Replacing a fragmented SharePoint 2007 site for the world's largest accountancy alliance
Praxity's website and extranet had grown stale on decade-old technology, with Flash-dependent features that didn't work on mobile and an advisor locator that sent users on a lengthy journey to find what they needed. We rebuilt the whole thing on Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, with a real-time global advisor search at its heart.
Blacklight have certainly gone above and beyond their remit to ensure a successful launch and given us what has been asked for, whilst both mentoring and guiding us through the process in such a way as to enable them to create what we wanted but found difficult to express. Their customer service is exemplary, Praxity would have no hesitation in recommending Blacklight's services.
The challenge
Praxity is the world's largest alliance of independent accountancy and allied services firms, connecting more than 30,000 professionals across member, associate and correspondent firms worldwide. The public website had two jobs: help people find the right accounting advisor anywhere in the world, and encourage new firms to join the alliance.
Neither was going well. The site had been built on SharePoint 2007 and had grown fragmented over the years. It looked dated, lacked the functionality the business needed, and relied on Adobe Flash for its interactive elements, which meant anyone visiting on a mobile device couldn't use the key features at all.
The advisor locator was particularly problematic. Getting from the search to an individual advisor's details involved far too many steps, and the underlying data was scattered across multiple locations with no central system tying it together. Internally, managing member information and running workflows was labour intensive and heavily manual.
What we built
We replaced the entire platform with a combined Dynamics CRM and SharePoint Enterprise 2010 solution, giving Praxity a properly structured system for managing their membership, their content, and their public-facing presence.
Member data moved into CRM as the single source of truth. SharePoint handled the website and member portal, with content publishing, access-controlled areas, events management and workflow tools all built in. The two systems work together so that content and member information stay in sync without manual intervention.
The advisor locator was rebuilt from scratch. It connects CRM data directly to the Google Maps API, letting users search for advisors anywhere in the world using multiple filters and see results instantly on a map. What had been a multi-step journey became a single, fast interaction that works properly on any device.
The result
Praxity came away with a platform that actually matched the scale and ambition of the alliance. The Flash dependency was gone, mobile users could access everything, and the membership team had clean, centralised data to work from rather than cross-referencing spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
What this delivered
- 01 Global advisor locator rebuilt with real-time map search and multiple filters
- 02 Member data centralised from multiple disconnected locations into one CRM
- 03 Mobile access restored after removing Flash dependency throughout
- 04 Workflows automated across membership, content and events management
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