Msf International Intranet Case Study

Francesco Ciriaci MSF International Intranet

The MSF International Intranet Case Study

The challenge, the process, the solutions.


About Medicins Sans Frontieres

Médecins Sans Frontières is an

international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation

that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters.


MSF Movement

• 19 independent NGOs (MSF Spain, MSF Italy, MSF UK, ...)

• 5 managing groups

• MSF International coordination

• Thematic working groups

• High turnover

• Working on the “fields”

• 5000 users, 10.000 “international” documents


The challenge

• Existing document management intranet

• Search problem

• Information management: from documents to contents

• Multilingual content


Goals

• Find an effective way to distribute official documents

• Make contents easy to access and easy to find

• Build the international employees directory

• Provide a one-stop shop to different tools and services

• Provide an initial collaboration environment for working groups

• Gives some possibilities of access to people in the fields


The choice: Plone

• Open Source

• Search

• Security (we are never paranoid enough about it)

• Flexibility / Adaptability

• ... and a good reference :)


The process

• Total 6 month period

• Agile design

• Agile development

• Adaptation

• Training


Agile design and management

• Design upfront

• Iterations, reviews, stories & a backlog

• Users reviews

• Refactoring

Analysis

Design

Visual design


Adaptation and other guidelines

• Don’t change the Plone UX

• Don’t change too much of Plone

• Divide into small products / components (possibly generic and oss released)

• Don’t do everything in Plone


Architecture and Solutions

Global Architecture

International SpaceOC SpacesWorkspacesTools


International space

•International space sections

• for “institutional documents”

• controlled (quality)

•Shared repository

• open

• keywords / facets driven

•Agendas and Calendars


OC Spaces

• Restriced access based on virtual groups build on email addresses

• Different levels of access

• Search only in OC Space

• Custom home page

• Possibility to manage custom portlets (boxes)

• No custom tools, controlled environment

OC Spaces are hosted sub-intranets for OC groups.


Workspaces

• Experimental work areas restricted to well defined groups

• Include different “services” that can activated by the Intranet manager

• Document Repository

• Files Repository

• Wiki Pages

• Events

• Chat room

• Discussion Forum


Tools

• Developed in the Intranet or as stand alone applications

• Facetuk (employee directory) as one of the primary elements of the project

• Missions directory and office contacts

• Some killer apps: “Good deals”

• ...

Tools are services available to all Intranet users


Content organization and access


Search

• Very important element in all intranet projects

• Live search

• Advanced search

• Search results features


Main tree structure

• International space and OC spaces have 3 levels structures

• Provides the official organization of contents

• Reflect the organizational structure

• Provides the starting path of navigation


Facets and Keywords

• Provide an alternative access path

• By Country

• By Topic (MSF specific)

• Not full faceted navigation is provided

• Some use of free keywords

• Very important role in the shared repository


Metadata

• All documents in the intranet share a set of common metadata

• Based on Dublin Core

• Extended with specific MSF metadata

• Particular role of Document Type

• Paving the way for future integration / exchange of contents between systems within MSF and beyond.


Features


Multilingual content

• Contents are translated, but the intranet is in english only

• Translations of contents have to be grouped in search, listings, etc.


Facetuk

• Not the classic “employee directory”

• Integrated with LDAP / Lotus

• User profiling

• User self-update

• Easy to “extend”


User self-update

• context of high turnover and rapidly changing data

• combination of

• alerts

• redirect

• emails

• to have as much updated information as possible


Dashboard

• Intended for power users

• Personalized aggregation (feed) within the Intranet

• Simple UI

• First user-centric feature


Intranet Lite Version

• available at tukul.msf.org/lite

• optimized interface for small browsers and mobile devices

• small bandwidth usage

• lite rendering

• uses geoposition to show latest updates for the country


Cool stuff out of it (Open Source releases)

• Multilingual intranet recipe

• Alert viewlet (collective.alertviewlet) and even smaller products

• Mobile / Lite version

• PAS modules / LDAP sync. tool

• Dashboard

• Workspaces (?)


Contact information

Francesco [email protected]: fciriaciskype: fciriaciblog: francescociriaci.wordpress.com

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Technology

Msf International Intranet Case Study