Kogarah City Council
Live Tiles and Office 365
Summary Data
Kogarah’s local government area (LGA) is located 14km south of the Sydney CBD, covers almost 20 square kilometres and has a population of around 53,000 people.
Industry
Government
Geography
Australia
technologies
Office 365
Live Tiles
Yammer
Consulting
Office 365 SharePoint Intranet Consulting
Challenges/Goals
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Implement an intranet on Office 365 to provide a solution to enhance knowledge sharing between staff
Solution/Approach
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The solution provided a central hub for many of the council’s collaborative requirements, providing an easy to access system for council forms, policies, news and resources. It also provides a collaboration environment for teams and projects.
Overview
Kogarah’s local government area (LGA) is located 14km south of the Sydney CBD, covers almost 20 square kilometres and has a population of around 53 000 people. Part of the St George region, the area is known for its sporting history, picturesque parks and foreshore and its relaxed, familyoriented lifestyle.
Kogarah City Council’s vision is to have a viable and sustainable future in partnership with the community; to achieve this they are undertaking the following:
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To build on the diversity of our community
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To improve our natural and built environment
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To respond to changing community needs and expectations
Situation
KCC had an existing Intranet which was used as a simple and central point for communications for departments. Synergy was asked to deliver a new solution that would provide the following functionality:
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New and updates
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Documents and form storage
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Discussion forums through Yammer
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Improved communication, collaboration and task tracking
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A visually complex design onto Office 365
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Cross browser support and optimisation for smart phones
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Accurate refreshed content for a strong user
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A new (IA) to provide a coherent navigation experience
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Simple Tools and instruction to maintain content
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Site Templates
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Content Manager training aligned with the above principles
Solution
Synergy worked alongside the KCC team throughout the project to define the requirements of the organisation prior to any work commencing. Synergy then formulated a range of solutions and worked with KCC to determine which the best fit was for KCC. The benefits of Office 365 and LiveTiles were chosen as the winning combination due the numerous benefits of the cloud and design efficiency.
Synergy then created visual concepts from KCC’s styling and built out a solution in LiveTiles to implement this. By implementing a solution in LiveTiles we avoided complicated custom development in Master Pages and future proofed the environment for future Microsoft cloud updates. This also reduced the time and cost in realising the design into a production site.
The new Office 365 intranet will provide enhanced knowledge sharing and collaboration between staff, in a responsive user-friendly environment. Maintaining the intranet will also be easily done as Synergy provided end user training to allow content management to be easily done by staff with minimal Office 365 experience.