When it comes to your organization’s intranet, never presume users think the same way or have the same approach to finding information.  Not everyone will know where content belongs or who the content owners are, so as Information Architects our job is to provide users with different paths and entry points for accessing information, so that it’s quick and easy to find. Read more »

Superpartners are Australia’s largest superannuation administrator, with over 1700 employees, offices in every capital city and over $80 billion under administration for over six million member accounts.

Seeing as they’re not all that busy, they also decided to become an iD client way back in 2006, and have been going strong with their intranet – The SPot – ever since.

Due to the competitive and changeable nature of their industry, Superpartners must continuously evolve and adapt to remain at the forefront – creating a variety of unique communication challenges. They were kind enough to tell us their story, and how they overcame these challenges to become one of iD’s biggest success stories.

Superpartners have shared some seriously innovative intranet ideas in their new case study, with a focus on creating the intranet that works for your business, rather than creates work for it.

With an enormous focus on engaging employees and improving their day to day experience at work, Superpartners have created and continue to improve ‘The SPot’.

We’ve published their case study on our website to give you all a sneak peek into just how they did it – get your hands on it here.

A big thank you to Superpartners, and congratulations on your fabulous intranet!

iD has joined the likes of Cindy Crawford, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry working with global online shopping giant and Australia’s leading home shopping network, Guthy-Renker. The company has partnered with iD to work on their inner-beauty, their internal communications – building a new intranet to support their expanding stakeholder network and foster a more engaging company culture.

It’s just as well because considering the competition, coming out a winner in terms of outer beauty might prove challenging. We are yet to be elevated to supermodel status, nor do we have our daily trip to work interrupted by a pack of overexcited, screaming teenage girls complaining of ADWEBieber Fever. The working week is young though so we will keep an eye out.

Read more »

Having moved passed an almost irresistible urge to break into metaphor/song regarding Kathmandu climbing their ‘information management’ mountain, we’re feeling quite chuffed with our self control.

The outdoor clothing and equipment retailer – and iD client since 2008 – has tested us at every turn. Puns, similes and other ill-considered jokes such as ‘weathering the storm’, ‘withstanding the elements’ and ‘paddling their own canoe’ have proved equally difficult to ignore, but we have arrived safely at the end of their case study without being too cheesy.

With 90 stores and counting throughout Australia and New Zealand, Kathmandu is one of the largest and most recognizable retail chains of its kind. Plans to expand operations meant they needed a way to better communicate with stores. With new outlets opening every few months, Kathmandu was on the lookout for new and improved ways to properly support their retail network, including streamlining the management of internal processes and reporting – integral elements of any successful retail business.

The retail giant selected Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) with the aim of enhancing operational efficiency and getting the business fit for battle on the global stage in the years to come. Read the full case study, and get all the gory details of exactly how they did it.

Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) has stepped up to the social media mark and integrated micro-blogging phenomenons Twitter and Yammer into their iD intranet.

NB: We were forced to exclude Yammer from the headline, not for want of trying but simply because the verb associated with using it evades us at this point.  ‘Yamming’? ‘Yammering’? Either way, we simply could not afford a faux pas here.

ACA is the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body, responsible for the allocation of over $158 million annually in funding to arts organizations and individual artists across the country.

In the only known parallel drawn between them and the National Rugby League (NRL) – other than the matching sized acronyms – they have both recently upgraded to iD 3 and are doing some very exciting things with the new functionality available in the latest version of iD (see Friday’s blog post).

A client since 2008, ACA recently enlisted the help of the iD team to do a complete redesign of their intranet to coincide with their upgrade. They wanted to re-vamp the site’s look and feel, with the goal of pulling more people to the intranet, engaging them in an interactive experience and ultimately keep them coming back.

Having previously struggled with employee uptake of the intranet, ACA saw the release of iD 3 as the perfect opportunity to turn things around create a brand-spanking new site their employees would actually want to visit.

Click on the image below to see the new design for yourself.

Big thank you to ACA for allowing us to use this screen shot.

They say first impressions last. If so, the National Rugby League has put themselves in good stead for the future, with an all new login screen for their iD extranet. A client since 2008, the NRL has worked with the iD team from the get-go to create a unique look and feel for their sponsorship portal – reflecting their corporate branding and reinforcing the ‘personality’ of the organization for users.

