Abu Dhabi Gas Industries (GASCO) was established following the directive of late His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayhan, President of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, to utilise Abu Dhabi's significant resources of associated gas which had hitherto been flared during oil production operations prior to its formation. Today, the associated gas is converted into a wide range of marketable products, which are used domestically and exported all over the world.

This conglomerate is also a key member in the country's hydrocarbons product chain and thus plays a significant role in the economy of UAE. The gas production and supply form a vital input to the energy sector, strategically important businesses, infrastructure industries and other manufacturing industries in the country.

Business drivers

ITQAN’s main priorities while building the new portal was to study the current portal, understand its contents, the organization structure and categorize the content again to represent it in the SharePoint component.    

Solution  

GASCO was looking for customized and reusable components that are not available in the default installation. Mohamed Yasser, project manager at ITQAN says, “The reusability and the flexibility in the project enabled customers to have many themes. The other highlights of the portal include integrating some Web parts with external applications, customizing the search engine and enable indexing for the PDF and MPP files.”
The portal project took 5 months to complete and was built on SharePoint 2007 technology. SharePoint Designer (SPD) also was used to customize the look and feel of the site. Visual studio 2005 and SQL server 2005 was used to create Web parts and also use as a database server.  

Benefits

The old portal was almost static therefore there was no collaboration and real time communication between the teams. The new portal however changed that and was built according to GASCO’s organization structure. Through the portal employees are kept in the loop regarding announcement news, events, discussion boards and surveys.

GASCO has been active in IT projects and has put a lot of its resources in this direction. ITQAN has also worked with GASCO on its document management project. The company is currently going through a major expansion and modernization phase. Four mega projects with a capital investment outlay of $6.0b are in progress. These projects, set for completion in 2008, will make GASCO the largest gas processing plant in the world.