SharePoint

Blue Net delivers SharePoint consulting for Minneapolis businesses, as well as implementation services that drive operational success.

SharePoint Development for Eagan

Customer Success

Profile and Industry

The mission of Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeast Michigan is to provide households with access to nutritious food and related resources. They do this through collaboration, efficient operations, education, and innovative solutions, leading to a hunger-free community in southeast Michigan.

Project - Create a delivery management system to track the constituents who are enrolled in the program, along with deliveries, surveys and call logs.

Technologies - ​SharePoint Lists, PowerApps, and Power Automate.

The Challenge - Gleaners created a new food delivery program and was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track all data points. This process was hard to manage and make visible to the right people. Automated processes were also virtually impossible to trigger and manage due to the static nature of Excel.

BlueNet’s Solution - We built a complete SharePoint solution using only out-of-the-box features and functionality. The solution has multiple components:

SharePoint library for constituent enrollments

Healthcare partners provide Excel files with all constituent data, which Gleaners uploads and parses automatically and into SharePoint. All deliveries are then automatically created for each constituent.

SharePoint lists with custom views, formatting, and forms are used to track constituent data as well as related survey, call log, and delivery data.

Flows in Power Automate automatically create and schedule deliveries, record survey dates, and more.

All data points are now tracked individually, making automation and reporting a breeze. The flexible nature of SharePoint allowed Gleaners to make multiple enhancements after going live without any impact to their process.

Summary - Gleaners Delivery Management System created a flexible and efficient platform to track all information in one place. They can now spend more time serving people and working towards their mission of ending hunger in southeast Michigan instead of spending time and energy trying to manage backend data.

Profile and Industry

Our customer is a specialty law firm specializing in many different loan transactions including real estate acquisition, real estate development, asset-based loans, and construction loans.

Project - Create a loan package generator that automates and streamlines the process of creating and manipulating legal documents for certain loan packages.

Technologies - SharePoint and Power Automate

The Challenge - Johnson Bealka PLLC had a labor-intensive process for copying legal document template files and populating customer-specific data in dozens of places in each file. The process was tedious to perform and susceptible to mistakes.

BlueNet’s Solution - We built a complete SharePoint solution using only out-of-the-box features and functionality. The solution has multiple components:

SharePoint library with document sets

SharePoint library for finalized PDFs

Flow available to start manually to auto-convert all files in selected folder to PDF

Every task in the process is now automated with one central form to fill out. Once filled out, it generates all the documents for that specific loan package. This populates documents that used to be filled out manually.

Summary - Our customer’s loan package generator allows for much greater efficiency in the process, quicker turnaround time for the production of documents, and cost savings to the law firm and its clients.

Profile and Industry

Turck USA is a specialty manufacturer of sensor, fieldbus, and connectivity products. They’re also known for interface technology, human-machine interfaces (HMI), and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. Turck offers efficient solutions for factory and process automation applications.

Project - Create a tracking system to monitor and manage ISO training completed by employees.

Technologies - SharePoint and SharePoint Workflow

The Challenge - Turck did not have an effective method of keeping track of who completed training for their ISO 9001 certification. Training was tracked in a master Excel list and the process was completely manual. They were looking for a solution that automates the process and is more efficient and effective.

BlueNet’s Solution - We built a complete SharePoint solution using only out-of-the-box features and functionality. The solution has multiple components:

Document library that stores ISO documents

List that keeps track of items that needed training

Employee list that keeps track of the employee and their current job title

Lists that store training that is currently outstanding and a list of the history of all training completed

Workflows use web services to loop through other lists to schedule new training and auto-assign to employees

Every task in the system is now automated. When a document changes, a workflow will start and check to see if training is required. If so, it automatically creates training due tasks for each employee with a job role that requires training related to the document.

All documents are tagged with job titles so that the workflow can loop through the employee list and auto-assign training.

Dashboards were created for supervisors and managers, so they can log in and see at a glance what training is required for the employees they manage. They are able to mark off and complete training in bulk. When training is completed, they are moved to the employees history for auditing purposes.

Summary - Turck now has an automated way to keep track of and assign training to all employees. Audits can be completed in a fraction of the time now that everything is stored and organized more efficiently than in the previous master Excel spreadsheet. Built-in time stamps are used to keep track of completion dates, and managers can save time by going to their dashboard to get quick views of what is outstanding vs trying to make sense of a possibly outdated spreadsheet.

Profile and Industry

Impact Innovations, Inc. was founded in 1968 in Maynard, Minnesota. The company provides seasonal wholesale décor, fabric, and paper products to retailers. The company also provides custom marketing and merchandising products, in-store signage, merchandising displays, and loyalty card production for customers throughout North America.

​Project - Develop an internal/external portal for Impact Innovations to manage jobs, while also allowing clients into the portal so they can collaborate on documents, images, and the production process.

Technologies ​- SharePoint and SharePoint Workflow

The Challenge - Impact Innovations, located in Clara City, Minnesota, needed a way to effectively track and store data related to each job and order that a client placed.

