Revisorgruppen Danmark connects accountants and upgrades Handbook in Omnia

– Our new intranet makes it a lot easier to find and access documents and pages containing relevant legal information, guidelines, and other resources, which is of tremendous benefit to our members in their day-to-day work as accountants. It will also help us significantly improve communications internally and between members, says Lars Hjort Frederiksen, CEO at Revisorgruppen Danmark.

Revisorgruppen Danmark (RGD) was established in 1992 by 13 accountancy firms for the purpose of creating a member-driven association supporting the professional quality of state-authorized public accountants. By providing education, quality-management tools, and a rich source of information and guidelines, RGD has been instrumental over the years in raising its members’ competence and quality standards.

Denmark’s largest network of independent and state-authorized accountancy firms, RGD today comprises 25 member firms with approximately 260 state-authorized public accountants and more than 1,500 assistants, administrators, and other employees.

The association’s previous intranet was a custom-built solution based on Sharepoint 2010. It was out-of-date and proving to be increasingly difficult to manage and use for publishing information. A key component is an information tool known as the Handbook, containing legal and compliance guidelines and other documents. The Handbook was in need of an update too. In early 2020 the association accordingly initiated the development of a new separate application for the Handbook, in which its contents were stored in Azure. On re-evaluating the project, however, they concluded it was far better and more cost-effective to invest in a completely new standard intranet platform with integrated document management. Following thorough research, RGD finally decided to build a new intranet and a new version of the Handbook in Omnia, consequently merging two systems into one.

– Omnia was a simple choice. It’s a future-oriented out-of-the-box solution, which suited us perfectly. There seemed to be more programming involved in implementing any of the competing platforms we looked at. With Omnia, we’ve been able to build both the Handbook and a new modern intranet, and at the same time consolidate the storage of all the Handbook’s information and our internal communications, on just one platform. It makes the management of the solutions much easier and more cost-effective, Lars points out.

The implementation of the new intranet and the development of the new Handbook started in May 2020. Both solutions were up and running and ready to be launched in just a few months.

– The Handbook is a critical work tool for all of our members. It contains guidelines, case studies, accounting models, legal interpretations, and other resources that they can’t readily find elsewhere. It’s a preferred source of information for many accountants since it saves them considerable time and simultaneously guarantees high quality. And after the upgrade, it’s now even more useful for them. Its design, structure, and search functionality has been radically improved, making it easier to find relevant information and documents, Lars underlines.

One of the major challenges of the implementation has been the migration of documents and other information into Omnia. The Handbook alone comprises some 8000 documents.

– Migrating the content from Azure and other sources into Omnia has been a very time-consuming task but also an invaluable experience. It gave us a chance to improve the categorization and structure of the Handbook’s contents, thus enhancing its findability, Lars explains.

The main objective of the new intranet was to increase its attractiveness and user-friendliness, while at the same time making it easier to publish new content and manage the solution.

– With Omnia we don’t have to worry about future upgrades anymore, which is a great relief. Its user-interface and layout options have helped us improve the attractiveness of the intranet. It’s also much easier to create pages and other content and to target information to selected users. These properties, in conjunction with Omnia’s smart news and community features, will lead to better member communications and internal collaboration, Lars predicts.

The new intranet has just recently been launched to a pilot group of member firms. RGD plans to sequentially roll out the new solution to all its members but will first gather feedback from the pilot launch before moving on to the next release.

– This gives us the opportunity to fine-tune the solution step-by-step, should this be necessary, instead of having to address a long list of issues all at once had we chosen to launch it to everyone concurrently. When the solution is firmly established among our membership, we’ll then take a closer look at new strategies for improving our communications on the Omnia platform, Lars concludes.