Last updated: 9th July 2026
Catholic Education Tasmania replaced a limited, in-house intranet with a single connected platform for staff across 38 schools and 4 central offices. The result was role-based logins, mobile access, and far fewer of the repeat questions that used to land in the same inboxes every week.
A Catholic education intranet is a secure staff platform built for a diocese or school system to communicate, publish policy and HR content, and help staff find answers without emailing a central office every time. Catholic Education Tasmania's version of this connects 38 schools and colleges and 4 central offices, and this article covers exactly how they built it.
- Replaced a limited, in-house intranet with one connected platform across 38 schools and 4 central offices
- Gave every staff member an individual, role-based login instead of a shared generic account
- Added a searchable knowledge base with a people finder to cut repeat questions to central offices
- Automated professional learning event enrolments and reminders
- Chose Australian hosting and a local support team as explicit selection criteria
Ask anyone running comms for a multi-school system what eats their week and you'll hear a version of the same story. The same question, from a different school, for the third time this month. Catholic Education Tasmania knew this problem well. With 38 schools and colleges spread across the state and four central offices fielding staff enquiries, the old way of doing things had quietly stopped working.
This article walks through what Catholic Education Tasmania actually built, why they built it the way they did, and what other Catholic education systems and dioceses can take from it. In 2026, this is a genuinely common problem across the sector, and there is very little written about how to solve it well.
What problem was Catholic Education Tasmania trying to solve?
Catholic Education Tasmania's previous intranet was hosted in-house and built for an organisation much smaller than the one it had become. Staff could only log in using generic accounts, and only from work. Nobody had an account that followed them, so nothing could be personalised to their role, their school, or what they actually needed to find.
The bigger cost showed up somewhere else. Specialist staff across the four central offices spent real hours every week answering the same questions from school reception desks, over and over, on top of their actual day-to-day workload. None of it was anyone's fault. There was simply no reliable place for a staff member to find an answer on their own. Regional and remote schools felt this hardest, since a phone call or an email chain was often the only option available to them.
Is a staff intranet the same as church management software?
No, a staff intranet and church management software solve completely different problems, even though a search for a "digital platform for Catholic organisations" will often return results for both mixed together.
Church management software, sometimes called ChMS, is built for the parish side of Catholic organisations. Tools in this category handle sacramental records, donor and stewardship management, and Mass or parish event scheduling. They are front of house tools, designed for parish administrators and clergy managing the community facing side of the organisation.
A staff intranet is built for something else entirely. It is about how the people working inside a Catholic education system, diocese, or faith-based organisation communicate with each other, find HR and policy information, and get everyday questions answered without waiting on an email reply. Catholic Education Tasmania's intranet has nothing to do with donor records or sacramental data. It exists purely to help staff do their jobs.
Most Catholic education systems and dioceses need both types of platform running side by side. One is not a substitute for the other, and confusing the two during a software search is one of the most common ways these projects lose momentum before they even start.
The same confusion shows up with student information systems too. A search for intranet software in an education context often surfaces gradebook and enrolment platforms instead, simply because they dominate the "school software" category online. None of that content addresses the internal staff communication problem this article is about, which is exactly why so few Catholic education systems find good guidance when they start looking.
What does a generic login actually cost a multi-school system?
A generic login means nobody has a real digital identity on the platform, so it can't personalise anything or track who needs what. Favourites, tailored dashboards, and role-specific knowledge bases don't work without a "you" to build around. Every staff member sees the same static front page and has to hunt for whatever applies to their school or job.
Microsoft's Work Trend Index found that the average worker receives 117 emails a day and gets interrupted roughly every two minutes during core work hours. Source: Microsoft WorkLab
For a central office fielding the same five questions from thirty eight different schools, that interruption problem compounds fast. A single hub that staff can search themselves removes most of that traffic before it ever reaches an inbox.
How does a staff intranet compare to the other systems a Catholic education office already runs?
