Kungsbacka Municipality Boosts Efficiency with a Modern Omnia-Based Intranet

– Our new Omnia-based platform has made it considerably easier for our employees to find, edit, and collaborate on documents and other information. We now have much better order, control, and structure in our digital workplace and among our steering documents. The intranet is today more streamlined and equipped with rich functionality, making it easier for users to navigate and for editors to publish and distribute content. Omnia’s integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams also boosts its usability and accessibility, says Magnus Almhed, System Developer at the Digitalization Unit of Kungsbacka Municipality. 

Kungsbacka Municipality, with its 83000 inhabitants, is attractively located between Lake Lygnern and the Kungsbacka Fjord on Sweden’s west coast, 30 kilometers south of Gothenburg. Approximately 7900 people work for the Municipality, most of them in health, elderly care, and education. The Municipality is organized into nine administrations: Building and Environment, Preschool and Elementary School, Upper Secondary School & Labor, Individual and Family Support, Healthcare and Welfare, Culture and Recreation, Municipal board administration, and Service & Technical.

The Municipality’s former 10-year-old Episerver-based intranet was in acute need of an upgrade. The content had been allowed to grow rampantly and users saw the platform as being uninspiring and difficult to navigate.

– We had outgrown our former solution and lacked many of the features that would allow us to communicate more efficiently. We were unable to distribute notifications via the platform, for instance, and its capacity to integrate other systems was extremely limited. We consequently needed a modern standard intranet platform requiring little or no self-coding and being able to efficiently integrate Microsoft’s products. With Omnia, we have all the functionality on our wish list and much more, Magnus concludes.

Magnus explains that Omnia’s smooth integration with Microsoft 365 and its ability to easily create 365 and Teams Groups via templates from within the platform was clearly superior to competing alternatives. The implementation process was initiated in the spring of 2018, prompting the project team and editors at the various administrations to start refining and re-categorizing the Municipality’s intranet content and documents.

– Changing your intranet platform can be a really beneficial exercise since it more or less forces you to take a good look at your information and navigation structure, content, and processes. We recognized that we had to revamp the content and structure of the intranet and our document archives before migrating any of them into the new platform. The content of our former intranet was organizationally structured and somewhat cluttered, making it difficult to find the right information and resulting in many duplicates. The new structure, however, is based on topics and users’ work tasks, says Magnus.

A task- and topic-oriented search and navigation structure is much more intuitive and sustainable, according to Magnus.

The content revamp included sorting out, updating, retagging, categorizing, and owner-allocation of every item of information and document to be migrated.

– It was a very time-consuming, but rewarding task. For example, only 35% of all documents were migrated into the new platform. The rest were deleted. We also reduced the number of web pages from 3500 to 1000. Overall, we’ve created a much more orderly-structured and easily managed intranet. Additionally, the control, traceability, revision management, and owner responsibility of all documents have been significantly improved, Magnus points out.

The new intranet and Microsoft 365 were launched simultaneously to the entire organization in the spring of 2019.

– Launching both at the same time proved to be a success since they are seamlessly integrated, thus providing extra incentive for employees to use both solutions, Magnus emphasizes.

As an integral part of the digital workplace upgrading exercise, the project team created a new super-user support network focused on helping users with Microsoft-related and intranet issues.

– The support network consists of 70 very talented super-users we call “365 ninjas”. They help their colleagues to understand and correctly use Microsoft 365, Teams, and the intranet. There are no formal demands made of the ninjas, but they are all very dedicated to their mission and of great value to the organization, Magnus underlines.