Olin Brass Case Study

6 Public Websites in SharePoint 2007

Olin Brass is one of the world’s leading specialty metal industry organizations. As a market leader, Olin Brass needed to redesign their site to be more professional, well-branded, easy-to-navigate, provide more value-adding functionality and be more manageable by non-technical staff. While they have an internal IT team that has implemented internal SharePoint projects, Olin Brass had not designed or developed any publicly facing websites based on SharePoint 2007. Since this is one of Habañero’s core strengths, Olin Brass engaged Habanero for this project.

The project is unique and complex in that the one instance of SharePoint 2007 serves up 6 distinct websites. Habanero designed a custom look-and-feel for Olin Brass parent as well as similar, but uniquely styled designs for Olin Brass’ 4 subsidiary companies. Each site contains separate design, separate navigation and user permissions are set separately for each business so Admin users can only access the content for which they are allowed. In addition, a separate design and site was implemented for Olin Brass’ parent holding company, Global Brass and Copper (again with separate navigation and admin rights). Finally, custom functionality including a database-driven Flash worldwide locations system with Web-based admin and interactive product calculator were created. These custom controls were developed and implemented as SharePoint Smart Parts so they could be dropped on any page in any site, increasing the value of each module.

Olin Brass Sharepoint Case Study (PDF)