An international communications, media, and automotive company based in the United States, with over $18 billion in revenue 60,000 employees globally, wanted to implement a new, consumer-grade portal to provide a digital workplace where employees can access company-wide information, as well as share tools and resources.

Business Objective

The company was challenged with having to manage and maintain four different portals across their divisions. Each of these had its own set of features including separate collaboration systems, design that did not comply with the company’s current branding and style guidelines, and ten-year old portal technology that was no longer supported.

Overall, the company envisioned a single portal to engage employees as ambassadors and customers by surfacing news about products and key initiatives. Additionally, provide employees with a broader knowledge of the entire company beyond their divisions. In considering this vision, the company outlined their objectives:

• Connect and engage employees by providing them with easy access to company, department news, resources and tools
• Improve user experience (UX) design and content restructuring of employee information systems
• Enhance and increase employee collaboration

Portal Solution Accelerator Implementation

After evaluating several enterprise portal platforms, the company chose Oracle WebCenter as the system they would use to build their employee digital workplace portal. Oracle WebCenter includes content management and portal components. It was particularly chosen due to its scalability and performance (backed by Oracle database), its ability to target and personalize content based on metadata, its flexibility to provide integrations with third-party collaboration systems, and its ability to integrate with Oracle applications including E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Taleo Cloud Service.

The company had limited Oracle WebCenter development and implementation experience and resources, so they sought out partners to help with their new portal implementation. Fishbowl Solutions was chosen based on their vast Oracle WebCenter experience and expertise. Additionally, Fishbowl offered a portal jumpstart framework called Portal Solution Accelerator (PSA) that provided additional software capabilities to drive better user experience and overall performance. This includes integrating content to be consumed on the portal using single page applications (SPA) instead of Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) taskflows. SPA taskflows are more lightweight and can therefore be more easily consumed on the portal without impacting performance. SPA taskflows also enable the use of other front-end design frameworks, such as Oracle JET (JavaScript Extension Toolkit), enabling web designers and marketers to develop their own components with basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS knowledge.

Fishbowl Solutions leveraged its PSA to address seven critical capabilities the company wanted from the new portal:

• Hybrid Content Integration – Ability to make quick updates/edits to content on the portal portal via a web inline editor, while having new content be checked in via profiles using Oracle WebCenter Content
• Personlization – Content targeted to individuals based on such user attributes as Division, Department, Company, Loacation, Management, and Employee Type
• Security – Leveraged roles and groups from Oracle Unified Directory to drive security. Fishbowl’s Advanced User Security Mapping (AUSM) software was used to ease user management because it enables rules to be created to map LDAP attributes to WebCenter roles (participant, contributor, administrator, etc.)
• Collaboration – Integrated 3^rd-party collaboration system, Jive, into the portal user experience so that users can see activity stream and collaborate with others in-context of the portal
• Application Integration – Integrated with PeopleSoft Human Capital Management to pull additional employee data onto the portal. This was needed for upper management to be able to quickly view HR-related tasks on mobile devices.
• Content & People Search – Content indexed by the Google Search Appliance is made available by searching on the portal where secure results are returned
• Optimal Portal Performance – Leveraged local Oracle Coherence cache available per node in WebCenter Portal, while Redis was used as a means to create a central publishing model for updated content to the cache

Results

The company officially launched the new employee portal in July of 2017. Since then, user feedback has been very positive. The value-add capabilities of Fishbowl PSA – standard portal page templates and layouts, mega-menu navigation, role-based content contribution using Oracle WebCenter Content – meant the company could focus on implementation and not custom development. This reduced time-to-market by 25 percent. Typically, the company has around 1,500 concurrent users on the home page, which loads in about 4.5 seconds. Secondary page visits take around 2.5 seconds to load. This performance is easily tracked as the company sees around 40,000 active users each week with minimal complaints or issues reported. The load times have exceeded expectations.

It has been reported that 92 percent of user sessions occur from the desktop, 5 percent from smartphones, and 2 percent from tablets. The most popular portal page is the Home page, followed by Time Reporting, Jobs, My Pay, and Employee Discounts.

Overall, the new portal has provided employees with a broader knowledge of the entire company beyond their position, division, and department, while bringing together one unified message and brand.