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Case Study UNIA

Abstract

The Swiss labour unions GBI, SMUV, VHTL, unia and actions unia are in the process of a merger. In autumn 2004 they will found the largest labour union in Switzerland called ‚UNIA’ For internal and external communications the project team was looking for a sophisticated content management system which lead them to the open source CMS TYPO3. The richness of functionalities and the power of the „Kickstarter“ helped to satisfy the enormous demands of such a communication platform.

Introduction

On September 7, 2002 the extraordinary congresses of the labour unions GBI and SMUV have decided to finalize the process, which began in 1996, towards an interprofessional union in the year 2004. With this adjudication the two biggest Swiss labour unions have a clear message: UNIA, the new union, stands for intersectoral unity in the private industry.

As of now the unions need to keep their employees up to date on further steps of the merger. In addition they would like their employees to actively participate in the merger process. An all-embracing intranet application has to be built as an internal communication platform for the new formation.

The second requirement is to present fresh information about the merger process to the union members and invite them to have a dialog about the future UNIA and its strategies. A Website for the future UNIA has to be built to show online presence and to allow open communication as well as discussions.

These two platforms shall give a subsumable face to UNIA which will be existing only virtually until the merger in October 2004.

The involved labour unions

Next to GBI (Gewerkschaft Bau und Industrie) and SMUV (Gewerkschaft Industrie, Gewerbe und Dienstleistungen) the future UNIA will be built by VHTL (Gewerkschaft Verkauf, Handel, Transport, Lebensmittel), unia and actions unia (1). Therefore the newly founded UNIA will have more than 200'000 members and will represent the working population from the primary, secondary and the tertiary sector. With this concentrated strength UNIA will have a considerable importance in political discussions and decisions and will be armed for future challenges.

(1) Remark: unia and unia actions are different labour unions than UNIA although they have the same notation.

Team Profile

To establish the two communication platforms a team from the different labour unions, external consultants and developers has been built:

The project - TYPO3 as a communication center

Intranet

The main goal of the new intranet is to announce the future UNIA among collaborators and affiliates. Important internal and external news, information on ongoing processes, documents for download, the pictures of each employee and much more are available on the website.

To let people participate in the process a wide array of interactive features have been added to the intranet such as internal polls, discussion boards, chats and an information boards on future events where users have the possibility to directly sign up for a specific event. All the news can be rated and commented by the readers.

One of the core function of the website is the ‚face of the day’ , the daily changing display of the pictures and the statements of every employee brings people closer together. With this variety of interactive features internal communication between the different labour unions have improved significantly. People from offices spread all over Switzerland have the opportunity to meet virtually and get to know each other even before the merger in 2004.

„The interactive features support the integration of the different labour unions and help to fight prejudices often seen in the process of a merger. Especially in Switzerland with its 4 languages (Italian, French, German and Rumantsch): In addition to the different 'mentalities' of the labour unions involved different 'cultures' meet. With the intranet platform we can bring people closer together by allowing them to exchange their opinions, to discuss problems and to be a part of the process“, Chan stated.

Internet

The slogan „UNIA’s future is its members“ outlines the strategy of the internet presence: Communication between the members and the future union. The main goal of the website is to deliver fresh information to the members and the public and to launch discussions about the ongoing process and the strategies of the future union UNIA.

Members and potential members have the opportunity to discuss the visions the new labour union should develop, which targets should be pursuited, what kind of questions arise and which answers UNIA should give and position it should take. That's the reason UNIA started the discussion about the future fairly early – everybody is invited to help to build a great new labour union. Several discussion boards, download areas where people can retrieve in-depth information about the project, an event board on diverse public activities, broad information about the project itself and additional features help the website users to keep up-to-date.

Realisation

„We’ve tested and evaluated many open source CMS“, Chan and Fernandez assert. „TYPO3 not only convinced us because of its richness of available functions but also of its install routine and stability“. The decision to apply TYPO3 has been taken fast: No licence costs, high scalability, the ability to integrate any webdesign into the CMS and last not least the immense amount of functions lead to this decision.

TYPO3 3.5 has been installed on the inhouse server of the SMUV/Share IT AG (a spin-off of SMUV and GBI IT) for the intranet and the internet solution.

The design of the websites has been provided by the project management team and was implemented into TYPO3 by snowflake productions.

To fulfil the requirements of being a communication platform many different extensions (in TYPO3 extensions are functions which extend the core of the CMS) have been implemented. Most of these freely available extensions have been integrated without much changes of their functionality. The TYPO3 internal language TypoScript makes it possible to adapt and manage the extensions to the requirements. In some cases existing extensions had to be reprogrammed to achieve specific requirements or to add some more/new functionality.

With the help of the internal „Kickstarter“ completely new functions can be programmed and implemented easily. The concept of the „Kickstarter“ enables/helps programmers to stick to the TYPO3 architecture. Therefore even new functions like the possibility to rate and comment news, or the collaborates archive, have been implemented into the intranet website very fast.

During the whole development process Fernandez has been introduced to the TYPO3 technology. In this way the new to build UNIA gained TYPO3 knowledge, becomes independent and doesn’t have to rely on a black box system where one almost can't tackle/solve problems.

Editors have been tought in two steps: After the first lesson editors were able to start managing content on the website. One week after the initial training a second lesson helped editors to consolidate their knowledge.

Benefits of TYPO3

Future

Since every labour union has several websites which will not be necessary in the future anymore, one major task will be to integrate all this content into one system. The power of being able to management multiple, independent websites in the same installation can help to reduce hosting and development costs for all the different regional sites.

It is not sure yet what the requirements of the future UNIA portal will be – but one thing is for sure: TYPO3 can cover almost any demand.

Case study by snowflake productions gmbh, Dominic Brander

Further Information

For further information please feel free to contact us:

snowflake productions gmbh
Zweierstrasse 35
CH-8004 Zürich
Schweiz
Tel: +41 44 455 80 80
Fax: +41 44 455 80 87
Mobile: +41 76 543 17 94
Email: typo3(AT)snowflake.ch
URL: www.snowflake.ch