Customer Solution Case Study

Sports Organisation Streamlines Business with Digital Collaboration Platform

OverviewCountry or Region: United KingdomIndustry: Sports

Customer ProfileThe Football Association has overseen British football since its founding in 1863. The association has its headquarters at Wembley Stadium in London and has 43 affiliated county associations across the country.

Business SituationAfter combining its two main business units, The Football Association needed the right communication and collaboration platform to meet needs of its business stakeholders, employees, and regional offices.

SolutionThe Football Association implemented an initial deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that provides improved information sharing and access, while reducing the organisation’s postal spending.

Benefits Increased communication and

collaboration

“With SharePoint Server 2010, we have increased efficiency by reducing the time spent exchanging or locating information. That enables us to handle our role quickly, effectively, and confidently.”

The Football Association (The FA) oversees the game of football in England. In 2009, The FA moved its headquarters into the newly rebuilt national stadium, to merge with the Wembley Stadium organisation. This required integrating two existing IT groups that were using different versions of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Rather than migrate all systems to one of the two versions, The FA chose to move to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. As a first step, The FA launched an initial deployment with the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Concentra. The deployment has shown that SharePoint Server 2010 can improve communication and collaboration within the organisation. By moving to an electronic solution, The FA is also reducing its reliance on postal mail and courier services by 75 percent, which will save the organisation tens of thousands of pounds a year.

SituationFounded in 1863, The Football Association—commonly known as The FA—is the country’s governing body for the game, and is the world’s oldest national governing body for the sport. The FA not only promotes the playing of football, it also establishes the rules of the game, sanctions leagues and competitions, and oversees the administration of the sport’s referees and disciplinary system. Nearly seven million people in England play some form of football every month, and 125,000 FA-affiliated teams play in more than 1,700 football leagues.

In addition to its centralised staff and offices, The FA also has numerous locations around the United Kingdom, including county and regional offices. Although the county offices run as separate entities, the IT infrastructure for the entire organisation is centralised into one unit so that security, firewalls, applications, and email can be centrally administered. The FA maintains two separate intranets—one for the core business divisions and another for the county offices and an extranet for working with business partners. Each of the networks has different requirements for security, access, and functionality, but managing them centrally ensures a level of standardisation that simplifies management.

The new Wembley Stadium, opened in 2007 in northwest London, is England’s national stadium for football, and it is the second-largest

stadium in Europe, with a capacity of 90,000 people. The stadium is owned by Wembley National Stadium Limited, a subsidiary of The FA. In 2009, The FA moved its operational headquarters from Soho Square to Wembley Stadium, which required integrating the staff and technology of the association with those involved in running the venue. Prior to the move, The FA used Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at its Soho Square offices, while the Wembley Stadium staff used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The FA needed to create an integrated IT strategy that could support the needs of both sides of the organisation as well as the regional offices. “Although technology has been an important part of our organisation, we still used a number of old-fashioned, paper-based processes,” says Saty Gahir, Enterprise Content Manager for The FA. “This slowed us down and created inefficiencies and unnecessary costs for both the main organisation and the affiliated clubs. We wanted to find better ways to communicate and collaborate so we can further our goal of promoting and overseeing football in the United Kingdom.”

The FA also saw this transition as an opportunity to modernise the work environment of employees who are used to a variety of sophisticated web-based resources away from the job. “They use sites like Facebook and LinkedIn at home, and their kids have access to those resources at schools and colleges,” says Gahir. “We want

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those same tools to be available at work. We want our employees to feel that we are keeping up with the times and giving them the tools they need to work more productively and efficiently.”

SolutionThe IT group at The FA initially considered migrating the Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment to Office SharePoint Server 2007, but it also looked ahead to the possibilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. “We felt that SharePoint Server 2010 would offer the features that people have got used to using in other applications and on other websites, like tag clouds for searching document metadata,” says Gahir. “So we made a business decision to hold off on migration and wait for SharePoint Server 2010.”

