If you are planning to build an intranet solution for a customer, take a look at this intranet sample package and demo site. The package includes templates that show how Relate can be customized to meet the needs of a social intranet.

The open source template package has been developed by Circuit, who has several years of experience developing with EPiServer Relate. The demo site is built on a scenario based on a fictive company called MedStore and illustrates how the employees of this global company collaborates within its stores, departments and cross functional teams on the Intranet.

Check out the MedStore demo site online (partner access is required)

Background

On many Intranets today information isn't updated regularly and employees have a hard time finding the information they’re searching for. Collaboration is often done through email, making it hard to follow up and track what has been said regarding a specific subject. Documents are either hidden in deep folder structures, or stored at a separate file share server. To update information, employees often need to send the related content to one of the dedicated web editors or go through a complex work flow.

Description

With the Relate intranet sample package we address this by empowering the employees to use the Intranet their main communications channel. For this to happen we have made it easy to:

1. Add, update and discuss content
2. Follow the topics that you are interested in real time
3. Find documents, articles, FAQ:s and colleagues
4. Collaborate within departments, within specific roles or in cross functional teams

Features
 

Stay up to date

News feed:  The built in real time feed lets you stay up to date with all the things that matters to you on the Intranet. By filtering the feed you can choose to only see activity from colleagues with the same role as you or activity in a specific project you’re member of.

Notifications: Keep up with what’s happening on the Intranet even when you’re not logged in, through email updates.

Search: Use the instant search to find what you’re looking for. The most important information is shown as you type, for example phone number if you are searching for a colleague.

Profile: A rich profile contact card that stays up to date. Find all colleagues that you have connections to, whether it is through a collaboration area, organization unit or department, in one place. 

Contribute

Articles and News: Use the power of EPiServer CMS to create articles and news pages seamlessly. Work with files, images and link collections with the same set of tools available to CMS editors. 

Files and images: Share any type of file and manage several images at one. Use categories for easy organization and find all files in one place. 

Blogs and status updates: Update your colleagues with what you are doing or share insights around a specific topic to keep everyone in the loop, without unproductive email traffic.

Collaborate

Calendars: Publish information about events taking place that are of interest to your colleagues, internal as well as external. Categorize them to make the right people aware of what’s happening. 

Discussion forums with polls: Always updated questions and answers. Quote important parts of the discussion thread, create polls and insert images to make it easy to follow your reasoning.

Groups: Work more closely by using groups as collaboration areas where you share all related information as well as updates around specific tasks. The groups are easily configured, can be open to all or private for a specific group, and can contain the following parts: notice board, file and image sharing, discussion forum with polls, news, calendar. 

Analyze

Activity: Spot trends and measure how the Intranet improves communication within the company using the Activity Gadget.

Available as Open Source

The Relate intranet demo site is released as open source under the MIT license. You can download the source code from CodePlex: http://relateintranet.codeplex.com