Branding & publications
Forms & detailed documents
Web & electronic publishingInterCall European Intranet
Found in: Web & electronic publishing
The brief
InterCall Europe are an audio, video and web conferencing company. They have two offices in the UK, plus a number of small offices across Europe. InterCall require a company intranet to allow the sharing of information between their different offices. They need a central store for all their internal documents to save time internally (as staff spend a lot of time emailing each other files), and to keep everyone up-to-date with the current information, templates and documentation. A key requirement is an intranet that InterCall staff could manage themselves. Work commenced October 2003.
The approach
The first stage of this project was planning what the site needed to contain. It soon became evident that a large amount of information was going to be stored and made available on the intranet. Therefore a simple site structure and navigation was vital. Two main ‘types’ of information were identified: - information as text displayed within a webpage, which would be read on-screen or printed out - files for download, which could be in a range of formats (Word, Excel, PDF etc). InterCall required that staff themselves had control of updating and inputting both types of information across the whole site. They wanted to allocate staff to maintain certain sections dependant on their knowledge and internal department. We discussed with InterCall staff their level of HTML expertise, and discovered that as expected, it was virtually zero. This meant we had to design a solution that required little training or expertise to use. Due to the company being split across multiple sites we also wanted the intranet to be very responsive and inspire confidence. A fragile or overly complex solution would lead quickly to nobody using it and returning to their previous ways of working. We discussed with InterCall ways they could move some of their existing internal processes onto the intranet and therefore free up internal resources. These included internal paper forms which were printed out, completed by hand then sent back to the relevant person. These would all become online forms completed on the intranet.
The outcome
We provided a simple, clean and consistent design solution for all the pages within the site. The navigation is grouped under department headings which allowed staff to quickly find what they wanted. As many of the pages within the site would contain large amounts of text to be read on screen, we paid particular attention to screen typography. The entire site is built using XHTML and CSS with only minimal use of images. This means that pages file sizes are small and response time is high. Also, any global changes required to the site can be applied quickly and easily. Through our experience of designing and building large-scale websites we proposed to InterCall that we use Zope to run the intranet. Zope is an open source web application framework, which we are very experienced in. Being open source software it does not attract any software or license costs. We worked closely with InterCall's IT department to ensure they were happy to run Zope on one of their existing servers and discussed any configuration and set-up questions they had. Within Zope we built two ways for InterCall staff to control the content of the site: - The first was an in-browser editing interface. To edit text within a page on the intranet, a member of staff opens a web browser and goes to the site. If they have sufficient access rights they see an option at the bottom of the page to 'edit this page'. Clicking that link opens a new window with simple Word like editing controls, and no HTML skills are required. Any changes they make are instantly updated onto the live intranet. - The second allows staff with access rights to upload files for download on a particular page. Again this is done through a web browser without any HTML knowledge, and staff can select any file for uploading from their hard disk or network drive. Finally we built online forms and services to allow staff to request information and submit data through the intranet. The results of these are either sent as emails to the relevant member of staff or automatically entered into databases. Return to web & electronic publishing
Found in: Web & electronic publishing
Recent Projects
The University of Reading alumni magazine
Grainger Trust forms
London International Festival of Theatre website
Routes to Reading
http://www.theimmigrantsproject.org/
School of Biosciences display panels
Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies identity