Requirements and PlanningAs a first step in its SharePoint Server 2010 migration plans, The FA looked for a technology partner to assist with the project. Because The FA had a four-year relationship with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Concentra, the London-based consultancy was an ideal candidate. “The FA came to us with two main requirements,” says Paul Graville, Sales Director at Concentra. “They wanted to integrate the operations of their two businesses, and they wanted to use SharePoint technology to form part of their digital media and collaboration strategy. The timing was perfect to take advantage of SharePoint Server 2010.”

Concentra invited representatives of The FA and Wembley Stadium to a SharePoint seminar and also presented a personal demo to introduce the features in the SharePoint 2010 technology. After The FA decided to move to SharePoint Server 2010, Concentra helped it choose the appropriate features for the business and plan an initial deployment that focused on the Discipline Department of The FA. The initial deployment was designed to explore some of the new features of the product and prove the business case for moving forward with a wider rollout.

The Discipline Department consists of five full-time employees plus a number of volunteers. Among other things, the team is responsible for managing clubs’ challenges to on-field and off-field disciplinary actions, including player suspensions. The team’s decisions face intense scrutiny from the clubs, spectators, and the media, so it is important that those decisions are made as promptly and transparently as possible.

In the past, the work of the disciplinary team was complicated by the difficulties inherent in managing and exchanging all of the necessary information—including referees’ reports, challenge submissions, and video clips of incidents—in a timely manner. The team relied on materials being delivered by post or courier, which delayed the process and also resulted in significant costs. “It’s

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important to us to make decisions and correct mistakes as quickly and efficiently as possible,” says Mark Ives, Disciplinary Manager for The FA. “We had already implemented a fast track system to speed up the resolution of disciplinary issues, but we knew we could make the process even better with SharePoint Server 2010.”

The Initial DeploymentThe FA chose three clubs—one from the Premier League, one from the Football League, and one from the Conference League—to be part of the initial rollout. Beginning in March, 2010, engineers at Concentra spent two weeks developing a proof-of-concept for the deployment, followed by a month onsite at The FA expanding the implementation using agile development processes. The new system includes webpages that each individual club can use to communicate and share information with the disciplinary team, and a key feature is integration with the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in for streaming video. “A disciplinary case may have multiple associated video clips which can each be a few minutes long,” explains Gahir. “In the past, our users had to download an entire file to view it. For users at remote locations around the U.K. who may not have great broadband access, this could be time-consuming. But with Silverlight, you can stream the information, and that’s a big benefit for us and for the clubs. It has really been working well.”

Concentra and The FA designed the SharePoint Server 2010 solution to make it easier for users to share and access information. “SharePoint Server 2010 allows us to create document sets where we can store all of the files concerning a particular incident in a single place,” says Gahir. “It also facilitates the two-way exchange of information between clubs and the disciplinary team—they now have a place where they can easily drop all their documents, images, and other content. And with FAST Search and enterprise metadata management, we can make it much easier for all users to find what they’re looking for.”

Because disciplinary actions can be a sensitive subject, it is important to The FA that all information pertaining to cases can be stored and accessed in a secure manner that ensures that files and videos are only seen by authorised personnel. “Security is a huge requirement for us,” says Gahir. “And we’ve found that the forms-based authentication in SharePoint Server 2010 and integration with the Active Directory Federation Service makes it easy for us to create secure areas that can only be accessed by particular people. We can also offer single sign-on to make it seamless for users to move between sites without repeatedly having to log on.”

The FA also wanted to test the ways that integration between SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 can further improve collaboration across the organisation.

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“People are using the software to work smarter and quicker, it delivers great strategic value to business, and we have opened up new possibilities for revenue generation.”

Saty Gahir, Enterprise Content Manager, The Football Association

“In the past, our users had to download an entire file to view it.... But with Silverlight, you can stream the information, and that’s a big benefit for us."

Saty Gahir, Enterprise Content Manager, The Football Association

A key feature has been the simultaneous co-authoring capabilities provided by the two applications working together. “We have employees based all around the country, and our existing system didn’t have a user-friendly way for checking documents in and out,” says Gahir. “As part of this project we’ve tested co-authoring of Microsoft Office Excel documents to streamline collaboration, and we’ve shown that it works. Now we’ll extend testing to the rest of the Microsoft Office suite.”

