Cornerstones Education creates educational products for primary schools in the UK. By providing vibrant and exciting products to support the National Curriculum, Cornerstone has grown rapidly to better help teachers and children across the UK. 1,400 schools, 20,000 teachers and 300,000 children already use the Cornerstones Curriculum of 70 inspirational learning projects to thrive at learning.
The Problem
To support the growth of the organisation and the need to curate large numbers of documents and content critical to the business, the existing file server was proving inadequate for a variety of reasons. The limited search ability and lack of metadata to accompany the documents and content which were integral to the company’s products was proving inconvenient, as it was hard to find the right content for different products when the only way to add data to a document was by putting it in a specific folder. Additionally, the company’s need to store routine corporate documents securely and reliably wasn’t not well met by the existing file server.
The Solution
Blacklight provided guidance and assistance in moving documents from the legacy system to SharePoint online and Office 365. Our extensive knowledge of building corporate intranets allowed us to make actionable recommendations, and support and encourage best practices right from the start. This helped Cornerstones Education maximise the return on their investment, and improve their own in-house skills to use SharePoint effectively. By working closely together with Cornerstones staff it was possible to build something that was useful, and accessible and ensured the right people (and only the right people) had access to the information that they needed for the roles. Blacklight’s expertise with SharePoint and our knowledge of the constantly changing platform allowed us to suggest the most effective ways to store the thousands of assets used in the production of Cornerstone’s core products in a way that was secure, easy to manage, effective and future-proof.
The Benefits
Cornerstones Education was able to quickly gain from the many benefits of SharePoint, such as version control, the ability to label documents with useful metadata, and a superior search experience whilst still keeping the solution simple enough to allow content creators to concentrate on creating compelling content. Outside of the more specialist needs of content creation, users performing typical corporate document management tasks were able to take advantage of the highly productive features of SharePoint, adapted to their needs and aligned with the organisation’s ISO 9001 compliant processes without adversely impacting the user’s to productivity at their daily tasks.
Blacklight Software