The Boston Red Sox recently beefed up their intranet portal to handle things like ticket requests, visitor credentials and invoice management. They did it using Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and it has saved the organization a great deal of time previously spent scanning documents, emailing and sending invoices by mail, reports Shane O'Neill at CIO magazine.

The intranet homepage for the team includes webcasts and a dashboard for managing game tickets. Red Sox employees are eligible for a set number of tickets each season, and before the ticket dashboard was added to the intranet, they had to submit ticket requests using a paper form. By automating the process with SharePoint, ticket requests can be handled much more quickly, making this the most popular feature of the Red Sox intranet.

SharePoint also helped the organization automate its billing process. IT director Steve Conley integrated the process with the team's ERP system. Now bills can be scanned into SharePoint and then lined up for coding, payment and processing, after which they end up in the ERP system. The automation has saved the organization from paying the late fees it often had to pay when bills fell through the cracks between spring training in Fort Myers and the regular season in Boston.

Another way SharePoint has made life easier for the Red Sox is by streamlining fan mail management. However, this process is not a paragon of automation. Summer interns toil over keyboards transcribing snail mail into SharePoint, where it is catalogued and forwarded to the players' email boxes.

For more:
- see Shane O'Neill's article at CIO

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