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ABELSONTAYLOR, INC.

Creating Modern Collaboration Spaces for the Creative Mind

The Client

Creatives at AbelsonTaylor work across more than 250 agency projects per year. They often working across multiple teams, generating sketch and design file collateral that lives with each project.

In addition to a collaborative project space for Creatives, AbelsonTaylor executives envisioned an employee experience platform connecting all employees to company news, announcements, department files and agency resources.

The Challenge

Netrix designed and built Nucleus, an employee engagement experience, to automatically generate collaboration workspaces for project teams when the agency wins a contract. Nucleus doubles as an employee communication hub for company information and resources.

Each day, employees of pharmaceutical advertising agency AbelsonTaylor collaborate on new ways to communicate their clients’ visions of science changing lives.

Creatives as they’re called in the advertising industry, connect with clients through hundreds of thousands of emails, phone calls, files, spreadsheets, presentations and documents. They work with teams across departments to share updates and project-critical information.

AbelsonTaylor consulted Netrix about replacing a legacy file share with a collaborative tool to make creating, editing and finding documents easier on Mac and PC. This led to initiating Project Nucleus: an all-in-one intranet, collaboration hub and project space that integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft 365 cloud collaboration toolset of Office, SharePoint and Teams.

Automations in Project Nucleus

Automated custom provisioning and archival of templated, client-accessible workspaces in a secure Microsoft Teams environment
Agency consultants can directly import client emails and attachments to a project team conversation
Executives can roll up all project related documents in a filterable, sortable and searchable dashboard
By the Numbers

  • 250+ new project teams annually
    20+ department teams and communication sites
    Accessible by 400+ internal users and hundreds more clients
    33% Mac user base

The Solution

Project Nucleus was delivered using The Netrix Way: our transparent delivery approach that allows clients to adjust scope while maximizing their budget.

Netrix Way teams ensure quality and transparency with project management, business analysis, and quality assurance workstreams.

The Netrix Way follows Agile development best practices, adding a few custom measures to ensure projects stay on-course and on budget.

  • We sent our client stakeholders Sprint Summary reports with burndown, velocity, and backlog growth metrics following each sprint.
  • We hosted bi-sprint Executive Review meetings with executive leadership from Netrix and our client, providing an opportunity to speak candidly about team performance and project direction.
  • We held frequent internal demos for product owners and development teams, providing guidance on everything from backlog grooming and story-writing to best practices DevOps architecture and automated testing.

Nucleus — named as a nod to AbelsonTaylor’s exclusive focus on the healthcare industry — meets the hybrid, geographically-distributed workforce wherever they work, enhancing the “work anywhere” features of the Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace ecosystem.

We built the Nucleus intranet on the SharePoint Framework, ensuring compatibility with future Microsoft 365 platform updates and simplifying the extension of the application from SharePoint into Microsoft Teams.

By integrating automated provisioning routines, Nucleus department, project and intranet sites inherit branding, security and page templates from centrally-managed templates. This paves the way for branded internal communications and secure external collaboration.

Most importantly, Nucleus reinforces the AbelsonTaylor brand for its employees and clients, empowering the organization’s lifeblood — its “Creatives” — to consume agency communications and collaborate on project assets from anywhere, using a Mac, PC or mobile device.

The Result

Pains

  • Legacy on-premises document management system, built on an outdated tech stack, struggled to scale and lacked a modern user experience
  • Legacy communication site and content database did not integrate with the firm’s strategic collaboration platform, Microsoft 365
  • Provisioning communication sites and deployment application updates each required manual operation, creating resource-intensive processes subject to human error

Gains

  • 250+ communication sites already provisioned across departments
  • Flexible, scalable architecture supports expected growth to ~1,000 projects annually, across 14 departments and 400 users
  • Automated provisioning of project teams guarantees compliance and security, while minimizing human error
  • DevOps pipelines and automated integration tests streamline deployment and ensure quality

Experience The Impact

No matter what challenge you’re facing today, our team of technical experts can get you started on a path to a better solution. We’ll partner with you to: 

  • Understand your current technology environment
  • Interview key stakeholders to understand the root of the business issue(s)
  • Propose a solution with projected timelines, budget, and dependencies