Edexcel, a Pearson company, is the UK's largest awarding body offering academic and vocational qualifications and testing to schools, colleges, employers and other places of learning in the UK and internationally. Edexcel reviewed a range of platforms and technologies before selecting SharePoint to host their public facing website. The client had a requirement for hosting and exposing documents and course material that is relevant to the courses and syllabuses that they offer. They also required the site to act as a portal for policies, communities and past paper archiving. The site needed to adopt the brand guidelines set out by Edexcel marketing. It also had to have the ability to host more than a thousand .pdf documents and papers. Teachers, Students, Examination Officers, Assessment Associates, Heads of Departments, Employers, Trainers and Quality Nominees all needed to have access to relevant documents and pages through a simple search feature. The site also needed to be a marketing vehicle for new courses and syllabuses, so the appearance needed to be fresh, appealing and in keeping with their corporate brand. | |  |
The solution required a combination of standard features as well as some heavy customisation in order to achieve the functionality that Edexcel required. Some of the features deployed were:
- Customised Past Papers search
- Integration of Communities Server
- Customised look and feel (master pages and multiple page layouts)
- Customised document viewer functionality
- Flash design and integration
- Alerts features
- Site analytics and reporting
Utilising SharePoint’s familiar document management capability in MOSS 2007, Edexcel were able to collaborate internally to create and manage documents and then publish them to their website quickly and simply. With the heavily customised past papers search facility users are encouraged to return as they can find what they are looking for quickly. This helped to encourage repeat visits and user retention. The communities feature enables user groups to engage with Edexcel around specialised topics and subjects which is a more efficient and effective way of communicating with their (captive) target audience.