QAS is a World leader in address management and data accuracy
solutions. Based on data secured from national postal authorities and
other leading sources, QAS captures, cleans and enhances the integrity
of name and address data. QAS has a geographically diverse set of 400
employees with offices around the globe in the U.K. (headquarters),
U.S.A., Canada, Singapore, Australia, and across Europe.
A winner of a coveted 2005 Information Management Award for
Knowledge Management, the QAS intranet, iQ, has many winning attributes
including:
A well defined plan
“The intranet is, and continues to be a central business tool that
can deliver content and knowledge management/retention, training as
well as automated business process management,” says Allistair
Crossley, QAS Intranet Architect. “The overarching strategy is to
continue to deliver process efficiencies internally to save the
business money, and to surface and target knowledge and content to
staff, and to make the people more efficient in their roles.”
Prior to implementing a new platform, the QAS intranet was powered
exclusively by a content management system (CMS). Though the Stellent
CMS provided ease-of-use publishing, the previous platform limited
application development and integration.
“It impeded developers who found themselves limited in what they
could do in terms of applications development and integrating with
other systems within the organization,” says Allistair Crossley, QAS
Intranet Architect. “For example, nearly 6 months was spent developing
a basic holiday forms application written using the CMS with its
proprietary language. The solution was never a satisfactory one and
when a new requirement to deliver reporting and statistics came about,
the mistake was all too evident, since the holiday forms numerical data
was bound up in proprietary text files.”
The CMS’s inflexibility for integrating applications forced
developers to write stand-alone applications which fragmented the user
experience. So the intranet team set out to develop a more flexible
intranet platform while leveraging their investment in the Stellent
CMS.
“The project centered on developing an extensible intranet
framework to deliver a single integrated business tool capable of
responding to increasing business process automation requirements,
increased knowledge retention, faster training for new staff, a sense
of community, an enhanced user experience and a richer experience
overall,” adds Crossley.
“At the same time, although the CMS was being used for obvious
content such as HR policies and benefits and some newsletters, the full
worth of content and knowledge management was not being taken advantage
of by staff. The CMS functions were clunky and cumbersome and did not
really sell the idea over network access to staff.”
However, the CMS is seen as a valuable publishing and management
tool so QAS wanted to preserve and leverage the investment in
Stellent.
Working with Stellent the internal project team included four
staff (Web Architect, 2 Developers, and a Departmental Manager). The
entire platform development project took 1 year and 4 months from
outset to launch.
Ongoing management of the intranet is the day-to-day purview of
the intranet team (three individuals) that fall under the Director,
Technology.
“We are quite fortunate I think in that we work in a bottom-up
system. Each year we define our strategy and our department manager has
to rationalize that to management and the board (especially if
additional funding is required!),” adds Crossley.
Robust and flexible technology
“The iQ intranet is a J2EE enterprise web application that is used
as a business tool for delivering tangible and calculated ROI across
the whole organization through the application and integration of
innovative and intuitive technology solutions,” says Crossley. “iQ
delivers value through broadcasting, knowledge & content management
and applications channels through a single integrated user
interface.”
The heart of iQ is an extensible framework based powered by
low-cost open-source software including:
-
Tomcat
-
Struts
-
Hibernate
-
JasperReports
-
Spring
-
OpenOffice
-
jTidy
The biggest challenge for QAS was decoupling the Stellent CMS from
the applications.
“Understanding the Stellent API and defining a generic CMS layer
to decouple the intranet web application and all data it works with
from any particular CMS vendor was a challenge, particularly since we
were one of the first companies in the UK to use the Stellent API in
this manner,” says Crossley. “Also, supporting the business with the
existing intranet whilst developing the new. Only two developers were
implementing the new application.”
In addition to the CMS, the J2EE intranet integrates back-office
systems and process applications such as:
-
SelectHR
-
Siebel
-
SUN Finance
-
Purchase Ordering
-
Sales Proposal Building
-
Holiday Forms
-
Project Scheduling
Technology overview:
-
Hardware: Xeon, 2GB RAM, 560GB HDD
-
Web component software : Microsoft IIS, Jakarta JK 1.2 Connector,
Jakarta Tomcat 5.5
-
Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000
-
Development Environment: Eclipse 3.1, Ant 1.6, Microsoft Visual
SourceSafe
-
Content Management System: Stellent (via JavaBean API
interface)
Toby Ward, a former journalist and a regular
e-business columnist and speaker, is the President and Founder of
Prescient Digital Media. For
more information on Prescient’s CMS Blueprint service, or for a free
copy of the white paper “Finding ROI”,
please contact us.