Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) provides countrywide transportation planning
along with bus, paratransit and light rail services throughout Santa Clara
County, the largest county in the San Francisco Bay Area. As such, the
organization regularly collaborates with multiple outside contracting
firms.
VTA
employs Microsoft® SharePoint® to manage its communications and data share among
internal employees and outside contracting firms. While this solution is
powerful and robust, it does not offer an easy way to ensure security for
outside contracting firms. SharePoint is also cumbersome and time-consuming for
those charged with adding and managing new contractor log-in accounts. As a
result, VTA had to find a way to improve convenience and functionality without
bogging down its existing IT department.
The
Solution
VTA researched a number
of software packages as a means to enhance capabilities, ultimately choosing
XtraShare for SharePoint by RL Soft, a software development firm based in the
Silicon Valley. “After exhaustive analysis of all technology options, XtraShare
was the clear winner due to its centralized and delegated administration, forms
authentication, custom user properties and Excel user import functionality,”
explained Russell Liskey, business analyst supervisor for VTA’s IT department.
Mr. Liskey also touted XtraShare’s ease-of-use for both internal staff and
outside contracting firms.
The Result
VTA was immediately
impressed with XtraShare’s installation ease and speed, with absolutely no
issues arising during its initial testing. The solution’s centralized extranet
site administration freed IT staff to work on other more pressing deployment and
support issues. VTA also appreciated XtraShare’s email template functionality,
which has reduced repetitive administrative tasks, eliminated their associated
personnel cost and notably enhanced the user experience.
Outside contracting firms are now able to administrate and
monitor their own accounts on their time, with users finding administration forms
and login screens both easy-to-use and intuitive. Because XtraShare provides
custom user properties, VTA is now able to gather essential information about users
automatically during the registration process or during successive updates.
Extremely pleased with the results, VTA will be extending
the use of XtraShare for SharePoint to its internal Human Resource site to
ensure a second layer of security for sensitive employee data.