How often do you have an opportunity to positively affect everyone in your organization with a new software project? When Pacific Continental Bank signed up with Passageways, their project manager, Suzy May, Corporate E-Communications Coordinator said from the beginning, she wanted this project to be different. The results have been very good and worth sharing with you.
Top Five ways to jumpstart a successful portal implementation:
Have organizational goals for this project. Pacific Continental identified increased efficiency in processes and communication, organize documents and forms as their primary goals for the project. Suzy wanted to accomplish these goals while having fun!
Carefully identify your project team. Suzy identified a project team with a wide-reach throughout their bank to help ensure their portal reflects the needs of their entire organization when they go live.
Get your project team involved. Summer Camp is the theme of Pacific Continental’s project team. They even have fishing hats for all members of the team!
Communicate the project to your managers early. While they are still in the early stages of implementation, about 20% of their employees have been introduced to the portal project.
Say “Yes!” Too often, Suzy has to say “No, our current intranet can’t support that request.” Suzy is asking for and incorporating input from employees on what they want and need in the portal.
Good stuff…Great fun….Can’t beat that, right?
What is your success mantra? C’mon, post your comments below and share some of YOUR silver bullets…
The City of Moline, Illinois is located in the heart of the Midwest, nestled between the banks of the Mississippi and Rock River in Rock Island County, Illinois. Home to 43,768 people, Moline is a relatively small town - with a thirst for Passageways intranet portal! With the signing of Deere Employees CU ($324 million in assets), Passageways now has three customers in Moline - DHCU ($346 million in assets) and IH Mississippi Valley CU round out the list.
IH Mississippi Valley CU was the first of the three to join Passageways in October of 2003, becoming Passageways' first external customer! Making sure that first customer had an outstanding experience with us (as we do with every customer) has benefited us, as they have been a great reference for a number of potential customers, especially DHCU and Deere Employees CU.
Special thanks goes out to IH Mississippi Valley CU for taking a chance with Passageways 5 and a half years ago!
Passageways firmly believes in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. One of the prime tenets of NPS is the benefit you reap from making customers into promoters. Passageways has consistently ranked high on our annual NPS surveys. The reason why we all believe in this is evident right here in Moline!
What has happened in Moline has happened before. Bethpage CU, Bellco CU and OTS portals' were all purchased within 12 months of each other by consulting with the OTS team which is a Tech CUSO on OSI platform.
Passageways penetration in Hawaii has a very similar story. Two credit unions, Aloha Pacific FCU and HawaiiUSA CU, worked closely together on their portal projects and both decided on Passageways. Recently, California Coast CU merged with First Future CU and both credit unions had Passageways as their portal platform and this made their integration plans simpler.
And of course, when Summit CU merged with Great Wisconsin CU, they had the choice between Passageways (Summit’s old provider)and Sharepoint (Great Wisconsin’s old provider). The decision was made to give up on Sharepoint for a Passageways portal as the future portal platform at the merged entity!
10 things your intranet portal team should understand. Seriously!
There should be one AND ONLY ONE organizational portal. This may be obvious but is worth reiterating here.
Your Senior Management team should be completely sold on the idea of an Intranet portal, as an ongoing commitment and not just the upfront commitment.
Portal software is almost a commodity by now, so choose your vendor based on services, best practices, support etc.
Successful portals should automate some workflows and improve some processes otherwise employees look right through another pretty application which does not do anything for them.
Your portal should provide employees quick access to the information they need to become more effective and productive in their role.get their input.
Portal should be built such that publishing is easy and not too permission heavy. You want people contributing, not shying away.
Work with a vendor that has a track record of continued success.successful portal implementation is like an art.you either have huge success or you create a ghost town.
The portal should support "single sign-on"; that is, with a single user id and password each user can access most of the applications and data that she or he is allowed to use.
Organizations should plan for integration with core systems and other existing software, even if it is a second phase.
Portal landing page should be well discussed and should be flexible- one size does not fit all when it comes to the landing page.
"Hey look! A bandwagon! Let's jump on it!" No, that's not why Passageways has started an open source project. The reality is that we just wanted to deliver more.
It was pointed out at PowWOW that any company who has happy customers has a sales force equivalent to the sum of its users. For Passageways, we strive to have all 28,000+ of you telling everyone you see how much you enjoy working with us. If we take that same mentality, and apply it more directly to our platform, you come up with open source.
Over the years we've created some modules that might be for demo purposes, or that add some small, but useful functionality to your portal. Things like our RSS Module, or the Rolodex Module. The problem was that we didn't have a good place to host them and keep them up to date. That changed when we started preparing for this year's PowWOW where we planned to actually code with the developers present. We needed to put that code somewhere people could get to it after the conference. That place, is Microsoft's CodePlex, an open source community like SourceForge, but aimed at .NET development.
CodePlex gives us source control, including integration with TFS. It lets us track issues. They let us add developers, like you, to our project so that we can collaborate on the project, they even provide us with a forum to collaborate on. The benefit to you is that
You get to see our code, which is a great way to learn how to develop your own modules to run on the portal
You get free stuff. Stuff that's helpful or stuff that's fun, and stuff that Matt makes in his free time will probably find it's way up there too. We already have one customer who has shared a Yahtzee module (thanks Sean!) for you to enjoy.
