College of Medical Radiation and Imaging Technologists in Ontario Intranet

CMRITO

"CMRITO values the long-term relationship we have with Envision IT. We have found the team to be knowledgeable, responsive, and professional and always focused on finding the best solution for us based on our needs and capacity."

Caroline Morris, Director of Professional Practice

The Client

The College of Medical Radiation and Imaging Technologists in Ontario (CMRITO) is the regulatory body for medical radiation and imaging technologists (MRITs) in Ontario. The core function of the CMRITO Council is to regulate the profession of medical radiation technology as set out in the legislation. The CMRITO protects the public by setting standards of practice for the profession, by setting entry to practice requirements for medical radiation technologists and ensuring the continued competence of MRITs, and by addressing concerns from members of the public through the complaints and discipline process.

The Challenge

Envision IT has been involved in several projects with CMRITO over the years. CMRITO was initially looking for a solution to facilitate collaboration and information sharing for its staff, Council, and committee members.  They operated a small Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 environment which was heavily customized to integrate with Microsoft CRM Server. Their most pressing needs were around document management - improving efficiencies in the creation and sharing of documents, implementing a disaster recovery process and improving how documents and emails were located and shared. They also needed to improve management reporting, and to develop an effective process for maintaining calendars for Council, Committees, and staff.

The Solution

The Envision IT-developed Intranet has a publishing site for general staff information (announcements, staff calendars, links, etc.) and sits on top of a number of collaboration sites. Envision IT made extensive use of metadata and content types (there were about 150 of them to start.) The Intranet launched with a fairly small sub-section of sites visible to the majority of staff, and they continued to open up other areas through a controlled approach to collaboration.

The portal has become CMRITO's primary method of internal communication, with information that is always current and easy to find. Documents are stored in a central repository and multiple contributors can easily coordinate on their development, with full version and approval control. Staff has access to more resources through shared calendars, committee sites, announcements boards and news feeds. Superior records management is a key function of the intranet. A records retention policy ensures that records are identified and removed according to their schedule, and any type of content can be locked down as a record. Management have access to key report data in order to make informed decisions.

Following the initial Intranet implementation, a number of additional projects were undertaken.

Online Service Manual

CMRITO had long been interested in creating an online manual to document its many processes.  Envision IT was contracted to deliver what has come to be known as the Online Service Manual (OSM).

The Online Service Manual is many pages of written guidelines, policies, procedures, and instructions for CMRITO staff to conduct their duties.  It was expected that the manual would come together over time, through the efforts of all staff.  Ultimately, the manual has become an online, searchable series of web pages within the existing CMRITO Intranet site.

At a high-level, the Online Service Manual comprises the following components:

  • Tables of Contents were set up and are dynamically maintained for the Guide and each major Section
  • Page layouts were created with the ability to advance to the next page, as well as return to previous page
  • A “Printer Friendly" view was created, including functionality to print entire sections individually
  • A new Search scope (specific to the Online Service Manual) was created to allow a user to search only the manual, or to search the entire Intranet.

The Upgrade and Office 365 Migration

After running SharePoint for nearly five years, CMRITO participated in Envision IT's Health Check Service in order to gain an understanding of the overall health of the SharePoint environment and mitigate potential problems with the continued use of the portal. One of the key recommendations of the Health Check was that the portal should be moved over to a new highly available SharePoint farm environment to guarantee optimal performance.

With SharePoint Online now available and Canadian data centres coming soon, CMRITO was keen to take advantage of the cost savings and increased functionality that Office 365 provides. Envision IT began with a test migration of CMRITO's SharePoint Collaboration portal to Office 365. This included extensive tenant configuration and integration with CRM as well as AD synchronization. A second phase was later concluded to migrate the portal to a new tenant within a Canadian data centre, ensuring complete data residency. It is expected that Office 365 will continue to evolve the intranet, and plans are already in place for the introduction of Office 365 Groups, which will provide more effective collaboration.

Records Centre Implementation

As an enhancement to the portal's records management functionality, Envision IT implemented a SharePoint Records Centre for CMRITO. This provides a method to scan and classify existing paper records into the Records Centre. This will eventually eliminate the need for maintaining any paper documentation. The development was initially carried out on an Office 365 Developer tenant, with the final implementation completed once CMRITO migrated its SharePoint implementation to a production Office 365 environment.

Human Resources Portal

CMRITO recognised a need to provide a space for managing staff records and other employment information. Envision IT assisted with the development of a portal for staff that includes individualised pages for each staff member that has restricted access to only authorised users, based on security roles. The portal provides links to mandatory training, links to benefit plan providers, and links to a variety of forms as well as a document library.  The portal also includes a vacation request feature that uses SharePoint workflows to request, approve and track staff vacations and other absences.