Article

By Cathy Dew

We have a client that is international with offices worldwide. They sell products in more than 100 countries across the globe. Like many large companies, they have global departments (for example, Finance, IT, Sales and some of HR) and a large flow of news and announcements that is relevant to everyone. Based on Kentico’s superior localization approach and features – we selected Kentico Ultimate as the CMS of choice for our client.

Headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, the initial implementation of their intranet used US-EN as the default culture. Makes sense, right? While this worked great in terms of serving up pages based on culture, the search was compromised for any culture other than the US. Searching in non-default cultures includes matches from the default culture in the search results. But US is a culture in and of itself. You see the problem. We needed to separate what was truly global from the content that was US.

2Plus2 defined a project and then worked with the technical team at Kentico to determine the best approach to include location in search results.

From the beginning, the site-wide search capabilities in the global intranet portal allowed filtering based on culture as part of delivering relevant content. Because the US (US-EN culture) is the default culture for the entire portal, this resulted in several US-specific items being returned as global content. As part of rendering pages, the Kentico platform incorporates a location tag to deliver applicable information. Retagging pages as global or US was also part of the solution.

In service of creating an awesome and relevant global portal search capability, our team set out to create a new culture called GLOBAL and then implement that as the default culture for the global intranet. The full solution also required enhancing the tagging mechanism to distinguish US-only content for truly global content. Note that content includes page, links, documents, events, FAQ, etc.

With the solution fully implemented our client now has the ability to deliver global content to everyone and then augment that information with location-specific information delivered in the language associated with the culture. Content that is specific to the US is no longer intermingled with the truly GLOBAL content.

To ensure a truly great search result our team went a few steps further. We added boosting by page type and boosting by keyword to really bring it home for our client. And voila – now you know why you might need to incorporate global as a culture.

Let 2Plus2 Make Your Intranet Relevant

The intranet design and development experts at 2Plus2 understand that compelling content is integral to the success of every employee intranet project. Our information architects and designers work hand-in-hand with writers and domain experts to ensure that every element of your intranet supports your organization’s messaging goals and is tailored to the specific ;location and culture for your employees.

To learn more about how to weave copy considerations into intranet design, give me a call at 510-652-7700 or contact us online.