You get to own it. Since it's open source, that means you can add a feature at any time. If you find a bug, you can fix it right now.
So if you're a developer, a portal admin, an advanced user, or just a portal enthusiast you need to go to our project at http://www.codeplex.com/passageways/. For those who have something to contribute, or want to get their hands on the source code, just drop Passageways a line and we'll get you set up post haste!
Follow Up: One "missing" feature is the ability get email notifications of new discussions or changes to the CodePlex site. Fear not! There is an RSS feed, and using a tool like RSSFWD you can take that RSS feed and have any updates sent right to your inbox.
Here at Passageways we are in the final stages of preparation for PowWOW, our annual users conference, to be held May 7-9 at the W Hotel in Chicago. We currently have over 100 attendees signed up and are nailing down some final details on the conference. We are very excited about this year's agenda, which includes two keynote speakers, Randy Harrington, CEO and Tisha Oehmen, CMO of Extreme Arts & Sciences kicking things off on Thursday morning. The agenda also includes over 10 hours of educational sessions, over 3 hours of Best Practices and multiple guest speakers including Randy Karnes, CEO of CU Answers, Ken Burnett, Training Director at Bank of American Fork and Thad Hutcheson, Chief Technology Officer at T Bank. If you haven't signed up yet click here to register, but hurry the deadline is April 16!
The annual Passageways Christmas party was Tuesday evening and as a first-time attendee I thought I would share my thoughts about the celebration. Held at a local steakhouse, the evening was filled with holiday cheer as well as feelings of accomplishment as 2007 was another great year of growth for Passageways. In addition to adding 35 new customers, we also grew internally with 7 new employees. Passageways also garnered its second industry best practices award in two years from CU Journal. With such a positive atmosphere the evening was enjoyed by all, and will certainly serve as a springboard to propel Passageways into a prosperous and fruitful 2008!
Happy Holidays form everyone here at Passageways, and thanks for making 2007 another year to remember!
We're wrapping up the 3.3.0.0 release of Enterprise Instant Messenger and I wanted to share some knowledge I gained about Active Directory while looking in to how an organization might deploy the new client to hundreds of computers.
Some history: For the first release in some cases, admins went around to each machine and stepped through the client installer. Passageways employees even helped out in this process for some of the larger jobs. While I do love talking to and spending time with our outstanding customers, I'm very glad I wasn't around back then. I myself have worked almost exclusively in the web world for a while and I am not a network administrator so I have never really had to worry about how new applications get distributed inside an organization. That being said, if this article seems rudimentary I apologize, but hopefully it will offer some value to some of the folks out there.
Here at Passageways I was working with a network admin who had set up a group policy to run a VB Script file when a user logged in. This file essentially took a copy of the installed client folder, and copied it to each computer on the network. This got us most of the way there, so I added a few lines to install the registry keys, make a shortcut on the desktop, and moved the variables an admin may wish to change to the top where they're easier to see. Great!
The downside to this first option is that the installer never gets run, so there isn't an entry in the Add/Remove Programs list under the control panel, so removing the EIM Client it is a manual task. Our Dev Lead, Matt, then pointed me at msiexec. Msiexec is a command line utility that will run an MSI file. Our client installer happens to be a glorified MSI file, so this works well. Using this method is our best practice since it will ensure that users have the latest version of the EIM Client. In fact, we plan to ship the EIM server with a batch file for your use with the following line in it:
This line installs the Client to the Program Files directory using ports 1111, 2222, and the server of MyEimServer. It does this even for users who do not have admin rights to their machine, and the /qn option means it does it behind the scenes without the user ever having to lift a finger.
Now there's still one more option combining the power of msiexec and Active Directory that may be of interest to you. AD lets you "Publish" installers through the Add/Remove Programs console under the Add New Programs section. To do so, you'll want to first transform the MSI, effectively modifying the MSI with the properties we set when calling msiexec above. Then, once you've got an MSI customized for your organization, follow these steps to publish the installer to your users (steps modified from Visio Deployment):
On the Start menu, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
In the console tree, right-click the domain or organizational unit for which you want to set the Group Policy.
Click Properties, and then click the Group Policy tab.
Under Computer Configuration or User Configuration, open Software Settings.
Right-click the Software Installation node, and then click Properties.
In the Software Installation Properties dialog box, click the General tab, and then browse to the location of transformed installer you've created.
In the New Packages section, select Publish.
This specifies that when you add the MSI, by default you want it published with standard package properties.
In the Installation User Interface Options section, specify what level of information the user will see during installation. Select one of the following options:
Basic: Displays minimal information when users install the EIM Client. This installs the client in unattended mode and requires no user interface. This setting corresponds to the /qb- command line option of msiexec.
Maximum: Displays all installation messages and screens during the installation of the EIM Client.
Click OK.
The end result is that when your users log off, then log back in, they will now see the EIM Client in the list of applications they can install in the Add New Programs section. This method does not install the client for them, so it is a great option if you do not require your users to have EIM installed, or it may be a handy tutorial if you want to do a similar thing for another product.
