A responsive intranet for the employees of North Brabant
For North Brabant, Iquality developed a responsive version of the intranet. This allows employees to use the intranet on every device. This new intranet has a modular structure. The various components can easily be applied separately and can be used for other sites. In the future, increasingly more functionalities from frequently used applications will be added to the province's intranet.
An important intranet
Brain, the intranet of the province of North Brabant, is important for employees. It's a place for communication and discussion, but also for access to colleague contact information or the application used to book conference rooms. Until recently, Brain was rather unresponsive. As a result, the intranet only functioned on tablets and smartphones. Furthermore, the look and feel started to deviate more and more from the province's public website: Brabant.nl. It was thus time for a major upgrade.
Additional features and more personal
Andries Bosma (Sitecore and Software Developer) and Dennis Nieuwenhuis (Front-end Developer) intensively worked on this new version of Brain. Dennis: "The intranet is now fully responsive. Employees can use it anywhere, any time and via any device. This offers extra possibilities. For example, they can now look up a colleague in the teleguide via their smartphone and call them immediately by means of a button. Furthermore, employees can adjust the layout of their own profile page, set which news widgets they wish to see and start applications directly via the intranet."
Modular structure
The new version of Brain has been completely redeveloped on the basis of the latest ideas on Sitecore modular architecture. In doing so, one is able to separate content, technology and design. Moreover, you can make separate modules for the desires functionalities. The advantage is that this creates less dependence between the various parts. As a result, you can more easily adjust or expand the site at a later stage. Moreover, if you have multiple sites, you can reuse parts of a site for another.
Reusing parts of other sites
For Brain, parts have been used that had already been developed for Brabant.nl previously. Think of the layout, search module and the navigation menu. Subsequently, a number of additional components were added. Andries: "Brain has a number of functionalities and components that Brabant.nl does not have. The province wanted certain aspects of the intranet to be different. Think of different colours or more options in the menu. We have included these, but all according to the modular architecture. This too can be easily adjusted or expanded later."
Faster results with HTML prototypes
An additional advantage of the reuse of components is that when designing a new website, you can quickly show prototypes in HTML. Such a clickable demo provides a much better idea of what a website will look and function like in practice compared to a bare design in Photoshop. A prototype can also be viewed on all manner of devices and in multiple browsers, Dennis explains. "Because Brain components had already been developed for Brabant.nl, making the prototype was a quick process. As a result, the province soon saw concrete results, which meant they could make faster decisions. In turn, this allowed us to deliver parts more quickly."
From wall poster to personal work portal
In many organisations and companies, we are noticing that the intranet is developing from a wall poster into a personal work portal. From this portal, employees can immediately access and use all information, applications and communication tools they need for their work. Including, for instance, office automation, HRM matters or e-learning modules. Such a work portal is a virtual necessity when you wish to facilitate employees to work at the time, place and with the device that best suits someone's tasks.