A staff intranet, church management software, and a student information system each cover different ground, and most Catholic education systems need all three, not one instead of the others.
| System |
What it is for |
Who uses it |
What it does not do |
| Staff intranet |
Internal staff communication, HR and policy documents, knowledge base, event administration |
All staff across every school and office |
Does not manage enrolments, gradebooks, or parish finances |
| Church management software |
Sacramental records, donor and stewardship management, Mass and parish scheduling |
Parish administrators and clergy |
Does not handle staff HR, internal comms, or school operations |
| Student information system |
Enrolment, gradebooks, attendance, and academic reporting |
Teachers and school administrators |
Does not handle staff wide communication or a shared knowledge base |
Seen this way, a staff intranet is not competing with the systems a Catholic education office already has. It sits underneath all of them, connecting the people using those other tools rather than replacing any of them.
Where integration matters is at the edges. A staff intranet that can surface a link to the student information system, or point staff to the right ChMS record when a question crosses over, saves a small amount of friction every single day. None of that requires the systems to merge. It just requires the intranet to act as the front door staff go through first, regardless of which back-end system eventually answers their question.
What did Catholic Education Tasmania build?
Catholic Education Tasmania built a single Elcom intranet covering all 38 schools and colleges and all four central offices. It replaced the in-house system entirely rather than sitting alongside it, so staff had one place to go instead of a choice between an old tool and a new one. Four things made the biggest difference to staff day to day.
Individual, role-based logins and mobile access
Every staff member now has their own account instead of sharing a generic school login. That single change unlocked personalisation across the platform. Staff can set their own favourites, see content relevant to their specific role and school, and access the intranet from a phone or tablet rather than being tied to a desk at work. For teaching and support staff who move between classrooms and campuses all day, mobile access on its own removed a real barrier that the old system never addressed.
A searchable knowledge base with a people finder
Rather than staff needing to know which of the four central offices to call, or who currently holds a particular role, the knowledge base lets them search by topic and find both the answer and the right specialist to contact if they need more help. This is the feature most directly responsible for reducing repeat email traffic, since it gives staff a self-service option that simply did not exist before.
Local support and Australian data hosting
Australian hosting and a local support team were explicit factors in Catholic Education Tasmania's selection process, alongside cost and functionality. For a state-based education system, having support available in the same time zone and data held onshore mattered as much as any individual feature on the platform.
Built to grow with the system
A Catholic education system rarely stays the same size for long. Schools merge, new campuses open, and central office structures change. The old in-house intranet could not absorb that kind of change without significant rework each time. Because Elcom's platform is not tied to a fixed number of users or schools, Catholic Education Tasmania can add new sites and staff without renegotiating licensing or rebuilding the platform from scratch. That matters as much for a system with 38 schools today as it does for one with 45 in a few years.
"The Elcom team absolutely met my expectations. I knew everything was being taken care of, and the project was delivered on schedule." Jill Miles, Marketing and Communications Manager, Catholic Education Tasmania
How does one intranet stay usable across 38 schools and 4 offices?
It stays usable by handing content control to the people closest to it, not by routing every update through one central IT team. Catholic Education Tasmania now has 12 publishers managing content across the system, with security permissions controlling exactly who can publish what and where.
The events manager automates enrolments and reminders for professional learning days, a genuine admin burden lifted off event organisers. New staff waiting on account setup get their own onboarding pages, so they are not left with nothing on day one.
This is the piece most software in this space misses entirely. Parish and diocese management systems handle finance and sacraments. Student information systems handle enrolment and gradebooks. Almost nothing is built for the specific job of letting many schools publish their own staff facing content without a dozen different logins to a dozen different systems. Elcom's intranet packages are built around exactly this kind of multi-site governance.
Most Catholic education offices already run on Microsoft 365 for email and document storage, and integration is usually one of the first questions IT teams ask before agreeing to a new platform. Elcom's Microsoft 365 connector means staff can single sign-on with the same credentials they already use, and documents already stored in SharePoint do not need to be duplicated or migrated across to a separate system. That single detail often removes the biggest internal objection to adopting a new intranet in the first place.
