Case Study

In 2005 Pfizer Ireland contracted Digital Crew to rebuild and redesign the Pfizer Ireland Intranet. The Intranet, which is used by all of Pfizer’s Irish based operations, was named Pfastnet. The famous Fastnet lighthouse off the Irish coast was used in the Intranet header graphic.

The main and core part of this project was the development of a very robust and flexible Content Management System (CMS). The existing Intranet held many thousands of pages of content, documents and resources.  The new Intranet was required to extend this and make it much easier for staff to mange and update the content.

A large phase of the project was the migration of hundreds of pages of existing content from the existing Intranet to the new system.

Through out the project we worked closely with the Pfizer Ireland Web team and continue to support them after the project launch. The Web Team comprises of a Pfizer staff member from each of the business units in Ireland. Each member is the administrator for his or her individual Pfizer site’s content. 

Our CMS allows each site administrator to assign editing and publishing rights to other staff and pass control to each department or group as required.

A portal template was created for each site using a colour scheme to distinguish between each one. 

Another key element of the solution was the ability to tie other third party online applications into the main Pfastnet navigation.

Some of these 3rd party systems comprise of online applications delivered by other software vendors such as a Human Resources (HR) management system. Other linked in applications are internally developed Pfizer web based applications.  The obvious advantage to such a large organisation like Pfizer that would have so many of these applications are that it is easy for staff to find and access applications from the centralised Intranet.  

One of our most popular innovations, which were created on this project, was a simple yet very useful embedding feature. The most useful of these embedding features is the Sub Page listing module. An example is a page for the HR group. A central page is created for forms. These forms are uploaded as PDFs and created as sub pages to the Forms Page. The CMS editor can now embed the sub page navigation on the main Forms page. This now means that the links to the PDFs are now automatically displayed on the forms page and will automatically change and update if the PDFs are individually changed. 

Elements such as this are designed primarily to save the editors time and also to assist them in keeping the content up to date easily and also maintains a consistency for the Intranet users.

Features

• Database-driven Website (MySQL)
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Migration of legacy content and documents to new system
• Seamless linking to third party systems and applications
• Templating Engine
• Permission Based Access for Administrators
• Embedded Content Features