Search support: Drupal, web projects

Building Communications Opportunities Alliance (BCO) is made up of NGOs and donor organisations working collaboratively on projects based on communication for development. The alliance website needed a mixture of public and private spaces to present project news to outsiders, and share meeting minutes and draft reports in logged-in spaces between partners.

The biggest challenge in designing the new site for the APC was in meeting the diversity of needs of its different audiences. The site needed to act as a one stop shop for: publicly accessible resources on open access to ICTs, a private members’ area for the diverse network of APC member organisations, and a virtual office intranet for the APC staff around the world.
This complex mix of audiences and content is presented in a clear and logical navigation with a raft of exciting features

This site was built to monitor the communication rights debate and discussion emerging from the changing information communication technologies landscape. It makes a radical departure from conventional formal navigation systems by using free tagging to structure content. After struggling to come up with a one-size-fits-all hierarchical structure for the content of the site, we abandoned the hierarchy and developed a right hand menu which Drupal dynamically generates from the keyword ‘tags’ which writers have attached to their content, allowing readers to construct their own themed lists of articles.

The Oxford Research Group’s intranet was designed to respond to the changing needs of the organisation as increasing numbers of staff began working from different locations.

Their requirement was to have an office intranet where shared files could easily be accessed, edited and stored by all staff regardless of location. They were unhappy with staff outside of the Oxford office (where their shared server was hosted), having to first download documents, work on them locally, and then upload them back to the server.
We developed an intranet for ORG that had a file store that they could experience as though it were on a locally networked server, regardless of location. So now all workers can open files in the file store, work on them and save them without going through the uploading and downloading process.

The public site of the International Development Education Association of Scotland (IDEAS) needed a robust and clear navigation that could serve a fairly diverse audience with easily accessible development education resources. Meanwhile IDEAS Members needed a private space for work-based discussion and access to internal documents.
Drupal’s finely grained permissions system made it possible for us to construct these differently tuned areas of the site with their contrasting access permissions and tools, behind a single IDEAS front door.

Creative exchange had been managing their subscriptions and publication distribution operations with a complex series of offline databases. Their need was to consolidate the databases and integrate them with their public website, so that the data could be accessed and managed by any authorised users.