-based collaboration architecture. This architecture adds one more capability to their corporate portfolio. Peerless is excited for the possibilities of expanding these technologies to other aspects of the company.