Case Study: Citizen Schools achieves increased collaboration and cost savings with Avanade's SharePoint 2010 solution

Citizen Schools Increases Collaboration And Cuts Costs

Citizen Schools is a nonprofit that runs after-school apprenticeship programs in 40 schools to support students in low-income communities. Facing rapid growth and an unwieldy SharePoint 2007 intranet (over 60,000 documents, duplication, poor version control and no taxonomy), staff relied on email to share resources. The organization needed an intuitive collaboration platform and a fast rollout—about eight weeks—to support summer training and scale operations.

Working with Avanade, Citizen Schools deployed Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 with tailored templates, workflows and governance, plus troubleshooting support and Microsoft escalation when needed. The new portal launched on schedule, delivering improved search, content management and discoverability; within weeks it had 500+ daily users, ~100 sub‑sites and 2,000 page views, cut duplication and versioning problems, saved about $50,000 in upgrade costs, and created a scalable platform for innovation, partnerships and future growth.

Citizen Schools

William Nourse

Chief Technology Officer, Citizen Schools