Case Study

Brief

To support a recent organizational change and new communications strategy, NHS South of Tyne and Wear consolidated three employee intranet Websites and an extranet into one corporate intranet, known as Keylink. As an integral part of their overall communications strategy, Keylink is designed to be the first “port of call” when their 3500 employees look for information.

Strategy

The four Web sites that NHS South of Tyne and Wear needed to consolidate offered a wealth of information, so a key challenge of this project was to ensure the new intranet made this information highly accessible and findable for all of its users who were accustomed to the previous sites. Along with the Web sites came multiple physical locations that employees needed to travel to. The new intranet needed to make information about and directions to them easy to access.

Execution

NHS South of Tyne and Wear selected Ektron CMS400.NET for its ability to organize content with its one-to-many relationship taxonomy and the ability to grow with the needs of their intranet. The WYSIWYG editor allows non-technical content providers to add news stories and new content in a word processor-like environment. NHS South of Tyne and Wear put CMS400.NET’s Web 2.0 geo-mapping functionality to use as well, to offer relevant information about their health clinics and other locations.

Results

The NHS South of Tyne and Wear intranet was mapped out in advance to ensure that it accurately reflects and meets the needs of the organization, based on key stakeholder feedback. This well-planned infrastructure takes advantage of key Ektron technologies, and the architecture was built based on the taxonomy functionality found in CMS400.NET. As a result, all navigation and content is organized in these one-to-many relationships, and employees are able to find the information in the ways they think of them. Search plays a big role in finding content on any intranet, and here is no exception. To aid users in finding critical information, they have taken full advantage of CMS400.NET’s “suggested results” search functionality.

Content is now updated in a timely and efficient manner. Now, news stories are added at least once per day, with requests to publish news information on the homepage up 500%, something that can be attributed directly to the success of the new intranet. Information is kept up to date by content providers who can add and edit content directly. New content is categorized within the taxonomy, so it consistently fits into the overall organization scheme.

CMS400.NET’s geomaping capability was used so that employees, who travel from location to location, always know where to go to find accurate directions, no matter what NHS location they are at. NHS South of Tyne and Wear uses it with Google Maps to give employees accurate mapping inside the intranet and taxonomy is incorporated to help them find where they need to go.