California Department of Social Services
The SNAP-Ed State Plane Intranet/Exranet Portal
On an annual basis the California Department of Social Services is required to produce a 4000-5000 page document that represents the "State Plan" for the Federally funded SNAP-Ed (Food Stamps) educational program. The document is composed of budgets and narrative descriptions for all activities across all California counties. Historically the document was produced by massive document distribution (via email) to over 400 field personnel and CDSS staff. The Department contracted with JFD to produce a SharePoint Portal to facilitate real time collaboration between 450 individuals representing 5 agencies across over 50 counties to produce the plan in one fourth the time. The project was completed in just 90 days.
An Overview of the Project
This video provides an overview of the SNAP-Ed Portal for the State of California. This segment is part of the initial training curriculum for the members of the site. Here the overall philosophy of the site, its structure and features are introduced. This video series trained hundreds of users across the entire state within a few hours with no related travel costs.
A Guided Tour of the Complete Portal
Interested in seeing the structure and features that SharePoint can apply to a monumental document collaboration project? If so then this video is for you. Five agencies in each of 52 Counties with 4 layers of management participating in each Counties plan and budget approval cycle. No matter what your SharePoint project may be, this is an excellent example of what's possible.
An Overview of the Document Generation Process
This video is the part of the training series the presents users with the new "SharePoint Centric" process for the development of the State Plan. This one video segment communicates the transition from collaboration via "emails with attachments" to documents "edited in place" in SharePoint Libraries.