Lhasa Limited – Publication Approval System

Background

Lhasa Limited help scientists to accelerate discovery by enabling scientifically robust decisions to be made faster through advanced analytics.
The organisation produces 1000s of articles, white papers, publications and hosts events around the world.

These publications require management to ensure that they are published at the right time and in the right place.Back in 2015, iThink 365 were invited to help build and deliver a solution which allowed the Marketing team to run this process. The solution was built on top of SharePoint 2013 and could not use any custom code. We delivered a process which worked but had gaps.

In 2017, Lhasa invited iThink 365 back to help them deliver an improved process based on feedback that they had collated over the last two years.

Problem

A two-day requirements and knowledge sharing workshop was run with Lhasa’s Marketing Team.

The key problems that they faced with the existing system were these:

  • Approvals could only take place within the office.
  • Publications could not be reviewed outside of the office.
  • User’s filled in the wrong information at the wrong time.
  • User’s didn’t always fill in the right information and Marketing spent time resolving those issues.

Solution

Lhasa had recently moved to Microsoft 365 for email. iThink 365 team took the Lhasa Marketing team through a learning session so that they could understand the art of the possible with Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform. A discovery phase was run to build a proof of concept and a solution was built. The main problems stemmed from the issue that people couldn’t use the current solution when they were out of the office.

iThink 365 proposed a solution built on the Microsoft 365 platform which delivered the following:

  • Migrated the publication site from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online.
  • Built a SharePoint Online experience integrated with Power Apps and Power Automate.
  • Delivered a wizard interface which guided the users through the publication process.
  • Provide User and Admin Guides for the Marketing Team •Provide Third-Line support for the solution.

Outcomes

Since the new solution has been rolled out the following outcomes have been found:

  • Marketing do not have to hand-hold users through the process.
  • Users love being able to action approvals, review content from their mobile phones.
  • The time it takes for content to go through the approval process is greatly reduced.