‘Lost in our intranet jungle?’ This is one of the punch lines used in the messaging surrounding the launch of the new TU/e intranet. It says a lot about how difficult it was to find your way in the old intranet, which served us for ten years.

“The old search engine was indeed just that, an engine better suited to searching than finding,” says Maarten van den Dungen, interim director of the Communication Expertise Center (CEC), winking. He is chair of the steering group responsible for the new intranet. Rein van den Bosch, who is managing the project from Library Information Services (LIS), explains why things are now changing for the better: “We're moving to an intranet in SharePoint, a future-proof system with a good search machine that's connected to other Microsoft products to give the user a unified experience. So, for example, the search engine will also search in Teams and OneDrive.”

“So don't be shocked if you see your own documents appear among the search results; they aren't on the intranet,” says Van den Dungen reassuringly.

New releases

The search speed and the quality of the results will also be improved, it should be said, by the work the editors have already done to heavily prune the number of pages containing information. And it's been made clearer where in the organization certain information has come from.

When the end of the working life of the current system, Typo3 v.8, started to loom large, the impetus was created for moving to a new intranet, says Van den Dungen. “The choice was between an expensive upgrade and shopping around.” As already mentioned, SharePoint has the advantage of working well with other Microsoft applications. The new intranet is also easy to use on mobile devices.

And there's this: SharePoint offers scope, at some future stage, to personalize the intranet. “So that you'll be shown information that's relevant to you, like the opening hours of the building where you work.” Making the intranet increasingly social is another possibility within SharePoint, with options to set up links with colleagues. The 1.0 version doesn't yet offer these options, but they'll come, promises Van den Dungen. “We want to move to an intranet that - in line with our core values - not only informs but also forges connections between colleagues and enables them to cooperate.”

English

Whereas our last intranet, which we had for ten years, “was a static set of pages that actually started to date from the moment it was launched,” the new intranet will be much more dynamic. “We have a roadmap: every year you can expect a new release of the intranet, with new features.”

Another novel aspect of the intranet is that it's no longer in two languages. It is entirely in English. For anyone who would rather read Dutch, there's a manual with simple steps for translating pages into Dutch. Some pages, however, such as those with safety regulations, are available in both Dutch and English, as this is a legal requirement.

Whether to go with one or two languages was a choice between two evils, says Van den Dungen. “We decided on a single language, which meant fewer pages, and that meant we had more staff capacity to ensure all the technical aspects ran smoothly.” And why English? “That's the working language at TU/e and, importantly, it's a more inclusive choice than Dutch. When the last intranet was launched, internationals accounted for perhaps 10 percent of our employees, now we're at 30 percent.”

Speed chess

“We started structuring the project in January 2022 and were ready to go live on December 15 – but we delayed the launch until after the festive season.” Project leader Rein van den Bosch is proud of the intranet that has been created, and of his team, which has produced it in under a year. “Owing to the time pressure, we had to carry out various activities in parallel. It was like playing speed chess on multiple boards at the same time, while everyone also had their usual workload. What this team has achieved is really amazing.”

As well as the steering group, a sounding board group was also involved, its members drawn from the university's academic and support staff, “secretaries, for example, as well as a managing director.” It was decided to spend the spring planning the strategy, making tricky decisions and building a trial version. “Once we had the Executive Board's approval, we worked through the summer to prepare the technical aspects of the migration and to get in touch with everyone involved throughout the university, such as the editors.”

With the launch still to come, Van den Bosch is feeling both confidence and a healthy measure of tension. “After the go-live date, we'll stay in touch with the sounding board group as the intranet continues to develop. We're also setting up a key user community, a group of experienced users in the services and departments who will give us continuous feedback as well as support with the ongoing development.”

Users who want to report a bug or share a tip can do so via the support page on the intranet (see main menu) or by calling the service desk.