COWI is a Danish consulting group with a team of 6,000 (employees working together with external partners) coordinating 15,000 projects on behalf of customers around the world. Slick communication is a fundamental requirement.

Using SharePoint as a primary communications management tool, the business runs a COWIportal intranet site worldwide. COWI has recently worked with Application Performance to integrate Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator to accelerate intranet performance, and WebTuna for real end-user performance monitoring.

We spoke with Frederik Bonde Nielsen, COWI’s Chief Specialist, Portal, to gain a better understanding of the issues that sparked interest in these innovative technologies and the benefits they are already seeing.

A world-wide SharePoint requirement

“COWIportal governs our communications process in all parts of the business – network news, the sales process, business support, IT and purchasing. Around the globe we are adding 4000 to 5000 projects every year, each of which uses a customised template in order to invite customers and external partners to collaborate. 

“COWIportal processes phenomenal amounts of transactions daily and globally, and the small incremental performance improvements have amounted to an enormous time saving and greatly increased productivity. In addition, there is increased confidence in the system and improved user experience – and hence greater buy in – all of which definitely improves our performance overall.

“We did an IT survey last December and some of the feedback we received said COWIportal was ‘slow’, he explained. “Now, slow can mean many things – it can mean the time taken to display a webpage, download a file or even having too many clicks to get to where you want to go on the Portal. Either way, we realised we needed to understand more about what our customers were actually experiencing and also improve performance in order to save time and to help our team become more effective in their use of COWIportal."

Improvement in performance

“We had already worked a lot on our own code to get performance enhancements but we realised we needed some new ideas; we then contacted Application Performance and agreed to install Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator to accelerate the sites.

“Already we can measure an improvement of 33% overall which translates into a 1 second saving per transaction locally (average page load times have reduced from 3 seconds to 2) and in the Gulf region in particular we have seen even bigger gains. So for our 500 employees working in that region Aptimize is helping ensure that they can adopt our intranet Portal even when they are constrained by slower networks with greater latency – which is a big deal for us.

“It takes time to change user perceptions – we estimate about 6 months – but I am confident that we will soon report improved anecdotal user experience which is just as important as the statistical evidence."

Understanding REAL end users experience

“Sitting in Copenhagen close to the datacentre it’s hard to fully appreciate that not everyone sees what we see or experiences what we do. Key to the whole improvement effort is to understand our users’ real experience and performance better.

“To do this, we originally used a PC based monitoring tool but this was not monitoring all our users and had to be moved from location to location which was simply not practical. When Application Performance introduced us to WebTuna we immediately understood that it offered the real end user experience information we wanted to monitor.

“One of the most surprising things was what we have learned about COWIportal use – for example, we now know that people from 65 countries access it every month; we simply had no idea before.

“Using WebTuna we can now monitor and track over time what portal users experience anywhere in the world, in real time. We are now able to better understand our users’ frustrations and we focus our improvements on what makes the biggest different. Continuous monitoring with WebTuna now means we can pre-empt issues and quickly work to resolve problems before they get out of hand.

“The guys at Application Performance have helped us implement two really important tools – Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator and WebTuna – into a complex system; they were really proactive at helping us get the installation absolutely right and are certainly part of our team going forward.”