Non-profit organizations are often organized with a national headquarters that supports dozens to hundreds of affiliate organizations.  A common responsibility of a not-for-profit headquarters is to provide the systems, processes and information needed for the affiliates to grow, operate efficiently and remain in conformance with required policies and procedures.  In addition, affiliate organizations need tools to help them execute on their local projects and to communicate with their staff and volunteers.

Communication and collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint offer personal portals, intranet sites and team sites.  Extending these tools with the Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint provides a solution that can be used on a national or global scale with the system provided by a headquarters operation, including user management, delegated to each affiliate.

With Epok Software:

• Affiliate members are managed in a separate identity repository to eliminate the need to provision these users in the headquarters Active Directory.
• Personal portals are available to all users, even affiliate members using Forms Based Authentication for SharePoint access.
• An email self-provisioning process allows volunteers to be easily added to the system with minimal IT effort or oversight.
• Confidentiality can be enforced at the site, document library and document level.  This allows managers to control the access to affiliates, volunteers and other third parties  to only the information they need and that they are entitled to see;
• Controls such as automatic access expiration, watermarks, policy acknowledgements, access logs and others within the SharePoint environment dramatically limit opportunities for inadvertent disclosure and other malfeasance.
• Users can instantly view a dynamic list of all sites for which he or she has access authorization.  In addition, basic terms and conditions of access can be presented at sign-in reminding each user of his or her responsibilities and obligations regarding the information available. 
• Each affiliate can manage and maintain their own list of authorized users and groups for their sites, libraries and documents, which relieves headquarter’s IT department from the cumbersome task of managing accounts for affiliates and volunteers.
• Users from geographically dispersed offices, that may use different authentication systems, can single sign-on to SharePoint sites hosted in any office.

See Volunteers of America case study.