‘Auguste’ intranet transforms VRT into connected organisation

The VRT was looking for an efficient and transparent way of communicating with all its employees. The old intranet had become outdated and the communications department found it difficult to reach everyone with procedures that were too cumbersome. Cegeka built a brand new intranet, Auguste, which runs on Microsoft Office 365 – so in the public cloud. The aim is for communications to run smoothly, to ensure that information is provided to everyone in an accessible format and to improve collaboration between employees.

With the new Auguste intranet VRT can now share all the necessary information with employees, and everyone can communicate and collaborate together easily. In order to establish a fast communication and information environment, Cegeka used its Portal Accelerator and integrated Microsoft Yammer as the internal social network. The new intranet has a well thought-out and detailed responsive design which is accessible from anywhere and mobile. Patrick Van der Borgh, Business Partner Policy Support at VRT: “The main benefit of Auguste is its ease of use; everyone can use this technology. The intranet is also extremely fast and the information is very clear. There are no different versions available on the intranet anymore, which means everything is easy to find.”

The previous intranet wasn’t flexible enough; communication only ran top-down and employees weren’t very involved. It was only version management that ensured there weren’t different versions of documents available in different places. “Only the communications department was using the intranet. The procedure was very cumbersome for other employees. We didn’t have any possibility of interaction and it was difficult for us to share information and expertise with each other. Collaboration between teams and projects wasn’t even an option,” says Patrick Van der Borgh.

Auguste: inform, communicate and collaborate

The new Auguste intranet has three main functions. The informative aspect ensures VRT can share messages with employees and vice versa. Everyone can log into the intranet via active directory, also from home. The communicative aspect ensures that all employees can communicate with each other. Management announcements, requests, congratulations for an employee’s wedding and so on: everything’s possible! The final aspect is the collaborative aspect. Every department can create a team or project site which they own and manage themselves. Van der Borgh: “The practical possibilities and much improved user-friendliness are making the sites a huge success. All sorts of project sites are being created, including for events like Music for Life. We can also provide external partners with access to this environment so we can share documents with each other easily too. And it’s all supported by our own IT department.”

Cloud model only offers advantages

“Because we’re a public institution, we need to be able to determine exactly what we need in advance,” says Van der Borgh. We all had a particular plan in mind, but we didn’t have the expertise we needed in house to implement it. VRT had already decided to use Microsoft technology, a choice which much reduced the technological impact compared to other technologies.” So the decision was an easy one, especially as the public broadcaster was already using Microsoft Office.

Van der Borgh: “We then drew up a list of requirements together with the communications department, and wrote to a number of partners. Most IT companies came up with technical proposals which quickly pushed us in the opposite direction. Cegeka looked at it more broadly and understood where we wanted to go.”

From new intranet to completely new office environment

Cegeka supported us very well with the technical design of Auguste, and the collaboration is ongoing. We want to develop our Office environment further and the experts from Cegeka are helping us with this. The desired results have definitely been achieved,” concludes Patrick Van der Borgh.