City of White Rock
An Engaging Employee Portal with Compliance and Productivity Tools
About
The City of White Rock is located in the southwest corner of the Lower Mainland in British Columbia, 45 kilometres from Vancouver and five minutes to the Canada/US border. The City has about 200 full and part-time staff.
Technologies
SharePoint Online
Power Automate
Power Apps
Power BI
Collabware
Business Challenge
The City of White Rock was using SharePoint on-premises for their collaboration portal and their employee portal. As with an increasing number of municipalities, the City wanted to move these services to the Cloud to reduce maintenance cost and improve ease-of-use.
Solution Highlights
To get the most out of the City’s investment in SharePoint Online, Gravity Union built a 'no-code' app for all employees, including field workers, to self-register for training. It was built in a few weeks (not months!) with Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate, and connected to SharePoint as a data source.
Power Apps for Productivity
Power BI to share data with citizens
An Engaging SharePoint Employee Portal
Use of the previous site had been waning and as part of the project, Gravity Union worked with the City’s IT and Human Resources teams to improve adoption. Gravity Union designed a more visually appealing portal with useful functions such as an employee directory, news, and events.
Power BI dashboards for web insights
Gravity Union also built internal Power BI dashboards for insights into website usage.
The City employs a virtual assistant on their public web site that allows visitors to ask questions. It notes their question, when it was asked, and where they were on the site when the question was asked.
That data is then exported and the results summarized in a Power BI report.
The Question word cloud comes directly from user input, without any intelligence applied, whereas the Key Phrase section has been run through Azure’s Cognitive Services Key Phrases API. The results are similar, but the Key Phrases section cuts through the noise on its own, while the Questions word cloud requires more manual interpretation.
These insights help content authors and owners of the website make updates to page content and prioritize areas of that address most users’ questions. This is a great way to use Power BI reports and dashboards to improve delivery of government services and information.
It’s easier to grasp the big picture when you move away from tables of numbers. Gravity Union helped the City build several Power BI dashboards with source data integration including:
Service Request report based on SQL database queries
Web report from Google Analytics APIs
Water Quality report which scrapes existing public PDF reports
Council report from a publicly available spreadsheet
These dashboards are part of the City’s Open Data website which allows anyone to view the dashboards with filters and interaction capabilities. Members of the public have the benefit of viewing data in the raw form or in a visual format with Power BI dashboards.
“Gravity Union is a key strategic partner in our rollout of SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Over the years, we’ve worked closely with Gravity Union on everything from the strategy, planning, training, to the implementation of Microsoft 365 including SharePoint Online, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI.”
— Chris Zota, Manager Information Technology at City of White Rock
Benefits and Results
Improved productivity: With SharePoint Online, employees can find information faster and build self-service apps to get work done
Increase in usage and adoption: Employee engagement with the new employee portal has increased, and more teams are adopting collaboration sites
Access to data: With Power BI, data from other systems is surfaced and easily accessed by staff and members of the public
More case studies
Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission (AGLC)
We helped the AGLC move to an employee-first modern intranet on SharePoint Online and Power Apps.
City of West Kelowna
The City of West Kelowna moves to Microsoft 365 as part of a broader paperless initiative.
The Township of Langley
We helped the Township migrate to Microsoft 365 for better access to council information and productivity improvements.