The FA has been very pleased with the results of the initial deployment. “The pilot project was part of the business case to move to SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, and we’ve proved everything we wanted to prove,” explains Gahir. “People are using the software to work smarter and quicker, it delivers great strategic value to business, and we have opened up new possibilities for revenue generation. We’ll also use the digital media and social computing possibilities to build communities and strengthen our relationship with the clubs and with the fans. Our goal is to have a complete deployment by the end of 2010.”

BenefitsThe FA has used its initial deployment in the disciplinary department to investigate the ways in which it can use SharePoint Server 2010 to increase communication and collaboration, improve process efficiency, reduce costs, and provide

employees with better technological tools. The results so far make it clear that the new solution can have tremendous benefits across the organisation.

Increased Communication and CollaborationThe FA needs to work easily with clubs and local football associations across the country. In the past, The FA often relied on hard-copy mailings to communicate with all of these groups, but its new digital collaboration platform based on SharePoint Server 2010 provides new channels for official communications through security-enhanced portal sites. This will make it easier to ensure that all users have the information they need. “As an example, if we have a new campaign for grassroots football, we need to make sure that the same information—messaging, posters, logos, and other materials—gets to all of the clubs,” explains Gahir. “Now we can use SharePoint Server 2010 to build a centralised information repository where our users can always go for access to all the latest information.”

In addition to pushing out information to clubs, the FA can now receive information from the clubs more easily as well. “As part of the pilot deployment, we’ve allowed the clubs to both view and upload information,” says Gahir. “We’ve never before had a system where they could upload electronic files as well. This improved two-way communication will definitely

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enhance our collaboration with the clubs.”

Improved Process EfficiencyAs The FA improves communications with its clubs and partners, it is streamlining its business processes as well. For the Discipline Department, this means that decisions can be made more quickly and accurately, and this is important for a group whose work is so closely scrutinised by the press and by fans of the game. “Our role is to uphold the integrity of the game, and I want to make sure we have all the tools available to make that happen,” says Ives. “With SharePoint Server 2010, we have increased efficiency by reducing the time spent exchanging or locating information. That enables us to perform our role quickly, effectively, and confidently.”

Better Work ToolsBy upgrading its communication and collaboration platform, the FA is giving its employees a modern, robust set of technology tools so they can better do their jobs. “SharePoint Server 2010 is a markedly different application from the 2003 and 2007 versions,” says Gahir. “With all the new features and the integration with Microsoft Office, it gives people the functionality they need to work more productively and efficiently no matter where they are located. There is much more robust and dynamic search functionality, for example, with thumbnails, tag clouds, and a better navigational hierarchy. It makes

finding a particular document much easier.”

Significant Cost SavingsBy moving from paper-based processes to an electronic system, The FA is not only speeding up its processes, it is dramatically cutting costs for both the main organisation and the clubs. “We pay a huge amount of money in postal and courier costs every year, as do the clubs,” says Ives. “We will be able to dispense with about 75 percent of those costs, which will save us tens of thousands of pounds a year. And the disciplinary group is just one function of our business, so the savings will be greater as we roll out SharePoint Server 2010 functionality to more of the organisation. Getting rid of all that paper will also reduce our environmental impact, which is a great side benefit.”

“In this day and age, relying on the postal system to send out letters seems very outdated,” adds Gahir. “We can use technology for virtually all communications with the clubs—from email to video conferencing—and that’s where I want to move to. I’m extremely confident that this will be the right move, not only for The Football Association, but for the whole game.”

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“We pay a huge amount of money in postal and courier costs every year, as do the clubs. We will be able to dispense with about 75 percent of those costs."

Mark Ives, Disciplinary Manager, The Football Association

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Microsoft Office 2010 Microsoft Office 2010 gives your people powerful, timesaving tools to do their best work from more places. With new capabilities and insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, Office 2010 offers the complete package—with familiar, intuitive tools. Now you can express ideas, solve problems, connect with people, and create amazing results—in the office, at home, or on the go.

For more information about Microsoft Office, go to:www.office.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Concentra products and services, call 020 7099 6911 or visit the website at: www.concentra.co.uk

For more information about The Football Association products and services, call 0844 980 8200 or visit the website at: www.thefa.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Partners Concentra