The Boston Red Sox IT group had been left stranded on base by manual processes that handled ticket requests, invoices and fan mail. But now that they’ve built an intranet portal using SharePoint 2010 they’re speeding towards home.
CIO — The Boston Red Sox have many weapons to keep the team winning on the field: powerful hitters, a seasoned pitching rotation, and an experienced coaching staff.
Best Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com
But off the field — and in the data center — a key role player for the Sox has been SharePoint 2010.
At the SPTechCon SharePoint conference in Boston last week, Red Sox IT director Steve Conley stepped up to the plate for a Q&A with Microsoft’s (MSFT) SharePoint Product Management Director Christian Finn.
Conley’s IT group consists of six team members that serve 250 people in the Red Sox organization. For 81 home games a year, the IT group is “in charge of anything that has a plug,” says Conley, with a laugh. “If you have to turn it on, I’m probably going to get called.”
Boston Red Sox
Microsoft SharePoint
The exception, he adds, is Fenway Park’s giant scoreboard in center field, which is managed by a third party.
One of the biggest advances the Red Sox have made recently is to revamp its intranet portal, named “Red Sox Central”, using SharePoint 2010.
The team’s intranet homepage includes features such as Webcasts of game highlights, photo galleries, a ticket dashboard for executives to manage their game tickets and weather widgets for Boston and Fort Myers, Fla., home of the Red Sox spring training camp.
Slideshow: 10 Things We Love About SharePoint 2010
Within Red Sox Central, Conley — a Red Sox employee since 2001 when they “still had typewriters” — wanted to configure SharePoint to solve problems such as requesting and allocating tickets, getting credentials from visitors, and paying and organizing invoices.
[ For complete coverage on Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software — including enterprise and cloud adoption trends and reviews of SharePoint 2010 — see CIO.com’s SharePoint Bible. ]
On the SPTechCon stage, Conley explained how moving to SharePoint in the past few years has liberated the Red Sox from of its tech dark days of scanning and e-mailing documents, snail mailing invoices and waiting days to hear back about ticket requests.
Ticket Request Application
Red Sox employees are allotted a certain number of tickets for the season. These ticket requests had to be made through the Red Sox ticket office via paper forms, a time-consuming process that could take anywhere from hours to days.
“We were able to automate all that with SharePoint using an online form for ticket request and acquisition.”
As Conley expected, the online ticket request form quickly became, and has remained, the most popular section of Red Sox Central site for employees.
