REDMOND, Wash., July 6, 2004 — Nextel Partners Inc., the exclusive provider of Nextel digital wireless communication services in midsize and rural U.S. markets, has adopted Microsoft® Office SharePoint®
Portal Server 2003 to run the company’s internal corporate portal, helping improve customer call response, lower administrative costs, and increase its employees’ productivity and efficiency.
With more than 2,800 partners (employees) working across the country, connectivity and access to shared data is critical to Nextel Partners.
“As one of the fastest-growing wireless carriers in the industry, we quickly outgrew our intranet,” said Russ Donahue, Web application manager for the IT operations center at Nextel Partners. “We needed a new solution that would provide partners with more reliable, up-to-date information that supports our focus on 100 percent customer and partner satisfaction.”
The company selected SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for its reliability, low total cost of ownership, and integration with Microsoft Office and server technologies.
“Switching to the new intranet was seamless,” Donahue said. “Our finance, customer care and technical operations teams have embraced the new technology and are accomplishing efficiencies we didn’t even think possible.”
With the new system, partners can take advantage of searchable company information to help them work more efficiently. Customer service representatives get up-to-date, relevant information as much as five times faster than before, improving customer service response time by 20 percent. Customization and personalization of portal content enables managers to target information, programs and updates to specific partners based on their organizational role, team membership, security group and other functions.
Also key is integration of the portal with Microsoft Office programs, such as Microsoft Office Outlook®
2003, and advanced Extensible Markup Language (XML) features of Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003 that will enable the company’s partners to access and view data from many sources within their common desktop programs.
About Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Windows®
SharePoint Services is a Web-based team collaboration environment built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, a highly reliable and manageable platform. Windows SharePoint Services allows anyone with a Web browser to create and access virtual workspaces for managing documents, discussions, lists, surveys, and other important contextual information such as team member status and presence.Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organization, indexing and management tools for SharePoint-based sites and enabling information captured in sites to be published to the entire organization. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also delivers personally relevant information through audience targeting as well as personalization and customization tools. Flexible and robust application integration is possible via Web Parts and rich views of XML, and Web services are provided via an extensible user interface. The current release of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is part of the Microsoft Office System, designed to significantly broaden the customer and partner value proposition with a rich client-server, XML-enabled solution that connects people, teams and enterprises.
About Nextel Partners
Nextel Partners Inc. (Nasdaq “NXTP”), based in Kirkland, Wash., has the exclusive right to provide digital wireless communications services using the Nextel brand name in midsized and rural markets in 31 states where approximately 53 million people reside. To learn more about Nextel Partners, visit http://www.nextelpartners.com/ .
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Microsoft, SharePoint, Outlook and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
NEXTEL, the NEXTEL logo and NATIONWIDE DIRECT CONNECT are trademarks, registered trademarks and/or service marks of Nextel Communications Inc.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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