Microsoft Integrated Portals
Customer Solution Case Study
Wipro Knet Solution Transcends Teams,
Delivers Process Efficiencies, Saves Costs
Overview
Country or region: India
Industry: Information Technology
Customer Profile
Wipro is a leading integrated business,
technology and process solutions on a
global delivery platform. The company has
over 55 centers of excellence and employs
over 102,000 people across all group
companies and business units.
Business Situation
Wipro Limited has had knowledge portals
within its group companies since early
2000. It was time to consolidate and
upgrade the technology, business
collaborations and data management for
the portal. In addition, a need to create a
single platform for all companies was felt.
Solution
The solution was created on Microsoft
Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007, not
as a simple upgrade but a new
implementation that evaluated the newer
business requirements.
Benefits
 Significant increase in usability and
performance
 Quicker, more relevant search
 Usage of artifacts has doubled,
engagement increases to 60 percent
 Successful reskilling through e-learning
“More and more teams are turning to KNet and
leveraging on existing knowledge, doubling the
average monthly usage of documents and
components from 550,000 to 1,100,000 in just 12
months. This is a significant example where the portal
has streamlined a knowledge flow process that has
led to time and cost savings.”
Ved Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer, Wipro Global IT Business
KNet, Wipro’s Knowledge Management Portal, has been revamped
and extended across group companies and business units. The
solution, built using Microsoft® Office SharePoint Portal 2007 has
reduced complexity, streamlined operations, and the new tools and
technologies have enabled sharing of information and
collaboration. The organization has been able to launch a robust
virtual learning experience, re-skilling more than 30,000 members
of its development teams in under 8 months which has resulted in
improved productivity and proven cost savings. In addition, the new
search features and cataloguing capabilities have doubled artefact
reuse, saving even more time and money.
“The re-skilling process
has strengthened our
knowledge base in
existing and new
technologies and
domain areas. The
initiative has received
excellent feedback from
our customers within
Wipro who believe this
exercise is enabling us
to deliver better quality
solutions to them.”
Siby Abraham, Vice President – Competency
and Operations, Wipro Technologies
Situation
While Wipro as a brand is synonymous with
Information technology, the Wipro Group
consists of several companies focused on
consumer care to medical equipment and
biomedicine apart from technology. While
each business unit had its own intranet portal
for collaboration, Wipro wanted to bring
together all units under one umbrella.
Wipro Technologies and Wipro Infotech had a
well-established intranet since 2001. There
was a need to revisit the existing portal and
review all applications and business
collaboration. Over the years, the complexity
in business as well as the market dynamics
and technologies had evolved.
With increasing demands, implementing
these requirements in the existing portals
was becoming more complex.
Over the last decade, the employee strength
also grew from 10,000 to 100,000, a 10-fold
increase. To meet the demands of the
employees, as well as looking at the trends
for the next decade, Wipro wanted to create
an IT infrastructure for the portal that could
scale easily to meet today’s and tomorrow’s
needs.
As it looked towards the future, the
organization realized that social computing
tools applications would play a significant role
Wipro Group
Wipro Technologies is a leading provider of integrated business, technology, consulting, testing
and process solutions on a global delivery platform;
Wipro Infotech, an end-to-end IT solutions provider;
Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, focuses on branded retail market of toilet soaps, hair care
soaps, baby care products and lighting products
Wipro Infrastructure Engineering business unit is leader in Hydraulic Cylinders and Truck
Tipping Systems markets in India
Wipro GE Medical Systems is a joint venture between Wipro and General Electric Company, a
supplier for all GE Medical Systems products and services in South Asia
in the present and future. Hence, the solution
must ensure it supports Wikis, blogs etc.
Wipro culturally evaluates internal as well as
customer requirements on how it can achieve
more with less. It enables the organization to
remain agile and nimble even as it grows
larger each day. “Our aim was to provide a
state-of-the-art communication, collaboration
and information portal. And yet we wanted to
ensure that we did this most cost effectively,”
explains Laxman K Badiga, Chief Information
Officer, Wipro
Solution
Wipro’s Internal IT team decided to reexamine every part of the portal – technology,
applications and business logic and
collaboration needs. “The new portal would
not be just an upgrade of technology. Instead
it would set the benchmarks for knowledge
management for the next decade,”
comments Kenny Kesar, Vice PresidentInformation Systems, Wipro.
As the company reviewed its business needs,
and looked at the evolution of collaboration
within the organization, it realized that
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal 2007 also
provided the next generation portal
foundation. “Upon evaluation, we realized
Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 meets
several of our goals. It would enable us to
reduce complexity, streamline operations,
and it offered the new tools and technologies
for sharing information and collaboration that
we wanted to deploy,” comments Krishna
Kumari, General Manager – Information
Systems, Wipro.
The organization deployed the solution in a
phased manner over a period of two years. It
was not a typical migration, as each
application, section, and requirements were
being re-evaluated and applications re-
architected. The first of the key applications
that Wipro worked upon was the ‘War-rooms’.
A War Room is a virtual space where team
members located at different physical
locations collaborate in order to achieve a
common goal. War rooms become a
necessity when large teams which are
geographically dispersed need to collaborate
on a real-time basis to discuss, coordinate
and accomplish their individual but interrelated activities which lead to the common
team goal. . Instant messaging ensures that
team members can connect with each other
from the War-room itself. Since there was no
need to bring all the older war rooms, a need
to migrate the older war rooms wasn’t felt.
