The challenge

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) protects the public from crimes involving firearms, explosives, arson, and the diversion of alcohol and tobacco products; regulates lawful commerce in firearms and explosives; and provides worldwide support to law enforcement, public safety, and industry partners.

The Office of Science and Technology (OST) plays a key role in supporting ATF's enforcement and revenue programs. OST provides state-of-the-art and world-renowned science and technology applications to help reduce violent crime, collect revenue, and protect the public.

ATF needed help reworking the OST intranet portal, which lives within the main ATF Connect SharePoint site. Content needed to be reorganized and the layout required a refresh, all within their SharePoint ITAR environment. Integration with OST regional data, calendaring, news, and shared file were all a part of the solution, as was ATF system statuses, staff directories, and more.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives

Industry

  • Government, law enforcement

Project timeline

  • 6 weeks to MVP

Blue Sequoyah Technologies services

  • API integrations
  • CMS development
  • Gap analysis
  • Github source code repository management
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Technical research, consulting
  • User experience strategy and design
  • User interface design

The result

We worked with ATF and OST personnel to understand their work environment, roles, and needs. Through meetings with key stakeholders and users of the current platform, we were able to identify the gaps in their workflows, shortcuts that were being taken, and the information that was critical for daily operations. We took a common sense approach to layout and taxonomy to eliminate the need for shortcuts while enforcing compliance.

Our developers worked within the highly secured ATF infrastructure to build our solution using the ITAR subset of secured SharePoint API and CMS functionality. It was challenging, but we were able to deliver a great product in a short period of time.

Screenshots are of our layout concepts to redact Bureau and Directorate content.

Summary

  • Directorate portal hosted in SharePoint ITAR
  • News, files, and calendaring across U.S. geographic regions
  • API integration with Bureau system status services
  • Responsive HTML5 framework with a great mobile experience
  • Very happy client!