When Microsoft SharePoint 2007 began pervading the enterprise more than a year ago, many IT shops looked at how they could use the platform internally to help their employees collaborate on key projects and store documents in central repositories.

But less attention was paid to how the platform could be used to build externally facing sites for customers, and that's exactly what Ira M. Schwartz, CIO of Allied North America, an insurance company that provides Risk Management for construction firms, saw as an opportunity. He wanted to provide more visibility to customers about the status of their interactions with Allied, and by analyzing that data, reduce risks and save them money.

Traditionally, Schwartz says, claims and risk management documents were accessed through a hodgepodge of phone calls, e-mails and spreadsheets, making it difficult for the customer to have a unified view of their relationship with Allied North America in real time.

"Spreadsheets were floating around and nobody knew what the latest version of something was," Schwartz says. "We wanted to make everything more transparent for our customers."

The primary reason for moving the data from these systems into a portal was two-fold, Schwartz says. One was to allow a place for his customers to track their transactions and interactions with Allied. Secondly, it would allow Allied employees to work with a Web-based, user friendly application that centralized data from disparate (and not the prettiest looking) enterprise systems internally.

"The legacy systems are deep and have a lot of functionality, but they are ugly and hard to maneuver,' he says. "I wanted to put all this into something that people could use."

According to Tom Schmidt, Allied's vice president of emerging technologies, SharePoint 2007 made the most sense because, from a development standpoint, Allied is primarily a Microsoft shop. Many of the company's legacy systems, including its claims management system, were developed on .Net.

Other systems that synced up well with SharePoint included a document management system developed by Epitome Systems, as well as an online certificate request and issuance system.

"Our familiarity with .Net development for both the web and desktop gave us a comfort level in developing webparts within the new version [of SharePoint]," Schmidt says. "Microsoft introduced a number of features with Sharepoint 2007 that are key to our solution, namely support for forms based authentication, web service integration and single sign on."