Serneke
Headless Umbraco Intranet
About Serneke
Serneke is one of Sweden's largest construction groups with a comprehensive contracting and project development offering. The focus is on more extensive and challenging projects where Serneke’s competitive advantages make the most significant difference - for customers, society, and the next generation.
Objectives based on Serneke’s business challenges
Before building the new intranet on Umbraco, Serneke identified the objectives of this project based on their business challenges. Take a look at what they wanted to achieve 👇
- Available (simple), correct, and relevant information for the individual:
- All employees should feel that they find the right information, services & tools.
- All employees must perceive that the information is relevant to their role.
- Their intranet must be accessible to all employees.
- Clear governance, ownership, and processes:
- The content must have a clear plan for updating and follow-up.
- The intranet should create commitment and a sense of belonging.
- All pages must have a clear owner and be accurate and up to date.
- Knowledge sharing and collaboration:
- Dedicated areas and tools for knowledge sharing.
- Easy to find contact information.
- The intranet should contribute to maintaining and strengthening the competence capital.
- Strengthened community and participation:
- Encourage, facilitate and make it possible to create a dialogue and collaboration.
- Strengthen the feeling of ONE common Serneke (not just focus on HQ).
- Strengthened employee and brand experience
- Guide employees in who they are, what they stand for (core values), and their goals.
- Create commitment and a sense of belonging.
- The intranet should be perceived as an attractive and efficient tool (modern).
What Knowit Experience achieved with Umbraco 🚀
We used a headless microservice approach for the project setup. Umbraco CMS controls the things it’s best for, creates content, and controls who and when content can be consumed. Umbraco contents are consumed with a REST-API from a node application in Kubernetes.
Umbraco decides where different intranet applications can be found, but applications are consumed from various services in Kubernetes, not connected to Umbraco at all - for instance, sending different types of forms, creating user-driven content, and finding employees in the organization. Therefore, every application is responsible for what it does best and only that.
We are consuming REST-API by requesting the URL path for the current page, and in response, we get to know which type of page and which application to be used on the website.
Authentication is made with Azure AD with standard oauth2 as a technique for sending secure tokens between different environments. This also gives us the opportunity to have preview functions (headless can be preview able!) directly in the intranet.
An editor has the same roles in different applications. If the editor clicks the preview button, we are redirecting the editor to the intranet with a preview-flag set. This gives us the opportunity to see preview data in the real environment, and we can use the editor user claims in the REST-API request to ensure security.
The results 🚀
The new solution came with some stunning results ✨ Take a peek at the goals we had initially set and the actual results that came after the launch 🙌
Set goals at launch for the time period 2019-04-23 to 2019-10-01
- During the first month, nya.serneken.se had 811 visitors - the goal was 250 visitors. Outcome: 325% higher than the set goal
- The number of visitors who did a search to find a colleague during the first month was 413 - the goal was 200 searches. Outcome: 206% higher than the set goal
- The average time spent at Serneke intranet was 04.10 min
- 352 made a return visit to the function to find a colleague -the goal was 100 return visits. Outcome: 352% higher than the set goal
- Of a total of 748 visitors, 462 of them used to find a colleague
- In 74% of visits, it is used to find a colleague for the second time