Scott Brownrigg Compass

An updated bespoke company information portal. Fully responsive, very well-connected.

An update to one of out existing bespoke company intranets. The fully responsive interface can be used on screens of all sizes - from phones to the biggest desktop monitor.

As well as providing a rich information portal, the intranet aggregates data from other corporate systems - staff information, project records and training events.

The challenge

Our original bespoke intranet for Scott Brownrigg had done fine work for 6 years, but the time was right for an update.

In consultation with the client, we decided to retain much of the functionality of the original system. However, an improved search interface would help users quickly discover relevant content in the increasingly large corpus of information held. We also wanted to broaden the range of other corporate applications aggregated by the system, including project records and training events.

Interface-wise, a complete rewrite of the front-end to improve the design and make it responsive would ensure it was usable across a broad range of devices.

Home page with news carousel and subject feeds

News item with tags, linked staff, comments and subscriptions

The solution

The new system retained much of the functionality of the previous one. Features such as rich text editing, granular administration privileges, content review and scheduling, internal news feeds and staff skill assessment were all feature in the new system.

We used the Bootstrap framework and a modular front-end coding approach to build a rich interface that is responsive across all screen sizes. Having the solid foundation of a formal framework helped us achieve some complicated user intractions for cropping images, defining imagemap hotspots, sorting and reordering lists of linked items, etc.

The new system includes a number of new or enhanced features:

User customisable news carousels
An application-wide user subscription model allowing users to quickly see updates to content they are particularly interested in
Integration with OpenAsset image library
Image cropping and definition of imagemaps within easy-to-use web forms
Support for multiple offices, with graphical presentation of office skills profiles
Event attendance management and integration with HR systems (Cascade)
Comprehensive staff skills profiles, with project summary and history pulled in from an external project records system (Union Square)
Sophisticated content discovery with a skimming interface for search results allowing users to review the content of search matches without leaving the result page

The outcome

The new intranet is available to all client employees using their web browsers. They are automatically recognised from their windows domain login. The new system has gone down well with staff, and we look forward to future development.

Technologies used

Adobe Coldfusion, Microsoft SQL Server, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, Axomic OpenAsset, Union Square and Cascade.