A SOURCE OF TRUTH FOR MEDICINES INFORMATION
The National Prescribing Service (NPS) is an independent not-for-profit organisation that provides medicines information to consumers, health professionals and other groups and individuals involved in the quality use of medicines. The service employs more than 130 staff and around 40 contractors in offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.
As a “source of truth” on prescription medicines it is imperative that all NPS staff have access to the most up-to-date information including relevant breaking news. Three years ago an intranet was proposed to promote efficient document management and to open up communication between teams. Nevertheless, once the budget was finalised the turn-around for delivery was just four months.
NPS staff reviewed the intranets of a number of businesses and decided that SharePoint was the platform that they wished to use, but they wanted a degree of customisation to remove potentially confusing menus and to enhance the user-friendliness for a staff with varying degrees of experience and comfort with technology.
Actions Taken
Webcoda were the successful tenderers for the NPS intranet project; the initial scope was restricted due to the limited budget.
The NPS in-house design team designed a home page and provided it to
Webcoda to translate into a SharePoint site with all the agreed
functionality: document management, editable staff profiles, web mail
integration, Help Desk job logging system and RSS feeds.
Webcoda added some low-cost enhancements including a Web Part Twitter, rotating RSS feeds and a third-party product for enhanced search functionality.
Webcoda provided on-site small-group training with the first release of the intranet, and the NPS added training videos for common tasks, such as logging on from home.
The NPS has an Enterprise License for SharePoint which, being an independent not-for-profit organisation, they obtained for the charity rate.
Results
The NPS intranet is a one-stop shop for policies, procedures and forms. Documents are not duplicated elsewhere on the NPS network and all staff are compelled to access the intranet.
Staff sign-up to news alerts at intervals that suit them, eg immediate, daily or weekly. Communication between teams is enhanced yet all-staff email traffic is significantly reduced.
The NPS have credit with Webcoda and continue to request extensions as they identify more things that they would like their intranet to do.
Overall NPS staff have embraced their new customised SharePoint intranet and say the return-on-investment has been “brilliant”. They believe other small organisations could find benefit from a customised SharePoint site against other restrictive out-of-box solutions or expensive builds.
The NPS is planning to update to Share Point 2010 and will assign Webcoda to oversee the smooth transition.