Creating Intranet sites is e-z thanks to CGI wizardry

“The e-znet solution, developed with CGI, is clearly a pioneer product. It will help Bell demonstrate its capability as a leading e-business.”

Eugene Roman, Vice-President and Chief Information Officer, Bell Canada

Sharing timely information with employees is the cornerstone of all good employee communications plans. Yet, how do you achieve that goal when you’re BCE and your 50,000-plus employees belong to dozens of subsidiaries and divisions spread out across Canada? CGI designed a solution called e-znet that leverages the infrastructure of web site hosting, web site management, and product support and server management in a centralized location. With e-znet, Bell employees have been able to create more than 300 Intranet sites that each took a few hours, not months, to design and implement.

The Challenge
The need to share information across company departments gave rise to increasing numbers of Intranet sites at Bell. Costs associated with the creation of the sites – training, hardware and consultants – were rising dramatically as were inconsistencies with the company’s branding guidelines. Before the situation began to spin out of control, Bell’s CIO office called in CGI to find a cost-effective, “self-serve” web-site creation solution that would enable diverse needs of the business with consistency and efficiency.

The CIO’s office wanted to ensure each department could easily adhere to and understand the company’s branding guidelines. Additional objectives included the ability to post information quickly and easily, provide self-serve hosting, provide technical support as well as a standardized approach to manage the web site. Of course, cost was an issue as well as most departments were hiring consultants to design the Intranet sites and provide staff training.

The Strategy
Following the initial brainstorming session that gave birth to what would become known as web wizard and later, e-znet, a Bell/CGI working committee was created to bring the idea to life. Both companies worked in synergy to discuss solutions, features, implementation, migration and communications. CGI deployed the first release in record time – 3 months – with the Bell team involved in every aspect of the design and testing phases.

In developing the idea, the joint team knew it had to create a product that would meet very specific needs. It would have to enable users to create and design their web sites in a very short period of time with the company-branded look and feel; provide a step-by-step drill down method to ensure ease of maintaining business content; provide Bell with the necessary tools to customize the look and feel of their web sites by specifying both home page and style templates; and produce detailed billing information to enable flexible invoicing based on pre-defined criteria.

Immediately following the brainstorming session, e-znet was born. Totally self-contained, e-znet is a self-serve enterprise wide web site creation tool for non-technical users. It provides an all-in-one supported web site hosting solution including content management, site security and customizable user interface, and it supports a streamlined set of tools in both English and French. While remaining very flexible, e-znet enforces corporate branding guidelines by generating web sites from selected pre-approved templates. The product can easily be adapted to a different company or division within the Bell family as e-znet can create new templates to meet specific communications objectives.

The Technology

• Site-specific information, security rules, and content are stored in a MS-SQL database.
• Multiple content formats are supported: Audio/Video files, Microsoft Office documents and Adobe rendered and others.
• Web Wizard allows importation of various type of documents (MS-Word, MS-Excel, MS-PowerPoint, etc) that will be rendered in HTML at run time or available for download.
• Intel-based servers run Windows, Internet Information Server (IIS), and Microsoft SQL Server software.
• Microsoft Windows Distributed InterNet Application (Windows DNA) Architecture supports searching tools, administration tools, and object management tools from third-party developers.
• The finished product is a web-enabled application that activates local functionality, using Active Server Pagers, VBScript, JavaScript, HTML, and DHTML. All of which are viewable through a web browser or HTML rendering engine.

The Results
When one considers that it used to take at least two months to design and implement an Intranet site and that it now takes a mere half a day, it’s easy to say the project was a success. But add to those initial first-year savings of $6 million, and you know the project was a success.

Eugene Roman, Vice-President and Chief Information Officer at Bell Canada is full of praise. “e-znet is clearly a pioneer product in helping Bell demonstrate its capability as a leading e-business. It will enable all of us to strengthen our capabilities as members of a leading Internet company.”

e-znet has given the Bell family a tool that not only keeps employees informed in a timely and effective manner, it has also empowered employees. They no longer require HTML training, consultants and additional hardware to stay in touch. e-znet frees up their time so they can spend it collecting and developing content, not web sites.

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