Plone Intranet for Staff Training and Engagement

This Fortune 1,000 Diet and Lifestyle Management company needed a website that would bridge the gap among their geographically distributed staff. Utilizing Plone's content management system and custom add-on products, Six Feet Up successfully launched a solid intranet built to support the company's long term growth and enhancement strategies.

Operating in more than 25 counties, with over 300 meetings servicing roughly 900 members per week, the franchise needed a way to distribute training materials, company policies, and staff communications to their geographically distributed staff.

Six Feet Up planned and implemented a private, centralized Plone-based intranet solution to service the needs of the user audiences. Six Feet Up succeeded in putting a solid foundation in place to meet the franchise's immediate staff training and communication needs, with expectations to enhance the site overtime to include online class registration and payment, member payments, merchandise sales, and reporting.

1. Custom Workflow & Notifications

A custom workflow was created that allows site editors to publish content to selected groups only rather than all logged in users. In addition, a custom email notification system was developed that allows users to receive email notification about published updates of content in specific sections of the site. This allows the franchise to notify users of newly added and updated content without relying on a single site administrator to post content and without requiring staff to visit the site.

Users can set their notification preferences on their profile to be one of the following: Immediately, Daily, or Weekly. The notifications system was built to respect the workflow rules, so that users only receive email notification for the items that they have permission to view.

2. Interactive & Engaging Content

Several interactive features were added to the website to promote user engagement, including commenting, embedded video, and ranking.

Commenting

Users have the ability to comment and reply to comments in most areas of the site. This allows the franchise to facilitate conversation with and between its staff members and solicit feedback that was previously more difficult across locations.

Embedded Video

Site editors can embed video files in any rich-text area of the site. Site users can view the video directly on the site by clicking on the video image.

Six Feet Up leveraged the collective.flowplayer add-on for this implementation.

Content Ranking

Within the discussion section of the site, users have the option to rate content by choosing thumbs up or thumbs down icons. Site editors have the ability to mark items as important. The Discussion landing page displays in a tabular fashion that allows users to easily switch between listing views for the Most Recent, Most Important, and Most Popular items.

3. Faceted Dynamic Navigation

Two sections of the site required advanced filtering capabilities to allow the users to find relevant items more quickly. Users can search for specific items within certain sections of the site, and can then refine their results by topics that are automatically populated from the keywords used on each item. Results refresh on the same page upon selection of topic(s) automatically.

Six Feet Up leveraged the eea.facetednavigation add-on for this implementation.

4. Training Academy

The heart of the site lies in the Training Academy section. This part of the site consists of a custom user-specific landing view that allows the user to see a calendar of scheduled events aggregated from all events in the site, a list of training events that the user is qualified to attend, and instructions on how to navigate through the Training Academy. From this view, users are able to access course details and available course dates. Site Managers are able to add/edit course and trainer materials for each course that are then available to registered users and trainers for downloading.