There may be geographical distance between the Northland Regional Council and the Whakatane District Council, but their technology landscapes were more than similar.

When Jason Dawson from the Northland Regional Council presented at a web conference and highlighted his organisation's gains from deploying an EPiSever led intranet, Tim Barrable, Whakatane District Council's manager corporate information, saw the parallels.

Currently tied by the limitations of a fairly basic and non dynamic intranet that didn’t support staff well, (and before that, working with a single web page and basic links to PDF documents), Barrable was determined to make a solid investment in an intranet that would help support the cultural change and forward direction of the Whakatane council.

“We were budget strapped – so the opportunity to leverage Northland’s development and templates was a windfall,” says Barrable.

“There were substantial cost savings through leveraging off the original development work and using existing templates.”

No need to reinvent the wheel
When Northland Regional Council (NRC) gave Whakatane (WDC)the green light to use the templates that had been created by Intergen on an EPiServer based platform, they were able to side-step the normal development hurdles and costs associated with starting from scratch.

Excellent collaboration between the councils meant NRC was in a position to share its intranet experience and the insights it had gained. An introduction to Intergen was made and the focus became one of reusing the consulting and development work, picking up the templates and tools that would best serve WDC’s needs.

Intergen’s Bryce Scanlen describes the synergies gained: “The fact that they are using pre existing templates developed for another local government agency means that they didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but could instead focus on making enhancement to their own ends. With the development work already completed, all that was required was rebranding, deployment and training.”

From Northland’s ‘Express’ to Whakatane’s ‘Whoogle’
EPiServer was selected as the right content management system to sit within the NRC environment, being chosen predominantly for its ease of use. The same reasons stacked up for the Whakatane District Council. Their main requirement was gaining a searchable staff directory with full integration into their Visual Suite phone system, giving staff a real time status of where people were.

With over 160 staff, better communication was a key goal. In rebranding the intranet templates as their own, making Whoogle a smart but friendly experience was a given – hence the cute animated eyes gave plenty of character to the Whoogle logo as the face for the site. Plenty of interactivity was desired with daily quotes, book reviews, image of the week and other templates nicely packaging the site as a vehicle to assist staff and as vehicle to hold core Council information.

Better content management
A before picture saw information and documentation lying in separate drivers without good access, so Whoogle was able to provide a working structure that gave a clear path for editors and users. Fittingly, Whoogle is integrated with Google’s enterprise search capability.

“It was previously very difficult to get staff to update and share content, with information often sitting on individual drives. Now publishing and management of content is very straightforward,” says Barrable.

The gain
The name alone sums up WDC’s intent - Whoogle, a clever hybrid of Whakatane and Google, is vibrant and full of smarts. Since the mid April launch, Whoogle has found unanimous support amongst staff, with great feedback coming from those who publish frequently.

“This has been a very cost effective result for us and Intergen were very responsive in making this opportunity happen,” says Barrable.

For more information
Shaun Donaghey
General Manager, Auckland
Intergen
09 966-3072
021 359 061
shaun.donaghey@intergen.co.nz
www.intergen.co.nz

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