Interaktiv Case Study: HORN + HORN
HORN + HORN Engineering office for civil engineering intranet
With a team of over 100 employees, the engineering office HORN + HORN provides its clients with services in the fields of structural engineering, building physics and construction management. Strategically positioned with three offices across northern Germany, HORN + HORN orchestrates an array of projects nationwide, encompassing healthcare facilities, research centers, and educational buildings, including nurseries, schools, and universities.
In the summer of 2023, Interaktiv GmbH relaunched the company's intranet and delivered a customized, versatile platform based on Plone 6 to optimize internal processes.
Requirements
The biggest challenge was modernizing the company's knowledge management: using the existing intranet was incredibly time-consuming and offered inadequate performance – so it was practically never used.
The task involved optimizing access to over 1,000 PDF documents for the team. The strategy was to assimilate these documents into wikis, offer rapid previews for swift retrieval, and employ an easy filtering system.
In essence, the goal was to engineer a supremely user-centric solution that promotes effortless and interdisciplinary cooperation across the team – essentially, crafting the perfect intranet all-rounder.
Facts about the project
The technologies
- Plone 6 backend
- Volto frontend (blocks)
- Solr as a search engine
- Docker implementation
- ReactJS for interactive user interfaces
- Zeo cluster with multiple Plone instances, load balancer and Varnish caching
Add-ons
The following add-ons were developed or used in the development of the Horn + Horn intranet:
- volto-download-block (from Interaktiv, not open source)
- volto-bookmarks (https://github.com/collective/volto-bookmarks)
- volto-block-divider (https://github.com/eea/volto-block-divider)
- volto-accordion-block (https://github.com/eea/volto-accordion-block)
- volto-columns-block (https://github.com/eea/volto-columns-block)
- volto-tabs-block (https://github.com/eea/volto-tabs-block)
- volto-block-image-cards (https://github.com/eea/volto-block-image-cards)
- volto-pdf-block (https://github.com/eea/volto-pdf-block)
Case Study Video (in German)
Here Jörg Zell and Mike Kühnapfel present the case study along with some live demo of the site.
About Interaktiv
Based in the Cologne region, Interaktiv stands as the largest Plone online agency in the DACH region, renowned for advanced web solutions and innovative approaches. Boasting over two decades of expertise, the 21-member team melds creativity with meticulousness to forge digital products that are not only functional but also tailored to the user experience. Their methodology is rooted in design thinking and lean UX, placing Plone at the core of their technological prowess. Leveraging the sturdy and flexible Plone framework, alongside Python, Interaktiv has consistently delivered complex web projects for their global customers from the outset.