They recently upgraded to the latest version of iD and naturally wanted to re-launch it looking better than ever. That’s where we came in. The iD Design Team was enlisted as official style counsel, with a whole host of new styling options at their disposal in the latest version of iD.

The extranet re-design started with their login page. While for most, the login screen may seem like little more than a stepping stone to the central system, in the case of an extranet it is the mandatory first stop for all users. Put simply – branding begins here.

Stay tuned for more details and screen shots of the NRL’s new extranet.

A big thank you to the NRL for the screen shot below.

Qantas subsidiary, budget airline, our client and all round crowd pleaser – Jetstar – know a thing or two about the challenges of catering to a dispersed workforce. At any given time,  they could have anywhere up to three quarters of their 3000 strong team on the move and in the skies.

To combat the difficulties, and subsequent inefficiencies associated with having an office that spans the Asia Pacific region, Jetstar purchased Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) in 2007 – signaling the birth of JEN (Jetstar Employee Network).

Since then, they have worked with the iD team to improve their intranet and ensure its ongoing success. It now forms an integral part of their business, with employees depending on JEN to make their often hectic lives easier. With limited time to access information critical to their job, ease of use is critical in keeping users coming back to the intranet. Jetstar needs to ensure employees can rely on JEN as the central hub of activity within the business – the place to go to get things done.

Jetstar recently worked with the iD Team to set up Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities for their users. Employees logging on externally to any of Jetstar’s internal systems are now required to login through JEN to do so – effectively establishing the intranet as the front door to the organization. Once employees have been correctly authenticated against Jetstar’s systems, they must pass a 2 factor authentication process developed specifically for them by the iD team. SSO ensures external access to Jetstar’s internal systems is a simple and secure process for employees – perfect for a workforce on the move.

SSO’s secondary function at Jetstar is to enable login credentials to be shared with their other internal HR systems. Once a user has logged into JEN, credentials are passed on to connected systems so that when a user clicks a link within the intranet, they are automatically authenticated and can move seamlessly into the new system without being required to login again. With SSO, users move seamlessly between applications without ever appearing to leave the intranet.

For more information on Jetstar’s intranet, see our Case Studies page.

Forgive us for the title; resistance proved futile.

In other news – as we have highlighted in our earlier posts, some of our clever clients are doing some really impressive things with iD CMS. The new functionality included in iD 3 seems to have awakened the inner-creative in clients all over the world who,  in conjunction with our design teams, have produced some amazing results.

One such example is Cummins Bridgeway, who has graciously allowed us to share a screen shot of their home page.

As a distributor for Cummins – global power leader and the biggest name in diesel engines in the US – Cummins Bridgeway provides products and services for customers over an enormous territory including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Cummins Bridgeway purchased iD in 2009, and since then have set about creating an innovative, fun and engaging intranet for their workforce of almost 1000. Working in conjunction with our design team, they have used iD CMS to create a unique and interactive homepage design.

The design goes beyond simply reflecting corporate branding, to actively support and reinforce company culture and inject a sense of fun into day to day happenings in the business.

Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the image. Enjoy!

Done anything exceptional with iD CMS that you’re particularly proud of? We’d love to see it. Share your success stories with us in the Comments section below.

We are currently in the process of upgrading a large number of our clients to our latest version – iD 3. As clients get to work with all the new functionality, they have offered us some great feedback:

“We love the iD-CMS tool. It is absolutely brilliant and one of our guys is well on his way with a new intranet design, which I must say is looking really brilliant.” – Mercy Health & Aged Care

“We are very excited as to the potential of what we can do!” – Coleman & Greig

It’s great to see clients enjoying the new version. If you are interested in upgrading please click here.

As one of the world’s largest multinational organizations, Shell faces the daunting communications challenge of connecting and engaging a global workforce of over 101,000. Spread over more than 90 countries and territories, these employees come from diverse cultural backgrounds and speak a multitude of languages. In 2003, it became apparent that a consolidated intranet presence was the obvious way to create the necessary synergies between staff around the world. They chose iD to power their intranet, and haven’t looked back since.

Read the full story on Shell’s communications challenges and how their intranet has evolved to date on our Case Studies page.