pTools creates Ireland's largest intranet for HSE

CONTENT MANAGEMENT specialists pTools have completed Ireland's largest intranet for the Health Service Executive (HSE) as part of a contract worth over €500,000.

The intranet provides a directory of all 120,000 HSE employees around the State and is being regularly accessed by more than 50,000 staff on a network of more than 25,000 PCs.

"It does the simple things well and at a level that can be accessed by all staff," said Tom Skinner, managing director of pTools.

Mr Skinner also noted that, unlike some other high-profile technology projects in the public sector, the intranet was "delivered on time and on budget".

With responsibility for everything from the registration of civil marriages to the provision of primary healthcare, Mr Skinner said the HSE had particular business and technology issues which made effective communications challenging.

He described the 18-month project as "level one" on the intranet maturity model and said the HSE planned more advanced features in a second phase of the project. Key features of the intranet, called HSEnet, include access to daily staff news, briefings and reports, staff email and contact directories, medical libraries and other resources. HSEnet is getting 750,000 page impressions per month and is expected to exceed one million monthly page impressions in the coming months.

A directory on the intranet will ensure accurate e-mail, phone and address details are available for all HSE staff. In most organisations this would be a relatively trivial task but Mr Skinner said the size of the HSE meant staff sometimes had to resort to ringing directory enquiries to get phone numbers for colleagues.

The HSE's Health Atlas, a statistical application which looks at the likely health risks to individuals in different parts of the State, has been moved to the new environment making it available to more staff.

The intranet runs on nine servers at different locations on the HSE network ensuring full backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

The intranet was built using pTools content management software. A number of British police forces have adopted the product while, in Ireland, the Department of the Taoiseach and insurers Allianz and Axa are customers.