Case Study

Employee Portal – Improved Corporate Communication, Increased Efficiency, and Productivity

Business Challenges

Our client, a telecommunications company spinoff, sought to improve productivity by providing employees access via the web to corporate information and electronic resources across the enterprise. To achieve this goal, ArborSys was engaged to implement an elegant employee portal – for everyone to use, from anywhere – uniting a personalized, collaborative corporate intranet with other online resources. ArborSys began this initiative by working with the client to establish objectives for each of the services:

• Employee to Enterprise Services – for updating personal files and answering questions;
• Employee to Employee Services –to facilitate collaboration;
• Employee to Task Services – tools and applications specific to a job function;
• Employee Self‐Help Services – information/ benefits updates;
• Content Publishing – to allow employees to update and publish content on the portal.

The ArborSys Solution

ArborSys was engaged to implement the portal solution and provide training services for the content creation and publishing lifecycle. The ArborSys team executed the full project lifecycle including: requirements definition, design, development, integration, implementation, rollout, and support.

The portal supported the following key services:

• Integration of existing corporate resources such as the employee directory, HR information and self‐ service, company forms and reporting, company news and information, self‐paced training materials;
• Design and implementation of a corporate taxonomy for content groups and resources;
• Personalization at group and individual levels;
• Content subscriptions;
• Content publishing to allow employees to update or create new content, review, and approve the content through workflows, and publish it directly to the portal site;
• Intuitive management of the portal taxonomy structure.

The following technologies were employed for the implemented solution:

• Oracle Application Server, Oracle Portal Server; Oracle Identity Manager; Oracle DMS;
• Verity Search Engine;
• Verity K2 Intelligent Classifier;
• EMC Documentum Web Content Manager (WCM) for content creation, review/approval workflows, and publishing.

The employee portal was implemented within 10 months, and training was provided to content owners for the creation, review, approval, and publishing of content.

Value Delivered

The ArborSys solution fulfilled the client’s initiative for creating a corporate identity, improving employee productivity, and reducing training time and costs. To maintain content currency, end users were trained in the processes for content creation and publishing, enabling them to manage their own content going forward. The ArborSys portal became a central resource for the client’s employees, used by everyone, from anywhere.