OMNIASIG: A New Level of Corporate Communication

Company Details

OMNIASIG (www.omniasig.ro) is part of Vienna Insurance Group (www.vig.com) which is one of the largest insurance groups in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), active worldwide and headquartered in Vienna. Vienna Insurance Group member companies offer high quality insurance services both in the life insurance segment, and in general insurance. The organization also provides innovative solutions locally for all aspects of life insurance and keeps excellent relationships with its clients and partners. Vienna Insurance Group, the umbrella company, includes 50 insurance companies at the moment, with approximately 23000 employees operating in more than 20 countries.

Project Goals

Omniasig Vienna Insurance Group wanted to optimize its internal work by implementing a web application that could offer more than just storage of files locally shared by employees. The two additional functional areas that were most important to Omniasig were project management capabilities and automation of routine administrative duties. Improving communication channels was also a significant part of the new Omniasig portal. An attractive yet simple design was to be used for the Omniasig corporate portal to comply with corporate styling guidelines and recommendations.

"We needed a simple yet secure and reliable web application that could become the primary working platform for our employees. We were looking for a professional business-to-business solution that could solve a number of problems related to our daily administrative duties. Sysmart made a really good impression when presenting Bitrix Intranet Portal to us. We thought it would be a perfect match for our requirements and made our decision shortly thereafter"" - said Narcisa Doroftei, IT Director.

The following requirements were set to the project: Calendars and schedulers for employees and workgroups; Restricted or limited access to selected files and folders; Customizable and editable web pages and web sections; Personal profiles with different access options; Internal instant messaging; Convenient search options; Internal news feeds and blog feeds; Capacity for up to 1500 employees.

The Solution

Omniasig decided to cooperate with Sysmart (www.sysmart.com) to realize its project. Sysmart is a software developer and website design agency that currently has two locations in Calgary, Canada and Bucharest, Romania. Sysmart uses a number of web applications, including Bitrix Site Manager, an advanced CMS, and Bitrix Intranet Portal, a high-end Enterprise 2.0 solution for creating databases, web designs, and high quality web applications tailored for specific business needs. Sysmart has Bitrix Gold Exclusive Partner status which proves that the company’s specialists are fully qualified for implementing, fine tuning and maintaining Bitrix products as a mature B2B company.

Sysmart used Bitrix Intranet Portal: Office Edition as the platform for developing the internal (intranet) portal for Omniasig employees. Inside Bitrix Intranet Portal: Office Edition effective communications among employees is made simple by a united information space, making internal information exchange more efficient and more accessible. It has a number of tools which increase the effectiveness and security of internal communications are: instant messages, news threads, mailing lists, blogs, etc. Official information about the company, contact lists, telephone directories, workplace policies, company photo galleries and multimedia libraries, electronic training courses, absence chart - these are perfect Enterprise 2.0 management tools that Bitrix Intranet Portal can offer to corporate culture builders.

"Using Bitrix products as an Enterprise 2.0 platform is always a creative process because you can tailor the product precisely to the client’s needs. Omniasig Vienna Insurance Group had requirements that could be best met by Bitrix products. After we received the requirements list from Omnisasig, there was no doubt that we wanted to use Bitrix Intranet Portal for their business project." - said Adrian Drumea, Sysmart General Director. "The product included 25 user licenses, but that was not enough for the new corporate portal of Omniasig Vienna Insurance Group. Along with the product, Omniasig purchased additional user licenses, so that the intranet portal could host up to 1500 user accounts simultaneously. There was no integration with Active Directory (AD), as user accounts were created manually by letting employees modify some of their private information on their own." - Adrian added.

One of the crucial elements of the Omniasig Intranet Portal was to bring high-quality project management tools and various internal communication channels to the employees. This was done completely using the Bitrix Enterprise 2.0 platform with a few minor changes in the front end and the back end of the application:

• Secure internal instant messaging application that stores message history;
• Shared files are now access-limited to specified employees, workgroups and user groups;
• Advanced search capabilities are provided by tags, labeling, and rapid document and portal page indexing;
• Omniasig employees and administration can now use Calendar and Schedulers to map project deadlines, set up events, etc.
• Company page and company profile page that can be easily updated;
• User profiles for each employee with their personal tasks, notes, photo galleries, blogs and file storages.
• News section for employees with dynamic content;

"Web pages and sections on the intranet portal are very easy to edit, and the product itself was not at all hard to understand. Our employees got used to it very quickly because Bitrix Intranet Portal employs social networking concepts of communication and collaboration that are already known to anyone who has a social networking account at Facebook or MySpace" - said Madalina Constantin, Intranet Manager.

Sysmart and Omniasig decided to use one of the standard Bitrix Intranet Portal design templates for the Omniasig corporate portal, making several minor modifications to the navigation elements (logo, color scheme, menu items).

Access and security settings were set at a moderate level:

• Each employee of Omniasig Vienna Insurance Group has their own user profile;
• Some of the employees’ personal pages cannot be accessed by all portal users (restricted access);
• Privacy settings are managed by the portal administrator and partially by employees themselves;
• Some web pages, web sections and particular files in the portal of Omniasig have limited access;
• Instant messaging is used internally, preventing any information leakage that could happen when using external IMs.

"Omniasig Vienna Insurance Group is successfully integrating Bitrix Intranet Portal into its business model, allowing users to have a better way of collaboration and internal communication between the departments, both horizontally and vertically. It is amazing how much time can be saved for more important things if you automate and properly organize your routine duties using a web application." - summarized Madalina Burduja, Marketing Director.