Ivory Tower Internet Solutions has been contracted by Jeffares & Green to implement a countrywide secure intranet built on an open source platform.
Ever had a company administrator who works tirelessly 24 hours a day, never loses documents, responds to information requests from all over the world, keeps everyone updated on the status quo, manages your projects, interacts with your clients, tracks your time, schedules meetings and keeps your address book up to date instantly... Hah, impossible you say. Not so.
This new doyenne of super efficiency comes in the form of a countrywide secure intranet, built on an open source platform by Web and custom software developer Ivory Tower Internet Solutions.
An integrated office intranet was Ivory Tower`s solution, after researching the many technical and logistical requirements, to the request from Jeffares & Green to build a system that reduced congestion on its WAN (a national private network), and provided a set of standardised documents to all engineers and administrators working around the continent and on projects overseas, in branch offices and on sites.
Says Hugo Lambrechts, IT Manager of Jeffares & Green: "The intranet solution which Ivory Tower developed for us has helped tremendously to centralise all our ISO 9001 manual documentation. Now the whole manual is online, and only certain staff members can produce hardcopies from the online manual.
"Our staff CVs and brochures have been centralised, enabling us to respond quickly to project proposal calls. The intranet has facilitated the allocation of project and reference numbers on a national basis, at the same time ensuring full integration with the firm`s accounting system and project cost control.
"The efficient document management system allows all branches access to marketing material, human resources forms and company templates."
This custom-designed intranet provides management and staff with tools to manage documents across the country, to search the database of CVs, to add and monitor projects, and to provide access to the central quality management document (ISO 9000), which is automatically and continuously updated with up-to-the-minute information and data. A further option, not implemented in this instance, allows all communication to be tracked and tasks assigned, through private and public address books, while mobile users can receive updates via SMS.
Any corporate employee can log on to the Intranet using their network password, which gives instant access to announcements, contact details, company and private bookmarks, favourite documents and software, powerful searches and other tools such as a postal code directory, calendars, and instant messaging and SMS management.
Using a powerful replication model on distributed Oracle databases, multiple instances of the intranets run in all regional Jeffares & Green head offices. Small changes to the database are mirrored automatically, while larger documents are duplicated from the file system into binary tables in the databases. These are mirrored overnight when traffic on the WAN is at its lowest. Records of new and updated files are mirrored within minutes so that the latest version is forced across the WAN.
Another unique feature of this particular Intranet is that it enables colleagues to communicate seamlessly. For instance, an announcement on the WAN appears on the home page - this is communicated immediately by e-mail, and you have the option of using instant message or SMS. Colleagues working on projects can subscribe to any number of private, public and global announcement groups.
The intranet is built on a 100% J2EE compliant, Java Enterprise platform, so access to features and functions is controlled at a high level. Initially a mapping is made between Access Control Levels on the Windows, Unix or Novell domain controller, which may be modified by an administrator to offer increasingly high levels of control. Guest, user, manager, system administrator and super user levels exist for the user, contact, document, announcement, link and project manager roles.
A custom project management module is being built on this backbone - the advantage of this kind of semi-custom development is that by leveraging the information already stored, sophisticated tools can be added to suit any industry.
Knowledge document retrieval is one of the more frustrating aspects of most companies. A great feature of the document control process is that when a file is uploaded, every non-common word is indexed in the database. These huge tables are synchronised overnight, giving access to an extremely powerful search engine, which allows users anywhere to retrieve lists of documents. Standard documents in various formats (Word, PDF, HTML and so on), users, and contacts can be searched in this way. Industry-specific documents (QMS, CVs, projects, etc) may, in addition, be allocated specific categories and sub-category key words that can be added to the search.
The benefits of such a system are profound - increased efficiency, cost-saving, reduced network congestion, better communication, standardisation, improved CRM, improved management overview, task and project control, unified messaging and contact management, not to mention far less frustration.
Also, the benefits of using Java technology on an openLDAP / Oracle 8i / JBoss application server and a Linux operating system are that no software licence fees are payable, and hardware requirements are reasonably priced. Because HTML is used on the client machine, the development is platform independent, and can come in at as little as one-tenth of the cost of industry-standard distributed systems.
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