A US-based healthcare network needed an additional intranet site that provided urgent COVID-19 related communication and resources.
A National Healthcare Network Built a COVID-19 Resource Site in Two Weeks
2 Weeks
to roll out new intranet
100+
Documents created
95,000
Page views
Outline
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Background
This company’s Enterprise Intranet team had already built an intranet using Liferay for internal communications to support patients, facility staff, and corporate teams. But when COVID-19 hit, the Enterprise Intranet team needed to pivot and expand their intranet with a new site—fast.
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Challenges
The idea of the new site seemed deceptively simple: a hub of information, tools, and resources connected with COVID-19 accessible to their users. But the team was faced with these three hurdles in order to deliver an effective solution:
- Executing on a time crunch. The site had to be ready as soon as possible because of the urgency of the communication and information it needed to convey.
- Communicating to a diverse audience. The site needed to be relevant not only for facility staff and patients but also for HR and IT teams who found themselves suddenly working from home.
- Pushing out ever-changing updates. Because of how quickly the circumstances with the virus evolved, documents needed to be continuously updated.
Implementation
Multiple teams including User Experience, IT Strategy, and senior nursing leadership brainstormed with the Enterprise Intranet team on the vision for the site and how best to roll it out in light of the unusual demands of tackling a complex and developing subject.
The team leveraged Liferay’s Asset Publisher to organize and publish documents, establishing a global vocabulary designed for intuitive understanding that also enabled users to subscribe for notifications every time a document was updated. Site administrators with COVID-19 information on different sites tagged documents in ways that connected them to the main site. To ensure users were accessing the most current and relevant information, the team also set up separate pages for each audience.
The team leveraged Liferay’s Asset Publisher to organize and publish documents, establishing a global vocabulary designed for intuitive understanding that also enabled users to subscribe for notifications every time a document was updated. Site administrators with COVID-19 information on different sites tagged documents in ways that connected them to the main site. To ensure users were accessing the most current and relevant information, the team also set up separate pages for each audience.
Results
Despite the difficulties encountered, the team got the new site up and running in just two weeks and has received “a ton of positive feedback from how the site looks and functions.”
Building the new site had additional unforeseen benefits. The team reused content templates from the main site for another site aimed at supporting the mental health and wellbeing of workers on the frontlines of medical care. And now, because of the necessary collaboration involved in this project, other IT teams have also learned how easy it is to manage content in Liferay.
In conjunction with the team’s main intranet, the COVID-19 support site ultimately benefited the team with its:
Building the new site had additional unforeseen benefits. The team reused content templates from the main site for another site aimed at supporting the mental health and wellbeing of workers on the frontlines of medical care. And now, because of the necessary collaboration involved in this project, other IT teams have also learned how easy it is to manage content in Liferay.
In conjunction with the team’s main intranet, the COVID-19 support site ultimately benefited the team with its:
- Speedy implementation. The new intranet site was built in two weeks with the collaboration of multiple teams, all while several teams started transitioning to remote work.
- Flexibility in a time of crisis. Since so many people were adding resources to the site at once, the team couldn’t manage the flood of documents properly. So they took advantage of Liferay’s ability to accommodate unique needs, creating a live search feature for individual pages to combat non-working links.
- Easy navigation and searchability. As one member of the Enterprise Intranet team put it, they “were able to connect the right people to the right documents at the right time,” giving “support and confidence” to site users.
Long-term, working on the site has shown the team how to adapt to change quickly with content that can be reorganized and updated. Collaboration with other teams became crucial to success, and now the team can carry those new relationships into future projects.