Portal Project www.teksam.dk

About TekSam

TekSam is a cooperative body for the Confederation of Danish Industri (DI) and CO-industri. TekSam manages cooperation between the two organizations and assists and advises corporate works. TekSam objective is to strengthen the daily cooperation between employees, union representatives and management to benefit the well-being and productivity of businesses. Development and streamlining of the companies are a common concern for management and employees. Use and development of new technology is crucial for business competitiveness, employment and wellbeing. TekSam activities are varied: Consultant Service, theme days, publication of pamphlets, newsletters and website projects and much more.

AlfaPeople has driven the Portal Project top professional and the result meets all expectations

"We have used AlfaPeople to help us create our new TekSam portal, and it happened in a project that has kept both time and budget, while we have a well functioning, beautiful graphics and rich web solution that is far less time consuming and much easier to maintain and expand than our old portal was ", tells Lars Poulsen, Chief Adviser in DI Confederation of Danish Industries, which together with a colleague in the CO Industry is responsible for web portal www.teksam.dk.

This portal is communication medium for TekSam, which is the name of a longstanding collaboration between employers in the DI and workers in the CO-Industri in order to advise and inform about 6,000 members of EWCs on industrial firms in Denmark on such important subjects as health, welfare, technology and productivity.

TekSam communicates their knowledge to many different audiences in business, both through meetings, counseling, newsletters, courses and events, not least through TekSam portal. This portal in autumn 2009 completed a comprehensive technical, graphical and content innovation, where both the structure, user interface and content has changed fundamentally, and how they have changed from the old CMS system, Microsoft's MS 2002, to a open source CMS system DotNetNuke.

Positive feedback

It's all done in close cooperation between TekSam and AlfaPeople, and the result is brings satisfactory to both of the two organizations and corporate eyes, says Lars Poulsen:

"I can see a broad consensus that we now have an extremely efficient information portal and I have received lots of positive feedback on the usability and clarity. The positive feedback comes from all target groups, such as management, shop stewards and foremen, but also from the people of our two organizations that put information into it. For their work has become much easier than with the old portal. For example. we can now import data directly from Excel, quickly and easily. "

The result of the portal project meet all expectations of the two organizations and users. But also the whole project to build the new portal gets high praise by Lars Poulsen:

"We chose initially Mondo (now AlfaPeople), because they offered the cheapest deals on the job. But then we also saw them as they pursued the project with the same employees - as highly professional throughout the project. It has been a really great project, with clear responsibilities and tasks, and with an efficient scheduling of the different phases, from requirements specification to final testing. There has been a track of it all, and no tasks have been forgotten or miscalculated. "

Effective project management

Among particularly helpful elements of the project management Lars Poulsen mainly highlights two:

• Organisation of two joint workshops for all project participants in the summer of 2009, where we agreed on both the skeleton and main contents of the new portal, and where we already matched expectations, so everyone agreed on the task and who should do what - and so you do not 'talking past' each other.
  
• Establishing a common site for the project team to manage the work and documenting the project for all involved to keep up with the overall development and individual tasks, right down to the handling of individual errors.

On time - and on budget

Both contributed to the success of the project, says Lars Poulsen:

"We all saw that the tasks were well defined and that there was complete track of who should do what, and it was also the tasks that typically gives the biggest problems in IT projects, namely the handling of errors and a thorough test before taking the solution in use. There were no loose ends in the project and everything was managed professionally."

TekSam portal was put into operation as planned on December 1, 2009 on the agreed budget, despite the fact that both the project and the IT company (from Mondo to AlfaPeople) had changed 'ownership'.

The operation takes place on the 'hosting base' where TekSam portal runs on servers in Atea's hosting center, where AlfaPeople both have been responsible for installing servers and content management system and also is responsible for ongoing technical upgrading and maintenance of portal.

TekSam therefore have a support agreement with AlfaPeople. But there's not much to do, says Lars Poulsen:

"We have very few problems with our TekSam portal, although it is running on a free CMS DotNetNuke. It doesn't only work just fine, it is also both flexible and easy to understand. We are very pleased to have chosen an open source solution. "