A National Healthcare Network Built a COVID-19 Resource Site in Two Weeks
Background
Challenges
- 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
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
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.