In the next phase, MOSS 2007’s latest and
far more powerful search engine was
implemented across the portal for Wipro
Technologies, Wipro BPO and Wipro Infotech
New features such as Data Cataloguing have
been implemented. This was important to
ensure that the information repository or
DockNet application could be organized
effectively. However, migration of data from
MOSS 2003 would have been a mammoth
task. To avoid doing so, both, the old
document repository and the new one, have
been made available through a single user
interface. This has been achieved through
integrated search. The enterprise search of
SharePoint 2007 indexes the content
KNET: Wipro’s Knowledge Portal
DockNet is the central repository of technical documents, Best Practices etc. which helps to
improve time-to-market for all projects
Komponents is the repository of reusable contents aims to eliminate redundant development
of functionality and hence realize business benefits
RFP Korner is the repository of Case Studies, Proposals and similar artifacts relevant for the
Sales and Pre sales community
Project Data Bank (PDB) aims to Projects teams to search open and closed projects details
from iPAT and E-CUBE.
War-room is a virtual space for team members to collaborate in real-time. It facilitates
document sharing, real-time on-line discussions, on-line updates to enable close monitoring of
team activities.
repository of MOSS 2003 and having a single
search scope defined to display the results in
a single search window. This ensures users
can access information, regardless of its
location.
Initially, the organization began with a single
server farm for the War rooms application.
This was to ensure quick roll out and to test
the new environment. “We didn’t want to wait
for the whole farm to be set up. Once the
sizing was completed, the server farm was
also set up in stages, as new applications or
re-architected applications were added. The
server farm sizing also depended on the use
of social networking tools such as IM, Wikis,
and Blogs, which were enabled with each
sub-site. The current farm consists of 5
servers – 2 web front end servers, 2
Database servers in Active/passive clustering
mode and 1 index server. The web front end
servers are load balanced. The various
applications in this farm has been enabled
through access over Internet though the
‘Intelligent Application Gateway’.
For each business unit (BU) and group with
the BU KNET has become a gateway to share
and inform the rest of the organization about
thier projects and expertise. Today, the portal
has close to 2500 group sites catering to
teams.
Account authorization for all employees is
managed through Active Directory®
integrated with the organizations ERP
solution. A federated model has been
established, to manage and administer the
portals for the business units.
Benefits
Significant Increase in Usability and
Performance
The new version provides a richer user
experience while maintaining the familiar
and consistent look and feel. It also
significantly increases usability by
integrating many new or enhanced features
such as email, blogs, IM etc. Introduction of
social networking tools in an enterprise
environment has created a new experience
for all.
In addition, business unit and team sites can
be easily created and with a richer visual user
experience. This is possible as MOSS 2007
comes with many more Web parts, which
enables local administrators to create and
manage individual sites.
“Customization of workflow based utilities
has reduced by a significant percent, with
out-of-the-box development, features as well
as maintenance possible,” Krishna Kumari,
General Manager-Information Systems.
Quicker, More Relevant Search
The federated search features available
within Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server enable users to filter down by
selecting the relevant category. “,” explains
Krishna Kumari, General ManagerInformation Systems.
Usage of Artifacts has Doubled,
Engagement Increases to 60 Percent
KNET led a business initiative for reuse of
artefacts for software development. In the
past, finding relevant artefacts was not as
easy. With new search and cataloguing
processes usage of artifacts has doubled in
the last 12 months. “More and more teams
are turning to KNet and referring to artefacts
that are relevant to project delivery. This is a
significant example where the portal has
streamlined a process that has led to time
and cost savings,” comments Vijayakumar
Kabbin, General Manager – Automotive and
Peripherals Practice.
Successful Re-skilling through unified
competency framework
For a large organization such as Wipro reskilling employees to newer technologies
becomes an epic task with a large chunk of
resources (people, money) blocked for a long
periods of time. With MOSS 2007, Wipro
embarked upon virtual learning in
earnestness through SHINE framework (Seek,
Hands on, Interact, Network and Enhance)
designed to reduce billability cycle time and
enhance overall competency of knowledge
workers. Subject matter experts (SMEs)
created content and through collaborative
tools for peer study groups and interaction
with the SMEs, Wipro has re-skilled more
than 30,000 of all programmers, developers
and analysts. “The re-skilling process has
strengthened our knowledge base in existing
and new technologies and domain areas. The
initiative has received excellent feedback
from our customers who believe this exercise
is enabling is to deliver better quality
solutions,” says Siby Abraham, Vice President
– Competency and Operations.
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For more information about Wipro products
and services, visit the Web site at:
www.wipro.com < Inputs from Strategic
Marketing group >
Software and Services

© 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published January, 2010
Products
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2007
− Microsoft SQL Server 2007
Hardware
Web Front End: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU
E5320 @ 1.86GHz/2 Physical Processors /
4 Cores / 4 Logical Processors / 64 bits
(Dual Proc, Quad Processors),8 GB RAM, 1
GB Ethernet NIC
 Index Server: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5320
@ 1.86GHz/2 Physical Processors / 4
Cores / 4 Logical Processors / 64 bits
(Dual Proc, Quad Processors),8 GB RAM, 1
GB Ethernet NIC
 Database Server: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU
E5320 @ 1.86GHz/2 Physical Processors /
4 Cores / 4 Logical Processors / 64 bits
(Dual Proc Quad Processors), 16 GB RAM,
1 GB Ethernet NIC
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