Reed Smith case study 

The client: Reed Smith LLP is a top-15 international law firm with nearly 1500 lawyers located in 23 cities worldwide. Reed Smith represents leading international businesses from FTSE 100 corporations to mid-market and emerging enterprises. With lawyers from coast-to-coast in the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Asia and the Middle East, their firm is known for its experience across a broad array of industry sectors.

The challenge: Reed Smith uses video as its core mechanism for training and internal communication. They wanted the ability to publish this video content and make finding it easy, coupled with a smooth playback.

Reed Smith use Citrix terminal services to deliver their main IT capabilities, but this technology choice was preventing effective use of their video library. Therefore they required a separate player that could be deployed within their Microsoft based environment to provide video viewing capabilities on a user's local PC.

The solution: Dot Net Solutions, working with one of their design partners, built a Silverlight video player that enabled Reed Smith’s existing video content to be more easily retrieved and viewed. This utilised their existing SharePoint repository which stored all their video meta data information. A Recommind search appliance provided indexing and searching of this content and this information was available directly from the Silverlight player search tool.

Users can build up a play list from categorised videos or from searches within the client interface. When playing the video, the player will stream video data from the local streaming service.

No information is stored locally with this solution, instead it acts as a proxy to the SharePoint system, reformatting and repackaging the SharePoint information for easy consumption by users. The net result is a great looking and easy to use application.