BlueNet’s Solution - We developed a portal using SharePoint Online that allowed access by Impact Innovation’s clients.

The portal contains a list for jobs, library for artwork, library for accounting files, and list to manage inventory.

There are several approval workflows that automatically route new orders for approval and automatically adjust inventory when orders are finalized. Alerts are sent when inventory gets low.

The base site was saved as a template and a new subsite gets created for each client, so it can be customized with the client’s logo and handle other unique needs.

Summary - Impact Innovations now has a one-stop shop for orders, artwork files, and accounting files for their clients. It provides both Impact Innovations and their clients with a flexible and portable platform to collaborate and transfer data. This solution has eliminated hundreds of emails with attachments and potentially secure information. Impact Innovations and their clients now get alerts when key events happen and can visit their portal daily to see new information that needs their attention.

Profile and Industry

The City of Burnsville’s goal is to provide quality services and amenities for residents and visitors to enjoy.​

Project - Create a new intranet platform​.

Technologies - Microsoft 365 and SharePoint

The Challenge

Burnsville previously had an HTML-based “Employee Intranet” that could only be updated by a select group of people who knew HTML and understood how the intranet was configured. It was managed and changed via Microsoft Expressions, another product that only a few people had access to and knowledge to use. This made their intranet “stale” very quickly, as the time to make updates was limited and the entire site could not be appropriately maintained.

The old intranet did not have any document management functionality.

The old intranet did not have a usable “search” function and was messy and difficult to navigate by end users. Employees stopped using it.

Blue Net’s Solution

Use Microsoft 365 with SharePoint to serve as the new intranet platform. Blue Net helped create a new intranet from the ground up.

A new home page with content that was relevant to everyone in the organization. There is now a rotating news banner, featured links, dynamically changing “What’s Popular” and “What’s New” sections. These sections display popular and new documents from across the intranet. There is also a section to display YouTube videos and feeds from social networks such as Facebook. Departmental subsites–each department gets a subsite to contain work and information related to their area.

Multiple libraries were created to house documents that were before housed on a server and linked to from the intranet. These documents are now in a common area that can be searched, modified, and easily accessed by all users.

Additional metadata was used to further categorize the documents to enhance the visibility of each document, making them easier to find and interact with.

A common calendar was implemented to allow employees to put things on the company calendar.

This calendar has a custom workflow attached to it so managers can approve/reject items before they appear on the calendar for everyone to see.

Search and Usability: Blue Net created a custom employee directory. The employee directory, by default, lists all the employees in the organization with refinements to filter by department, job title, ask me about, etc. This directory also uses full search to look up keywords that might be in that person’s profile.

Summary - ​The City of Burnsville now has an organization-wide intranet that is more dynamic, more appealing, and much easier to manage. It offers document management, workflow processes, and more.

Profile and Industry

Medtronic’s medical technologies make it possible for millions of people to resume everyday activities, return to work, and live a better and longer life. We’re able to do this with the help of some very special people around the world:

Project - Customize the home page and a subsite for the Neuromodulation Sales Training department at Medtronic​.

Technologies - SharePoint

38,000 dedicated employees who share a passion to improve lives

Thousands of medical professionals who share their insights and ideas

Hundreds of advocacy associations that help us share information so people with debilitating diseases know relief is possible

Business Challenge - Blue Net was asked to customize the home page and a subsite for the Neuromodulation Sales Training department at Medtronic.

Blue Net’s Solution

Using our SharePoint consulting for Minneapolis services, we worked alongside the client to arrive at a design plan and layout for the home page and its subsite pages.

Details such as images, fonts, colors, and placement of web parts (including the search bar) were defined.

The placements and the look and feel of the top and side navigation bars were defined.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Profile and Industry

Since 1910, Berger has been delivering quality transportation services to individuals, corporations, and government agencies. Berger has over 100 years of experience as a one-source provider of transportation and storage needs.

​Project - Develop a purchase order submission and management system to replace an outdated purchase order (PO) process.

Technologies ​- SharePoint and InfoPath

The Challenge - Berger’s previous PO system was built on a platform requiring ongoing expenses. It was also outdated and difficult to change. Berger was already using Microsoft 365, so leveraging SharePoint for a new PO system had no extra infrastructure cost.

BlueNet’s Solution - The PO system we designed was almost an exact replica of their old system. Their old system wasn’t broken, so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We created lists to store branch, department, vendor, and general ledger information. A forms library in SharePoint was used to create the PO request form. It was customized in InfoPath and has data connections to the lists to provide filtered dropdown values in the form. The form has a user entry view and a print view that can be saved as PDF for long-term storage.

Summary - Berger now has a PO system that is integrated with their Microsoft 365 tenant and intranet, meaning they are no longer paying extra fees for the solution. It’s also easier to access since it is in Microsoft 365. Users can access the PO request form from wherever they have an internet connection.