European Youth Forum Intranet

Client profile: European Youth Forum (YFJ)

Based in Brussels, the European Youth Forum (YFJ) is an independent, democratic, youth-led platform, representing about 100 National Youth Councils and International Youth Organizations from across Europe.

The Intranet is a key tool for the coordination of the YFJ activities, and especially for coordinating activities between the Secretariat in Brussels and the member organizations. The existing setup relied on some pages for authenticated users only on the main YFJ website, together with shared folders accessible according to the user role; calendars were hosted on a separate service; yet another service was used to generate and send newsletters; discussions about upcoming initiatives were held by e-mail only; tasks were not managed through any distributed system.

Migration to Open Atrium

Nuvole chose the popular Open Atrium as a basis for the new Intranet: the standard Open Atrium features (discussions through blog posts and comments, calendars, wiki-like knowledge management, task management through case tracker) were enough to cover most of the features of the old Intranet system.

The migration process from the old Intranet to Open Atrium involved:

  • Remapping about 250 users profiles, with several fields, and groups. Usernames and passwords were being stored in a way compatible with Open Atrium and were recreated so that users would be able to login with the same credentials as they used to.
  • Creating groups in the new Intranet and mapping the old user roles to Open Atrium groups.
  • Migrating the private pages to the new Open Atrium groups.
  • Importing the existing public calendars in Open Atrium and configuring a WebDAV system for the private ones.
  • Configuring the visual appearance of Open Atrium to match the corporate identity of YFJ.

Open Atrium customization: Documents feature

The existing solutions to manage files and folders in Open Atrium through third-party Drupal modules were not integrated and sophisticated enough for our use case: we needed a system very easy to use, respecting all Open Atrium permissions and able to import the large existing file repository (several thousands files) in the newly created groups.

Nuvole thus created an ad-hoc module, packaged as a Drupal feature, to manage files and folders. Main features:

  • A familiar two-panes interface (folder tree in the side pane, current folders content in the main one).
  • Easy movement, renaming and deletion of files, thanks to AJAX operations.
  • Custom sort of folders.
  • Batch creation of subfolders.
  • Support for standard or drag-and-drop upload of new files.
  • Complete integration with Open Atrium (seen as a standard Open Atrium feature, which can be enabled on a group-wise basis and is seamlessly integrated with the group activity tracker and other features).
  • Granular e-mail notifications to group members when a new file is uploaded.

Open Atrium customization: Newsletter feature

The new Intranet was meant to be also a platform where the YFJ staff could prepare attractive, customized HTML newsletters to be regularly sent to thousands of subscribers, some subscribing to the English version and some to the French version.

Using the existing SimpleNews contributed module as a basis, Nuvole built a Newsletter feature for Open Atrium. It is completely integrated with Open Atrium groups and can be enabled on a group-wise basis like the standard Open Atrium features.

The YFJ staff can create Newsletter issues, add articles to them, choose the template among the several customized templates they use, preview the newsletter and obtain the message HTML source code, with all style and images embedded in the body as data for easier delivery. The newsletter is then sent through a professional mass-mailing service.

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