UniCaen : Set up an easy to use, useful and attractive collaborative intranet

The University of Caen Normandy is a public institution with a scientific, cultural, and professional character, located in three departments of the Normandy region: Calvados, Manche, and Orne. It is comprised of professors, researchers, students, and BIATSS staff (librarians, engineers, administrators, technicians, service, and health personnel).

It brings together training and research units, institutes, and schools. It is part of the Normandy University community of universities and institutions, with Caen as its headquarters. It hosts more than 31,000 students, making it the largest university in Normandy.

Reflecting its organizational chart, the University of Caen Normandy has a classic, static and aging intranet with numerous pages. Contributors are scattered, information is little used and communication is essentially top-down and cold. The intranet no longer corresponds to the needs of the teams and cannot be integrated with other tools of the information system. What's more, it needs to be replaced as a matter of urgency, as the platform is no longer updated or maintained, making it vulnerable.

UniCaen's ambition is to set up an easy to use, useful and attractive collaborative intranet that meets the challenges of:

• Cohesion


• Proximity: bring all agents closer together through smooth, dynamic, optimized and spontaneous communication.


• Modernization of the establishment: provide a modern information and communication tool to anchor a profound and necessary change at UniCaen.

In addition, the aim is to completely rethink information, organizing it primarily by department offering. UniCaen also wants to revitalize communication by building on existing networks and developing communities of interest.

The new intranet is aimed at all BIATSS staff, i.e. administrative, teaching and research staff, as well as lodgers, i.e. staff who work on UniCaen spaces without having a contract with the establishment. This represents some 3,000 people. In the medium term, the university intends to open up the intranet to research staff from other partner universities.

The University of Caen Normandy chose eXo Platform for several reasons:

• Its ability to handle communication differently.


• Its support quality: UniCaen has little experience of project management, and really needs support to achieve its ambitions, particularly in setting up communities of interest.


• Ease of use and intuitiveness.


• Its scalability and availability in the cloud.

A multi-disciplinary working group, representative of the organization, was set up from the outset to help define the ambition. All departments are represented: communications, which drives the project, HR, f inance, international, innovation, school office, information systems, professional training, etc.

Since January, about ten working groups have been engaged in defining their scope and structuring their needs for collaborative spaces on the new intranet. Some groups have decided to take over what already exists, others only part of it, and some have started from scratch. It's an ongoing process of co-construction to create a living platform.

The number of mandatory spaces is very limited, so that users can choose which ones to join according to their interests. In this way, the tool is user-centered.

Spaces are currently being created, and training sessions are held regularly to upgrade the skills of administrators and hosts community.

The project team is also working on the coherent integration of eXo Platform into the ecosystem of available tools. UniCaen already has chat and document sharing solutions. It is therefore necessary to define each solution bounderies