Intranet Staff Discussion Forums Case Study - Action for Children

Overview

Action for Children one of the UK's leading children's charities, helping children achieve their full potential. Through their services they support some of the UK's most vulnerable and excluded children and young people. Action for Children was founded in 1869 and known for many years as the National Children’s Home and NCH, the children’s charity. They are now known as Action for Children.

Objective

BOCC first developed the staff Intranet site for Action for Children, utilising the BOCC CMS (content management system) in 2002. Since that time we have continued to develop the site for the organisation and have included a number of additional features and tools.

The Intranet team at Action for Children wanted to review and enhance the existing discussion forums area to offer further functionality to their staff.

Solution

BOCC met with the Intranet team to discuss the exact requirements for the forums area. After initial review of similar forum implementations for other clients, BOCC included the following enhancements and features:

• Topic Guides - Assign nominated moderators who are experts in particular areas who can knowledgeably comment on postings;
• Report a  Post - Ability for staff to report a posting if it is unsuitable or inappropriate;
• Regional Forum Topics - Ability to post regional topics and postings and assign them to specific areas of the site.

Technologies

The system utilises the following:

• Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
• Adobe® ColdFusion®
• Verity Ultraseek Search Appliance
• SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant