Tag driven intranet portal

„MatchPoint helps editors to deliver relevant information to the right target audience.“ - Thomas Pedersen, IS Manager AF Group

Semantic Intranet at AF Constructions: increased popularity, less effort

The cool Scandinavians were always a step ahead of us Swiss in the use of new technologies - even if the ideas were Swiss. The Oslo-based construction company AF Gruppen uses MatchPoint from itsystems in its new SharePoint Intranet in order to refine the administration and control of its contents.

MatchPoint is a SharePoint solution framework from itsystems based on the principle that information should be managed based on its importance as opposed to its content. At AF Gruppen, we have implemented the advantages of this approach in a new, semantic intranet together with our MatchPoint partner Crayon.

Step 1: Put contents into the correct context

The MatchPoint auto tagging functionality allows AF to ensure that every new intranet content is automatically classified using a semantic model according to the company division, target group (role-based), type of content, language and location. To achieve this, a centralised content file is used in a modular authoring environment: one SharePoint list for news, one for articles, one for advertising campaigns, files for documents and images, a site collection with sub sites for projects etc. (see illustration). The MatchPoint files are already "pre-tagged", i.e. the files already know which topics are relevant for their content and automatically pass these on to all new contents. The authors are also pre-tagged: MatchPoint automatically categorises the content according to the author's affiliation with a business unit or his role within a project. MatchPoint allows the files to be structured as required, i.e. the causal connection between content and physical file that normally means a high level of maintenance in SharePoint CMS solutions is no longer necessary.

Step 2: Personalise the display of contents

AF has designed the intranet presentation layer completely independent of content management. As opposed to the classical intranet, this is not made up of a nested site structure, but a couple of pages in which both the display of the navigation and contents is personalised and pre-filtered. For this reason, AF has also pre-tagged the user: The department, location, role and preferred language for every reader are known. When a user opens the intranet, MatchPoint on-the-fly despatches a search of all contents which compares the categorisations with the characteristics of the reader. The search result in the format of a personalised navigation is then graphically prepared and displayed using the MatchPoint dynamic view web part according to the type of content. For example, the news in Teaser format, the most recent pictures from projects as Patchwork or the advertising banner as a graphic with a link.

Result: more relevance, less effort

The complete AF intranet therefore consists of search queries that, depending on the user and where the user is navigating to (intranet navigation is actually an additional MatchPoint filter for searches), retrieves and displays the corresponding contents from the file at lightning speed. This also means a significant increase in the relevance of contents for each individual reader and therefore user acceptance. At the same time, the intranet no longer needs to be structured according to administrative or other criteria as considerably less physical pages are required to display the contents. In turn, AF Gruppen can drastically reduce maintenance costs and design the content independent of structures.