What changed for staff and for the central offices?
The clearest change was in email volume. Central offices experienced a noticeable drop in the repeat questions that used to come through every week, freeing up specialist staff for the work that actually needed their expertise.
"A persistent challenge has been the reliance on email, with office personnel often addressing the same enquiries from staff. Having a central hub delivering information at the moment people need it saves a significant amount of time for everyone." Jill Miles, Marketing and Communications Manager, Catholic Education Tasmania
The flexibility worked both ways. Staff got faster answers, and publishers got a platform adaptable enough to handle very different kinds of content across a growing system, from HR policy updates to professional learning event details.
What about privacy and data governance?
Any staff intranet handling personal information for employees falls under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, so data governance needs to be designed in from the start rather than added later.
For a Catholic education system, that often means staff records, HR documents, and in some cases working with children check information sitting somewhere on the platform. Role-based permissions do double duty here. They personalise the experience for each staff member, and they also act as a genuine access control, so sensitive HR and policy content is only visible to the people who are actually authorised to see it. Australian hosting supports this further, since data sovereignty and local compliance reporting are simpler to manage when information never leaves the country.
Accessibility is worth planning for at the same time. A platform built to WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 standards ensures staff using screen readers or other assistive technology can access the same policy documents, forms, and knowledge base articles as everyone else. For a Catholic education system with staff across a wide range of roles and ages, this is not an optional extra. It is part of treating every staff member the same way, regardless of which school or office they work in.
What can other Catholic education systems and dioceses learn from this?
Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace research estimates that roughly 80 percent of the world's workforce is frontline or deskless, yet most workplace platforms are still built for people who sit at a desk with a company email address. Source: Gallup
Multi-site communication is a shared problem across the sector, not a Tasmania specific one. Most Catholic dioceses, education offices, and faith-based welfare organisations run a mix of paid staff, volunteers, and casual or relief staff, many without a corporate email address at all. A parish volunteer coordinating a weekend event, a casual relief teacher covering a single day, or grounds and canteen staff at a school are all real examples of people a typical intranet was never built to reach.
Adding another point solution on top of an already fragmented stack rarely fixes that. It tends to add one more login for staff to remember and one more system for IT to maintain, without solving the underlying problem of reaching people who were never issued a company email in the first place.
Consolidating onto one platform built to handle mixed staff types, multiple sites, and decentralised publishing tends to solve more of the problem at once. Catholic education systems considering this shift can start with Elcom's intranet evaluation guide or the intranet best practices guide before comparing vendors.
Timing matters too. If a new financial year is coming up, that is often the moment these projects finally get the internal green light. It is worth having the conversation before the budget cycle locks in, rather than after, since procurement and implementation for a system this size rarely happens quickly.
Other Australian school systems have made similar moves. St Ignatius College Riverview eliminated six legacy systems with a school portal, and OLSH College Bentleigh took a similar path. Browse the full case study library for more examples across education and faith-based organisations. Elcom works with Catholic, Anglican, and Uniting Church organisations across Australia on exactly this kind of consolidation.
How Catholic Education Tasmania's intranet story stands today
Catholic Education Tasmania did not set out to build something flashy. They needed staff across thirty eight schools to stop relying on generic logins and inbox chains, and start finding answers themselves. That is the whole story, and versions of it are playing out across Catholic and faith-based education systems all over Australia right now.
The same lesson applies well beyond education systems. Dioceses, Anglican and Uniting Church networks, and faith-based welfare organisations run into the same version of this problem once they grow past a handful of sites. Whether the entity is a group of schools, a network of parishes, or a diocese managing both, the underlying need is identical: one place for staff to go, built for people who do not all sit at a desk, that scales without adding a new login for every new site.
If it sounds familiar, a short conversation is usually more useful than another product page. Book a consultation to talk through what this could look like for your system.