Delivering an essential intranet for Czarnikow Group

Noko has delivered a new intranet for Czarnikow Group using specialist planning expertise and the Interact Intranet platform.

Czarnikow had clear business objectives for the project:

• Provide staff with convenient access to key business information and services
• Improve internal communication
• Support the global workforce
• Help build a single company culture

In short: deliver an intranet essential to the daily working lives of staff.

Czarnikow Group is one of the most respected companies in the agricultural commodity markets. The business is driven by knowledge, expertise and information so delivering an environment that actively supports the working day is key to their competitiveness.

Delivering business objectives and supporting staff

"We decided that a new intranet would help us support a range of key business initiatives at Czarnikow Group, including improving communication to our global workforce, access to market reports, compliance and business information, streamlining business processes and offering internal support services" commented Stuart Durrant, CIO at Czarnikow Group.

For the first stage of the intranet project Noko ran user-focused planning workshops to understand key staff challenges and tasks.

"When planning an intranet our first objective is to understand staff work patterns and look to support the way people work within the organisation," said Chris Attewell, Managing Director at Noko, "so we used a user-centred design approach to discover more about staff and the information challenges they face."

Making the intranet essential – Understanding staff needs

The project objective was to encourage user adoption by designing an intranet that makes it faster and more convenient for staff to perform their key tasks and daily job role.

Noko ran user-focused intranet planning workshops with the Czarnikow intranet team, creating personas to understand key staff challenges, using reaction cards to assess brand and business objectives, and running card sorting sessions to plan the information architecture.

Several common staff challenges were identified during the planning workshops:

• Contacting colleagues, plus knowing their status and location
• Understanding if global offices are open or closed
• Knowing the time in key office time zones
• The current exchange rate for key currencies
• Access to market reports and industry news
• Being informed of company status information

Solving these issues became the focus of the intranet homepage, ensuring that staff had quick access to useful information. Other departmental sections were then created to house further resources, including ICT helpdesk information, updates and guides; HR forms, compliance documents and market information from the Analysis team.

Interact intranet platform

Noko delivered the project using Interact Intranet. Interact was the perfect platform because it is flexible, intuitive to use and offers rich intranet features.

"Using Interact Intranet has enabled our team to build and manage a fully featured intranet without the need for extensive technical development," commented Maggie Delaney, Intranet Manager at Czarnikow Group. "With minimal training it’s possible for our users to manage intranet content and features."

The results

By focusing on solving staff tasks and challenges Noko delivered an intranet for Czarnikow Group that was well received by staff and started delivering real value from day one. The Interact Intranet platform provides Czarnikow with a suite of intranet tools that solve key information, collaboration and business process challenges within the organisation, and will continue to expand with their business requirements.

"We’re really pleased," said Maggie. "The new intranet has gained excellent feedback from both management and staff and we’re looking forward to expanding it with new features and services over the coming months."

Following the successful launch Czarnikow Group are creating a roadmap that will introduce new Interact Intranet modules and further integrate the intranet into the daily working lives of staff.

Travel agent portal project completed for Carnival plc

Noko, working in partnership with Refreshed Media, have revised the Complete Cruise Solution travel agent portal to coincide with the launch of Carnival's new Academy incentive scheme.

Carnival plc, the operator of leading cruise lines Cunard and P&O Cruises, have recently launched a new incentive and training scheme for individual travel agents which required a redevelopment of their award winning cruise portal, Complete Cruise Solutions. The portal launch had to be coordinated with the new incentive scheme, updates to internal systems and a launch campaign.

Working together with leading Bournemouth digital agency Refreshed Media and a team at Carnival, Noko successfully planned and completed the web development updates to CompleteCruiseSolution.com, implementing new online features, integrating with Carnival business software and processes, and coordinating with all the teams to achieve a successful launch.

"We're really pleased to have worked with Carnival and Refreshed Media on this project," said Chris Attewell, Noko's Managing Director. "It's very satisfying when a project involving several teams and a major new service has such a smooth and successful launch."

Noko announces Interact Intranet partnership

We’re extremely pleased to be working with Interact as implementation partners for their powerful Interact Intranet software suite.

Why are we partnering with Interact?

Over the past few years we’ve seen our clients’ desire to improve internal communication, knowledge sharing and business productivity grow rapidly. Interact Intranet can play a key role in delivering these business objectives in a cost effective and manageable way.

The suite includes a range of advanced features for managing rich internal communication, company documents, business processes and staff collaboration.

We think Interact Intranet will suit many organisations’ desire for intranet software that is easy to customise, intuitive to use, puts control directly in the hands of the intranet team and has many interactive features, but is not technically complex to plan, deploy and support.

It also complements our experience helping clients plan, design and roll-out intranet and collaboration projects.

