City of Reykjavík
Employees started using Facebook groups and other social media platforms to stay in touch with each other and to organise events. Therefore a new platform was needed which had all the required features. The City of Reykjavík needed a new intranet platform. That much was sure.
Goals for the new social intranet
The new platform should enable the users to communicate on a group level but also beyond that, with all other users of the platform. All departments of the city administration should be automatically connected but this was only the start of the communication between employees, not the end of it.
The intranet should feature an accessible and simple design while enabling the users to work with the platform without any complications or unnecessary steps. It should be possible for users of any age group or level of tech-savyness to engage with each other and participate in content creation and user interaction.
The expected massive data set the site would be representing should still be completely searchable and the architecture should thus be completely scalable to handle this load.
An architecture to last
Since the City of Reykjavík was already using Drupal for their public facing website they decided to use it for the intranet as well.
A professional, social intranet was built with Drupal (version 7). All organisations and departments within the city government can create their own pages. All employees can be added to those pages, no matter what department they are associated with.
The employee is automatically signed in to Drupal with the user data from their browser session, which is automatically extracted from the internal network. To make sure all the data is up to date it is synchronised with the HR management system of the City of Reykjavík. If the user is not in the internal network, he/she can log in with a username and password.
Advanced features for a modern social media system
With the social intranet all the users have access to a communication platform on which they can talk about everything regarding the City of Reykjavík. We also included functionalities known from social media like „commenting“ or „liking“. The user can also send private messages to an employee or to a group.
Not only known social media features were included: We also built a compliment function with which the employees can congratulate each other, if a coworker does a great job, its easy to congratulate him. This is a very nice and well used function.
To help the employees to find needed information as fast as possible we built a full text search for the entire website. All data posted online and all users are fully searchable.
All employees can set up their profile and add their skill set. Employees with special skill sets are also searchable and can be added to dedicated work groups within the intranet. But not only business skills can be found. The same applies to other profile properties, like hobbies and other interests.
Feature highlights
- Synchronisation of users with the HR management system
- Authentication of users with Microsoft Active Directory
- Structured roles and rules for users depending on their role in the organisation
- Expanded user profiles to show relevant data like contact information and skills
- Modern social media functionalities
- Advanced full text search feature
