Business Impact Article - Posted 5/11/2007
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Investment in Communication Achieves 30 per cent Increase in Information Requests
Investors in People was set up by the United Kingdom government in 1991 as a non-departmental public body to help businesses with staff training and development. The organisation has 50 people in Central London who are responsible for developing the Investors in People framework and standard. In addition, there are 14 licensed quality centres around the country to implement this standard through practitioners and assessors.
Graham Alltoft, the organisation’s E-Business Manager, knew that they needed a new content management system for their public facing Web site. Their existing software had been in place for nearly five years—centuries in Internet time—and it was due for an upgrade.
In particular, he wanted to achieve two things. First, he needed to streamline the process of content creation and publishing. On the existing system, it could take a day or two to format and publish a form or document. Second, he wanted to make it easier for people to find what they wanted on the site.
Investors in People already used Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 for its intranet, so it felt confident in selecting the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to manage its public Web site. Alltoft worked with Core, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, on both the intranet and public Web site.
The search features are very powerful, according to Alltoft. Web site visitors have used the new capability to unearth documents “even we didn’t know we had.” He adds that finding content quickly helps people make a decision about whether to pursue the Investors in People accreditation.
Things have got a lot easier for the people who actually create the Web site content. They use everyday programs like Microsoft Office Word to create the content and upload it to an internal only version of the Web site. Every night, any new content is automatically copied over to the live site. It is very straightforward and easy to use. This means that content on the site is more up to date and easier to maintain.
The success of the new search and content management tools is clearly shown by the site’s traffic stats. While the number of visitors is the same, people are staying longer on the site and reading more material. More important, the number of people requesting information packs has increased by as much as 30 per cent. Since this is the primary goal of the Web site, the new software has really delivered. “We see it as a massive improvement over what we had before,” says Alltoft. “For a limited development effort on our part, it’s extremely powerful and useful for customers.”
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