Interact Intranet software suite

Interact Intranet enables intranet teams to deliver powerful, feature rich intranet and extranet sites. It combines sophisticated functionality with ease of use, taking away the technical complexity of managing an intranet and allowing non technical staff to concentrate on the features that drive a successful implementation:

• Delivering relevant, findable and up to date content
• Allowing common business tasks to be performed online
• Delivering internal communication, news and updates
• Providing a social collaboration platform connecting people to people and providing spaces for teams to work together
• A site design that reflects the culture of the business and helps to foster cultural change
• Tools that help maintain quality and relevance as the intranet expands

Maintaining a healthy, effective intranet

Over time intranets often lose their effectiveness, suffering from complicated navigation and becoming bloated with out of date information. Interact provides tools to help you evaluate and improve the quality of your intranet:

• Content review dates – When a document is added to the intranet the author can set a review date and a workflow alert will be issued to the author at the relevant time
• Out of date content notification – staff can report out of date content to the author
• Content rating – staff can rate the quality of content
• ‘Best Bet’ tagging – Content authors can tag a document as a 'best bet', ensuring the information (such as a company policy) is easy to find via the search engine
• Search analysis – Helps authors understand what users are searching for and improve taxonomy. Staff can also report back to the intranet manager if their intranet search did not produce relevant results

The core system

Interact Intranet provides a whole host of intranet features:

• Easy to use content management and document management
• Control over intranet design, structure and navigation
• Intelligent integrated search
• Staff directory with rich profiles, custom fields and enterprise social features
• Integrated media manager with support for rich media
• Workflow and Forms manager – Reduce the cost of printing and processing forms
• Interactive social features including blogging, commenting, tagging and status updates
• Role based permissions
• Fully customisable homepages with over 40 pre-built homepage widgets
• Flexible permissions
• Multi-lingual support
• Supports ‘AA’ level usability compliance and has been audited and approved by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB)

Additional enhancements and modules

Interact can also be extended with additional enhancements and modules, including:

• Statistics and search analytics – You can easily find out which searches yield poor results so that missing content can be added to the intranet. Warnings are automatically sent when content or intranet use is poor and when content is missing keywords
• Absence manager – Manage staff absence with all the facilities of an advanced HR system. Includes reporting facility to examine absence trends
• Expense manager – Expenses can be added, approved and processed quickly and easily via your intranet
• Room and resource manager – Reserve meeting rooms and resources such as projectors, pool cars and refreshments. Set approval processes where required and automatically list available resources
• Support desk – Helps IT log, track and monitor internal support. Users can also log and track their IT problems. Can also be used for external support
• Advanced document manager – Increase your control of document versions. Check in/out documents, add watches and control security
• Training manager – Streamline training administration and employee development by organising and administering training courses and maintaining up-to-date records of staff development

More information

If you’re looking to revamp your intranet and would like more information or a demonstration of Interact Intranet please contact Chris Attewell on 023 8090 5555 or complete the contact form on our website.

Noko offers Umbraco open source content management system

We’re really pleased to announce that after a lot of research we’ve adopted Umbraco as our open source content management system of choice.

Why Umbraco?

We selected it for several reasons:

• Well written with great functionality
• It is straightforward for site editors to use and offers powerful web content management capabilities
• Doesn’t enforce any design restrictions
• Provides Noko with an excellent (and cost effective) platform for delivering interactive web projects
• Has a professional developer community (which we’ll be looking to actively support)
• Has an excellent range of site implementations (http://umbraco.org/tour/sites-running-umbraco).
• Is written in ASP.NET, which complements our implementation skills and experience

Why open source?

Open source offers a cost advantage of course but we’re also enjoying the approach and openness that a professional open source culture delivers. When it works (as it does with Umbraco), it works really well.

As experienced web developers with many years experience implementing web content management and collaboration projects it’s amazing to see how far open source .NET content management systems have come in the last few years.

Our next job is to start working towards Certified Solution Provider status!

If you’d like to learn more about the features the Umbraco team have recently uploaded an excellent set of videos:

• What is Umbraco?
• Webmaster Tour

If you'd like a demo of Umbraco's capabilities we'd be pleased to hear from you.

Revised website released for Touchstone Group

Noko has successfully released a revised website for the Touchstone Group, reflecting their new digital marketing strategy.

Touchstone are a leading UK provider of business software and consultancy services. The company recently revised their strategy to focus on three key areas: Infor FMS SunSystems financial management, PROACTIS spend control and the Microsoft Dynamics range of business management software.

The Touchstone site is built on the Alterian CMC content management system. During the project the flexibility of the CMS made it straightforward for Touchstone to restructure the site and write new content whilst Noko concentrated on the design and interactive functionality.

Noko delivered a revised site design, navigation layout and homepage. In addition the content management system was extended with plug-ins to enable site editors to build relationships between products and supporting content including news, events, case studies, testimonials and downloads.

The new site has a home page and product area that create a highly focused experience for site visitors. The site also delivers a platform for flexible content management, enhanced search engine optimisation and implementing Touchstone’s social media marketing strategy.

The website can be viewed at http://www.touchstone.co.uk/