Gedeon Richter International Intranet
The need
Gedeon Richter contracted ALLWIN to develop a user-friendly, multilingual intranet platform. Representing high-end technology was a priority.
Business goals
The company wanted to streamline its processes across countries, so it set out to improve corporate communication between employees. In order to achieve better productivity, they wanted to strengthen cohesion between the different departments and felt that creating a main channel of communication in several languages might be the answer.
Solution
Gedeon Richter was looking for an enterprise-ready, reliable, yet market-leading technology solution. It was a top priority to create an intuitive and user-friendly platform that not only centralises workflows between different countries and departments in one place, but also creates a collaborative interface for all. This had to include smooth authorization management and dynamic content management as well. Considering all these business needs and goals, ALLWIN chose to develop a new Sitecore-based intranet platform.
During the implementation we faced several challenges.
Azure Login
The employees needed to login to the intranet platform with their own corporate accounts. In addition, they had different user rights so the client synchronized the accounts with Azure Active Directory. ALLWIN had to find a solution that supported the international use of the intranet application by employees who have different rights for the site.
After the system was launched, a number of countries that did not yet have group-level AD access joined the service as well. We supported their access to the intranet service through a unique registration and login process.
Azure Content Delivery Network
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User experience comes first. We needed to find a solution to create a fast loading website, even with the complexity, the multilingual and site-specific contents, and the many different file types.
In addition to general performance optimizations, we decided to implement Azure CDN for media content like videos, pictures and documents. This way we managed to reduce Sitecore server loads and enhance user experience.
GDPR
In this project data protection was top priority. To enhance security and restrict access we applied encryption, and used it as a Sitecore pipeline. The data was stored in an encrypted database, while we made decryption available by the application.
This way we ensured the data to be accessible to users who have the appropriate rights.
Performance tests (Azure, Jmeter)
Performance tests were necessary in order to assure we had the loadbility and scalability of the implemented application we set out for.
The seamless scalability was ensured by running the application in Azure, but that in itself wasn’t enough. We had to estimate which Azure resources needed to be made dynamically scalable to serve future increases in system load capacity.
For performance measurement we used two tools: Azure Load Test and JMeter.
In both test tools, we wrote a unique code to manage the login process and created more than 1000 temporary users, which were randomly selected during each test run. Using Azure, we could fully extend our application between the two types of test tools. We also had the opportunity to test the application running not only from physically accessible locations, but also from multiple Azure centers. These tests gave us the opportunity to extract more realistic data from the system. The tests provided clear information on the capacity of the network and we were able to pinpoint which components could become a bottleneck when the system had to serve visitors above the planned capacity.
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Result
The new Richter intranet platform increases the activity of the employees worldwide and allows for more effective internal communication. It acts as a built-in social media platform, therefore employee productivity and the number of interactions with each other grew significantly.
During the development we paid special attention to security, as a result of which the website is not only fluid and functional, but also completely secure.
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