The Health Services Executive has completed the rollout of a new intranet that will serve over 50,000 of its 100,000-strong workforce and will include Web 2.0 workflow features, Microsoft SharePoint and GeoMapping technology.
The new intranet was deployed by Dublin content management firm pTools over an 18-month period, after the contract went out to tender in 2006.
Entitled HSEnet, the intranet provides a single, unified location for internal online content for all HSE staff.
Since going live in November, the site has received more than 750,000 page impressions a month and is expected to exceed one million page impression in the months ahead.
Tom Skinner, managing director of pTools, said the HSEnet has been deployed to a multi-server distributed environment.
Features of the technology include advanced workflow and content compliance, rapid deployment and in-built Web 2.0 features, SharePoint integration, security marketing and SEO optimisation.
HSEnet will also use pTools’ eForms and GeoMapping functionality to rapidly deploy online forms to staff and to geographically associate content within HSEnet.
“The intranet has already demonstrated increases in efficiency,” said Skinner. “The HSE is a 100,000-strong organisation where workers would have spent a great deal of time finding numbers and email address. Now that information is instantly available.
“The tentacles within the organisation were so dispersed that information was coming from all sources. Until now, there has been no definitive point where staff could access information.”
Skinner said making an intranet work in a large organisation like the HSE required a lot of information management and hardware distribution, training and dissemination of the technology.
PTools distributes content to intranet, divisional sub-sites and the web from a single environment.
“It is effectively a nine-server platform with significant data recovery and data back-up environment, designed to deliver the intranet to all parts of the country and the organisation.”
By John Kennedy
