Micro Focus OneSource CMS for SharePoint

About Micro Focus OneSource

Micro Focus is one of the world’s largest enterprise software providers, delivering trusted and proven mission-critical software that keeps the digital world running. Its pragmatic, disciplined, customer-centric approach allows customers to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace.

Following a large-scale merger, Micro Focus embarked on an Intranet consolidation project. All content is SharePoint-based, and previously different content owners had struggled to manually design sites which in the end weren’t user-friendly, lacked visual appeal, and were challenging to update. With over 15,000 Intranet sites, the team looked for a scalable solution.

At the same time, other parts of the organization faced their own, but not dissimilar content challenges. The Customer Experience team delivers a plethora of actionable and informative materials to all business functions, distributing them through email. Dr. James D. Borderick, Master Strategist for Micro Focus, explains: “While acceptable, email distribution certainly did not make things easy, nor did it allow us to embed other media such as video or charts. It also meant that when the data is updated, another large round of email would be generated, putting pressure on our network.”

Meanwhile, the Inclusion and Diversity team at Micro Focus struggled with their own content creation and distribution, as explained by Paul Morgan, Inclusion & Diversity Leader HR for Micro Focus: “We need a dynamic way to provide employees around the world with relevant and meaningful content that supports our company and employee commitments to a diverse and inclusive workplace. We need this to be visually stimulating, easy to navigate, and easy for the authors to create new content often and without having to start from scratch. All while maintaining a common look and feel with automatic company branding. We needed something that anyone could use without having to learn how to code HTML.”

Thankfully, the answer was found within Micro Focus’ own portfolio of solutions. Micro Focus OneSource CMS for SharePoint puts content and site creation in the hands of nontechnical users, simplifying Intranet creation whilst ensuring corporate branding standards are followed. The Intranet team set to work straight away and Cassandra Schelldorf, Security Communications Manager for Micro Focus, was clear on the ease-of-use benefits immediately: “OneSource CMS for SharePoint minimizes the time to market for Intranet sites thanks to its user-friendly interface, drag and drop capabilities, SharePoint integration, and WYSIWYG editors. Our team saved months by using OneSource CMS for SharePoint versus SharePoint out of the box.”

Dr. Borderick also put the solution to practical use: “Every quarter I release new data from our competitive benchmark program. The data cycle release dates are built into a OneSource CMS for SharePoint page with a countdown and a calendar integrated into a backend SharePoint calendar, giving me a fast and clean way to view the calendar at a glance. All materials are published through the WYSIWYG editor and the charts are either added via PowerBI or created using the OneSource CMS for SharePoint chart function. When the materials are updated each quarter, users receive a simple URL, saving time, energy, and most importantly, network bandwidth.”

Morgan agrees: “OneSource allows every knowledge level, including novice, to create a rich web experience for visitors and look like a web star. It provides many content choices that add significant depth to every page. Being able to drag and drop content onto a page without writing code significantly cuts time, even for the advanced user. OneSource has saved me hundreds of hours of coding. And even if I had spent all that time coding, I’m absolutely confident it still would have been a subpar web experience compared to what I have been able to create with OneSource.”

“OneSource CMS for SharePoint is faster than any other web publishing tool I’ve worked with. I also love the variety of content plugins which allows quality websites to be created in hours, rather than weeks,” according to Dr. Borderick.

Yordan Nikolov, a Lead Web Developer for Micro Focus, supports internal customers with their Intranet presence: “We want our customers to focus on their content without having to worry about the underlying SharePoint structure and terminology. OneSource CMS for SharePoint with its intuitive interface gives our users the power to present their content in the most elegant and effective way.”

Schelldorf concludes: “OneSource CMS for SharePoint allows content owners with no coding skills to create visually pleasing Intranet sites quickly and easily thanks to the variety of widgets available, drag and drop capabilities, and WYSIWYG editors. A colleague installed OneSource CMS for SharePoint and within just a couple of hours had a fully navigable and up and running Intranet site published and ready to go for her team.”