Overview

Export Finance & Insurance Corporation (EFIC) was established to support the growth of Australian businesses internationally. They are responsible for helping eligible Australian exporters to get export financing or take care of insurance needs. As Australia’s export credit agency, they report to the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Challenges/Goals

EFIC wanted to build awareness as an enabler of growth by providing specialized finance and insurance services to eligible Australian exporters. They required a website that would provide awareness and understanding of the EFIC solutions available to the exporters.

Solution/Approach

Working with both EFIC and their design agency (Sputnik Agency), Synergy worked to customize SharePoint to the visually complex design provided by the design agency. It was also our goal to leverage SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality, reducing the need for third party software purchases or custom development.

Synergy developed a custom navigation control for the site, including multi-colored tabs, fly out menus and accordion-style expansion on various pages. Custom .NET request forms were created for customer requests and subscriptions and were deployed as SharePoint solutions (.WSP). The data from the forms is posted to SharePoint lists and the information is relayed to the EFIC staff via Alert Me emails.

Results

Because Synergy was working on the project along with Sputnik Agency, all the work was done in a single, hosted environment. Sputnik Agency worked on the creative side of images and overall style, including Flash. Synergy was responsible for the styling of master pages, custom .NET components and the configuration and deployment of the site. A central ticketing tool enabled the teams from all groups to collaborate on issues.

The outcome of the collaboration was a well branded and rich design. The work also created a successful relationship between EFIC Marketing, their MIS department and the vendors, including Synergy. The collaboration created a digital CMS platform, using SharePoint 2007, that supports two sites for EFIC.