Forestry England Case study
Requirements
Software that was coming to end of life, and a new Sharepoint platform prompted the need for a new intranet platform. “Why the need for a new intranet platform if you already have Sharepoint?”, we hear you ask. The communications team at the Forestry Commission did a pilot test to compare GovIntranet and Sharepoint. The team decided to use Sharepoint for document storage and collaborating on documents; GovIntranet for its communications and engagement capabilities and the GOV.UK approach to guidance content.
How we helped
Having hosted a pilot instance of GovIntranet, we used the prototype site as a basis for building Roots, the new intranet. There was a firm deadline for when the old intranet site closed down. We needed to get a bulk of content moved into the new system before the deadline, and we had to train a lot of editors to do the work.
Before training could start, we needed to formulate the information architecture of the new intranet, in particular, how guidance content would be categorised. We ran several workshops in Bristol with staff from around the country, with card-sorting and data tagging exercises. Outputs from the workshops helped us build the final list of categories and tags that editors would use.
Training consisted of writing for the web lessons (plain English, accessibility, search engine optimisation), and practical CMS training.
Luke has blogged more about the project:
