Intranet & Employee Portal for Credit Corp Group

Credit Corp is Australia's largest provider of sustainable financial services to the credit impaired consumer segment.

Sector: Financials - ASX: CCP - Market Cap: 1.71B - Website: creditcorp.com.au

Project:

To design and develop an internal employee communications platform and intranet that would support regional diversity for the business’s global operations, various business units, spoken languages and content authorisation based on job role and seniority.

The Intranet, preferably, would be built using the companies favoured and establish technical infrastructure and software stack. This included Microsoft servers and databases, Umbraco CMS 7 for content management and Angular 7+ for web client interfaces.

Crucial for internal adoption, the Intranet would have to provide Single Sign-on (SSO) with the companies Active Directory.

Challenge:

Credit Corp’s existing Intranet had been cobbled together using Microsoft SharePoint by internal administrative staff. Although adequate while the corporation was smaller, overtime had become ineffective and was not conducive for internal communications, employee onboarding or facilitating general human resource (HR) interactions.

Even though a new intranet was see as an essential development by Credit Corp executives, the development, rollout and licensing costs associated with all major enterprise grade intranet platforms seemed excessive and the business case failed to clearly show a medium term Return on Investment (ROI).

Considering Credit Corps internal technical team had high levels of competence and familiarity in both Umbraco CMS and Angular 7+, it was an appealing proposition to investigate and design an Intranet solution utilising familiar technology.

However, Umbraco is a fully integrated Content Management System (CMS), predominantly delivering content as server-side generated web pages based on pre-configured templates and components. Umbraco does not natively function as a Web Service or Application Programming Interface (API).

As an additional challenge, Umbraco facilitates user authentication internally and does not readily support Single Sign-on (SSO).

Solution:

As part of the development, PurcellYoon was commissioned to work through an intensive phase of Research and Development (R&D) with the goal of proving that Umbraco can be configured to operate purely as a Web Service and Application Programming Interface (API) providing complex and fully dynamic content through to an Angular web client.

Secondary to proving Umbraco’s capability as a Web Service, PurcellYoon needed to prove that an Active Directory Single Sign-on (SSO) integration was possible without completely circumventing Umbraco’s comprehensive and reliable Membership system.

Fortunately, Umbraco CMS is an endlessly configurable content management tool. Both PurcellYoon and Credit Corp were confident of its capabilities handling multiple languages and delivering targeted dynamic content relevant to the active user based on their geographical region and business unit membership. For this reason, Umbraco CMS was a perfect, low-cost choice for administering content for a broad audience with unique company interests.

Outcome:

As a credit to Umbraco’s flexible and best-practice architecture, not only was it possible for PurcellYoon to transform the standard page rendering into a dynamic Web Service feeding JSON data to an Angular client, Umbraco also seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Active Directory for immediate authentication of all employees without the need to enter a username and password.

PurcellYoon delivered an Umbraco content management platform with Single Sign-on, targeted content delivery based on employee language, location and business unit, plus developed a highly responsive, Single Page Application (SPA) utilising Angular 8 that consumes dynamic content from Umbraco as a web service.

The project was completed within the schedule and within the budget, providing an Intranet & Employee Communications Portal that was familiar for both administrative staff tasked with generating content and internal Information Technology staff responsible for supporting and extending the technology now into the future.

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Reference: https://www.creditcorp.com.au