We first looked at what staff needed from an intranet. Front of mind was that it had to be accessible for everyone, including our ground support staff who work remotely and only use handheld devices. The platform needed to be responsive, as well as allow users to be created directly in the intranet so it didn’t matter whether someone had an Active Directory account.
The selection criteria went through experience, cost and support provided. We chose Elcom because they had worked with other NFPs, they could offer us support after deployment, and the cost compared to a lot of the other vendors was quite reasonable as well, particularly as they offer an unlimited user licensing model. Their servers, data and hosting are also located within Australia, which is one of the usual requirements for grant applications we apply for.
It’s been a wonderful experience working with the Elcom team. They have been very accommodating, especially with new requests and changes from our side. The implementation has been smooth, and I’m really pleased with the intranet.
The new intranet is responsive, and our entire workforce can access organisation-wide information, knowledge, resources and news, all on their handheld devices.
We designed the intranet around the ability to find what people need. The homepage features quicklinks to common staff resources such as accessing training. Search can also be used to find and filter documents, pages and articles that are most applicable and relevant.
The homepage alerts function is great for notifying staff of critical business updates. We can link it to a page that is mandatory for everyone to read and then report on how many people have or haven’t read it, and group the data by states, regions and areas of work.
The Staff Directory integrates with Active Directory and includes additional fields for expertise, skills, interest and pronouns. This and our searchable directory of our office locations, service regions and their contact details, saves our heavily dispersed and casual workforce a lot of time in trying to find the right person to assist them.
The platform makes it easy to create information pages and news articles, add review dates and assign content owners. Publishers can also upload documents, set expiry/review dates, assign owners, and choose relevant metadata which includes selecting relevant compliance standards associated with the procedure and regulatory items that are external links. They can easily replace documents with new versions to retain existing metadata and taxonomy.
We have now met our goal of getting a user-friendly intranet up and running for all staff to access. We will continue enhancing the intranet as more feedback comes through. To improve the user experience further, we will be setting up security permissions to provide different views and personalised content to different groups. We also plan to introduce online communities for staff to connect and collaborate around topics of interest, as well as look at what systems we have and how they might integrate with the intranet.