State of Illinois – Get Covered Illinois

On July 14, 2011, Governor Quinn signed Public Act 97-0142, the Illinois Health Benefits Exchange Law. This legislation, effective immediately, enables Illinois to establish its own health insurance exchange for individuals and businesses with 50 or fewer employees. The Health Exchange Marketplace (i.e.: GetCoveredIllinois) was built to support State of Illinois residence in finding health care.

RePoint Technologies converted a custom design WordPress theme to a SharePoint 2013 site running in Office 365 without compromising the responsive design or any design components/functionality on the site. This conversion reduced hosting and overhead costs by utilizing client side techniques in SharePoint 2013.

Repoints insight, experience, and development capabilities provided a successful implementation that leverages first class front end development and design techniques with advanced SharePoint 2013 practices. RePoint utilized the new SharePoint 2013 Design Manager to produce custom Master Pages and Page Templates with custom JavaScript and CSS. This implementation allowed conversion of HTML based designs to SharePoint in order to leverage front end development work with layouts and CSS. This site utilizes advanced SharePoint 2013 techniques such as JavaScript Object Model APIs, JSLink, Display Templates, jQuery, Require.js, Bootstrap, HTML5, Modernizer and custom CSS3 media queries.

The end result of the project is a multi-lingual, responsive website that shows differently to fit mobile devices, tablets and the desktop.

Size and Complexity

RePoint Technologies migrated a custom branded, responsive, multi-lingual WordPress site with over 10 different purchased plugins to SharePoint 2013 using only html, CSS, JavaScript and out-of-the-box components in 3 months. All commercial plugins from WordPress were re-written using SharePoint client side concepts with no degradation in look & feel or functionality. The Illinois SharePoint commended RePoint in what was accomplished because of the complexity within the timeframe – “We didn’t believe it could be done in that time”, “We continue to be impressed with a number of the strategies you employed in the migration.  In short, you did a good job.  Thank you.”

Results

RePoint successfully migrated GetCoveredIllinois from WordPress to SharePoint saving the State of Illinois significantly in support of their public website SharePoint consolidation project. By eliminating hosting services for other technologies, the State is able to employee one team of admin and one hosting environment for all their websites. GetCoveredIllinos was migrated pixel perfect to the point where nobody at the State could recognize the difference between the SharePoint version or the WordPress version. In addition, State administrators and developers praised RePoint for a system that is easier to manage in SharePoint than it even was in WordPress based on the strategies and techniques employed.

Performance

Contract was executed with end of the year money on a tight timeframe that the State of Illinois created purely based on budget constraints. RePoint put together a team of highly skilled SharePoint developers that were able to implement a system in a timeframe that could have been scoped twice as much in normal circumstances. Our methodology of small, nimble, expert teams allowed us to complete the project on time and under budget.

Feedback

RePoint received 5 out of 5 rankings on every category in a past performance questionnaire. Comments received on that questionnaire include:

“The RePoint team was given in many regards an unreasonable task of converting a custom WordPress site to SharePoint 2013, with the expressed intent of maintaining the same look, feel and functionality of the existing site.  The team exceeded all client expectations, meeting every deadline and in many cases exceeding expectations.  Every task was completed at or above satisfaction and stated requirements.”

“RePoint completed full site migration in less than sixty (60) days with all expectations and requirements met or exceeded.  The existing site was built over a period nearly double the length of the time that RePoint was asked to switchover from the existing WordPress platform to SharePoint.  RePoint’s expertise and professionalism ensured that all tasks were completed at or above requirements and on time.”

“RePoints Project leader (Greg Galipeau) and developers were among the most responsive and professional that I have worked with in the fifteen years of Operations and Project Management experience.  They were responsive and respectful of all stakeholders and were often asked to attend additional meetings without missing deadlines; these competing requirements required them to communicate with the stakeholders and each other at a very high level, which they did exceptionally well.”

“The RePoint team was exceptional while interacting with all stakeholders.  Meetings were conducted in a completely respectful manner even during contested change of scope discussions.  Questions and inquiries were always responded to in a timely manner with a complete response included in that message, whether it be verbal or written.  The client never had to re-ask a question.  RePoint did a fantastic job of anticipating follow on questions or points of contention and clearly articulated responses to deal with those items.”

“RePoint are truly SharePoint experts!  They took a custom WordPress site with a number of custom PHP features and converted it to SharePoint.  End user testing proved that the end users could not distinguish between the different instances.  Furthermore, they completed the task with an extremely aggressive timeline and frankly, an unrealistic timeline given the amount of work.  Their technical expertise greatly reduced the overall risk of the project and made the stakeholders very confident in the ability of the team to complete the work prior to the contract’s expiration.”