Hyde Housing Case Study

Intranet Workflow

Company Profile

Hyde Housing Association is one of the leading housing associations in the south-east of England. The company manages around 24,000 homes from four regional offices in London, Southampton, Maidstone and Horley in Sussex, and a network of area offices throughout the south-east. This includes more than 10,000 properties managed under Compulsory Competitive Tendering legislation on behalf of the local authorities in Dartford and Lambeth.

Business Requirements

Hyde Housing Association Group had a requirement to implement an Intranet to service their 700 users across 44 sites. The company required a secure Intranet that offers specialised user interfaces per region. In the initial phase, the site needed to provide information on contacts, document library searching and printing, and access to internal forums. A variety of daily information also needed to be supplied to users, specific regions and individual users.

Our Solution

Beacon worked closely with Hyde to design, develop and implement an Intranet site meeting the above requirements. This included the overall design, Intranet set-up, page design templates, a contacts database, and document publishing and management facilities.

To develop the requirements specification, we began by holding a focus group to provide an introduction to Intranet technology and the benefits this technology can bring. We also discussed the workflow and user interface requirements, what elements should be included in the Intranet, and how it could be implemented. The project was split into phases so that functionality became available as the implementation progressed, for example implementing user functionality followed by administrator functionality.

Beacon developed the Intranet site as a portal so that users had access to all functions and information. The design reflected the regional structure of Hyde offices with a different style for each region. A database was used to model the organisational structure and provide comprehensive searching facilities for contact information. Hyde wanted to empower key staff to publish and maintain information on their Intranet. A sophisticated document publishing system was developed by Beacon to facilitate all of Hyde’s requirements. The system allows for the publication of a variety of documents types, for example, Microsoft Office Applications, Management Information System reports and scanned documents. Microsoft Office documents are automatically formatted to the Intranet design theme and published to either public or restricted staff groups. Document metadata is collected in the publishing process, which allows for notification of future review and retirement dates on each publication.

The Internet was also firewall-protected and used NT pass-through security to ensure that a user’s identity, and hence his rights and permissions, are determined transparently without user intervention.