With the help of demicon, an international financial services provider with more than 10,000 employees transformed their existing intranet system into a multifunctional and collaborative workplace within just a few months.
The Problem – An Inconsistent Work Platform
The various internal intranet systems throughout the international group restricted the cooperation of the employees. In addition, cross-departmental and multi-site collaboration of more than 10,000 employees was not an easy task; consequently, a workable solution was required.
The Goal – To Shape the Future of Cooperation
The solution to the problem needed to reflect the values and culture of the client as well as its digitization strategy. The project, therefore, involved merging the existing internal platforms (Confluence and the separate, proprietary intranet) to provide a unified and interactive collaboration platform for all the company’s employees.
While developing its own Confluence platform, the client was open-minded and had a progressive attitude towards the solution, which was impressive for a company of its size. Furthermore, cooperation is an important part of the corporate culture and ensuring success.
Since the implementation of Confluence in 2013, a large amount of data was accumulated: as a result, hundreds of workspaces were created for teams to undertake their projects and thousands of blog articles were written. Because of the complex work environment that included over 10,000 employees worldwide, the biggest challenge was finding a common structure that worked best. The more content and knowledge that is accumulated, shared or edited on a platform, the more important it is to have a flexible and easily comprehensible information architecture.
The Solution – From the Simple Intranet to an Interactive Digital Workplace
In order to improve the exchange of knowledge and, thus, increase the efficiency of cooperation, demicon opted for a software collaboration solution based on Atlassian’s Confluence and RefinedTheme, which is an add-on from the cooperation partner, RefinedWiki.
“Confluence is an ingenious, out-of-the-box solution, however, to make it work well at the enterprise level, a little more needs to happen – especially if you’re goal is to gain a high level of acceptance and have a solution that is easy to adopt. For a digital workplace with excellent usability and user experience, RefinedTheme, with its fantastic toolset, offers the ideal prerequisite for creating a better information architecture for users.” Lars Bachmann, the Senior Principal Consultant for Confluence.
To create the ideal digital work environment, both wiki and the company’s intranet were the basis for the new collaborative work platform. demicon knew that the restructuring of the different intranets to an interactive digital workplace could be quite difficult, as learned by experience with other restructuring solutions. The solution further included a combination of expertise, the features of RefinedTheme, and other add-ons (selection):
- Refined Theme for Confluence
- Refined Toolkit for Confluence
- Scroll PDF Exporter
- Team Calendars for Confluence
- Questions for Confluence
- User Profiles for Confluence
- Enterprise News Bundle
Custom macros
In some instances, however, the scope of these add-ons and plug-ins did not meet the individual needs of the company. To further enhance the collaboration solution, several custom macros were developed, including a news ticker that displays IT alerts based on the selected Confluence language, and the Category Search macro. This provides a simple and structured search feature on the category page that checks all spaces in real-time.
Individual corporate design
The important concept of the company’s overall solution also included an individual corporate design that greatly differed from the standard Confluence Default Theme. Simple design elements such as colour schemes, standard area logos, CSS style sheets, and header and footer content are easy to manage centrally. For example, even a “non-technical users” can aggregate additional colour schemes for different wiki rooms.
The result – A highly effective software collaboration solution
The solution resulted in a highly effective software collaboration that is based on Confluence and RefinedTheme and provides adequate support for the client’s more than 10,000 employees worldwide.
“Communication is everything, just do it!” – Take the next step in the digital transformation of your working environment. Design your individual Digital Workplace with the Atlassian Toolchain by simply using Confluence as the basis of your collaboration platform and JIRA and custom add-ons to individualize it.