Project of the Month

Sunshine Connections

Client:
Sunshine Connections is the product of a five-year partnership between the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) and Microsoft that provides Florida teachers and education decision-makers at all levels with information and resources to fuel the achievement of every student. Part of the Microsoft Partners in Learning initiative, the Sunshine Connections project vision is to work closely with educators in the State of Florida to design and deliver an integrated portfolio of applications and services to provide both state and local performance data and instructional resources. Leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), the Sunshine Connections team is following an iterative design process “transforming classrooms into 21st century learning environments and enabling teachers to individualize instruction for every student.”

Challenge:
The Sunshine Connections site was running on WSS 2.0 and was heavily customized. FLDOE was in the process of converting to MOSS 2007. As a part of this conversion, FLDOE asked IDEA II for guidance and development support to effectively brand the solution leveraging SharePoint Designer.

Solution:
IDEA II created a thorough Discovery Assessment report through a site walk through and internal interviews with the FLDOE. Further, IDEA II created an Information Architecture recommendations report that paved the way for the rebrand and creative redesign. IDEA II provided HTML templates that were then integrated into MOSS 2007, making it possible for the site to be updated by FLDOE as needed.