Cardinia Shire Council

Cardinia Shire is a rapidly developing municipality located on the south-east fringe of Melbourne, between Western Port Bay and the Yarra Ranges. With an area of approximately 1,280 square kilometres, and a growing population of over 74000.

As part of Cardinia Council’s ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to move into a new building in Officer enabled the organisation to rethink the way staff work and service customers and the community. As part of this move, the council reviewed their current technology platform and its ability to integrate the proposed Activity Based Working environment. The Activity Based Work (ABW) environment empowers staff to work optimally, with an aim to remove the boundaries of traditional offices. The solution implemented would need to improve collaboration and communication between employees and enhance information accessibility to serve and connect employees with each other, from work and a social perspective. It was evident that their legacy environment would not be suitable to meet these strategic goals.

To address these needs and ensure a speedy deployment, Cardinia Council engaged FiveP Australia to implement an information management strategy based on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, FiveP has comprehensive experience, with its consultants having delivered SharePoint solutions since 2005. FiveP’s solution on the SharePoint 2013 platform had a flexible user interface, which is responsive in nature, with an ability to render itself either on mobile devices or desktop/laptops. Throughout implementation, FiveP’s experienced consultants worked closely with Cardinia to ease the integration of the new platform. Utilising SharePoint’s social functionality has resulted in a dramatic increase in users adoption as employees can easily connect with each other.

The partnership between FiveP and the CardiNet project team resulted in the FiveP solution being nominated for a number of council awards. The project won the “CEO Commendation Award for 2014” and the project further received an internal Quarterly Award. Both awards demonstrated Cardinia councils commitment to a flexible and mobile workforce while maintaining information privacy and security for the organisation, residents and customers.

The site now continues to grow and enhance the way in which employees perform their day to day tasks. The social aspects of SharePoint 2013 have been a clear winner with this intranet, as it is a vital part of people’s interaction with each other and helps with Cardinia’s overall knowledge management strategy.

FiveP continues to work in partnership with Cardinia as they look for ways to increase their use of SharePoint and improve collaboration amongst teams.