How EOS built a Confluence intranet for 10,000 users

Facilitating collaboration was priority No. 1.

Above all else, EOS wanted an intranet that helped its vast workforce work better together in one, centralized hub.

Every user matters—all 10,000 of them.

Designing for 10,000 users is a tall task, but EOS partnered with Demicon on a content strategy that left no users behind.

Intranets this size need more than spaces to stay organized.

EOS made use of Refined Sites' added structure to organize enterprise-volumes of pages and spaces into an easy-to-navigate UI.

Case Study

Use Case:
Intranet

Industry:
Financial Services

Location:
Head office in Germany

Atlassian Users:
~10,000

Refined Sites:
1

Using:
Refined for Confluence, Refined Toolkit, and Refined for Jira Service Management

EOS Implemented a social intranet for the entire organization in partnership with Atlassian Solution Partners demicon. Using Refined for Confluence, they were able to launch a content and knowledge rich collaboration platform reaching 10,000 employees. With an intranet this size, it’s a huge challenge to organize such an enormous amount of content into a flexible and easy to understand information architecture. With Refined’s inbuilt organization and structure capability they were able to make this happen.

About EOS Group

EOS Group is a leading international financial service provider in the financial service industry. Established in 2000, EOS Group consists of selection of specialized companies aiming to bring together many years of financial experience in global and local markets. The group consists of more than 60 companies operating in over 25 countries. With headquarters in Hamburg, Germany the company boasts around 10,000 employees.

About demicon GmbH

demicon GmbH is a German based IT management consultant company. They are official Atlassian Platinum Solution partners and a partner of Refined. Their team of IT-experts and consultants possess many years of experience in concept development and implementation of customized Atlassian Software collaboration tools.

We spoke with Lars Bachmann, Head of Sales at demicon. Lars is interested in how social intranets benefit companies by providing a productive and innovative working environment. In particular, his interest is captured in the way Confluence facilitates innovation, communication and project management.

“Atlassian’s Confluence is more than a digital data base for knowledge management. It is an enterprise intranet – one place for all your team’s work – which creates a dynamic and productive environment. Spend less time hunting things down and more time making things happen. With Confluence you can organize your work, create documents, and discuss everything in one place.” – Lars Bachmann

Background to the Project

In November 2016 EOS approached demicon for a digital collaboration solution and by the end of February 2017, EOS had a live working solution.

EOS have been using Confluence in some areas of EOS group since 2013. Until recently, EOS had a number of different intranet services in use, including their own company intranet service which had a major relaunch in 2009. The main problem was that their company intranet was not optimized for collaboration purposes and they didn’t have a consistent platform in use across the entire EOS Group. In 2017 with direction from demicon, EOS reformed their social intranet, combining the company intranet system with Confluence and introducing a wholesome collaboration experience.

Refined is simply the best and a solid base if you want to improve your Confluence platform. As we became partners to Refined in the past couple of years, we have chosen Refined to work with.

Lars Bachmann, Senior Principal Consultant for Confluence

EOS Group's intranet home page, built with Refined.

EOS Group's Confluence-based social intranet, customized with Refined for Confluence and Refined Toolkit, caters to a whopping 10,000 employees.

The Goal

For demicon, the overall goal was to create a solution that reflected the EOS Group values and culture and a solution that was in line with their digitalization strategy. The project involved merging internal platforms (Confluence and the company intranet) to provide a clean, social business intranet platform for all employees at EOS.

With 10,000 employees, collaboration is not an easy task but for EOS group, collaboration was an important part of the culture so they were determined to find a workable solution. EOS Group is open-minded, progressive and relaxed when it comes to their Confluence platform, impressive attributes for a company of this size. To paint the picture, thousands of blog posts are written by the employees and hundreds of spaces are used for working in teams and projects.

With this number of employees collaborating on a platform like Confluence, the challenge is to find a structure and navigation that works. The more content and knowledge that is preserved and shared on Confluence the more important it is to create a structure so that content can be found and used. Consequently one of the biggest challenges was to put the complexity of a working space for 10,000 employees into an information architecture that is both flexible and easy to understand.

We asked Lars why demicon decided to implement Refined for Confluence.

“Confluence out-of-the-box is a great product, however at enterprise level you will have to do a bit more – especially, if you want to gain a high acceptance and adoption for a digital workplace with excellent usability and user experience. Refined offers a fantastic toolset that makes it easier to create better information architecture for the user. Just to name a few of the great features: categories, sub-categories, different colour-schemes and individual dashboards. Refined is simply the best and a solid base if you want to improve your Confluence platform. As we became partners to Refined in the past couple of years, we have chosen Refined to work with.” – Lars Bachmann

The Solution

Demicon used their expertise to combine the company intranet, Confluence and Refined to create the EOS collaboration platform. For EOS Group the ideal platform would constitute both a wiki and a social business intranet. demicon knew from experience that mixing up wikis and social intranets can be unstructured and messy, but with Refined's features and their own technical expertise on hand, the ideal solution was made possible.

The following apps – among others – are tied to the solution:

Refined for Confluence
Refined Toolkit for Confluence
Scroll PDF Exporter
Team Calendars for Confluence
Questions for Confluence
User Profiles for Confluence
Enterprise News Bundle

As well as this a selection of user macros were custom made by demicon for the EOS Collaboration solution. Some of these included an Alter-Newsticker that displays IT-warnings based on chosen Confluence-language and the Category-Search that is used with Refined’s structure and organization function.

Two screenshots of the EOS Group's Refined site.

The Result

EOS Group now operates with a highly effective software collaboration tool based on Confluence and Refined for Confluence to facilitate collaboration between 10,000 employees.

If your company is seeking a customized Confluence solution we recommend getting in touch with the experts at Demicon.

They offered the following advice for companies seeking a Confluence solution:

Take care of all stakeholders before and during the deployment
Communication is everything.
Just do it!

“With Refined features, it works. For instance with categories on a menu level, subcategories, a lot of individual dashboards in order to aggregate content and an extra colour scheme for the wiki-spaces. As an additional feature, we developed a user-macro on top of Refined that we call “Category-Search”. It is a simple structured function on category-level which checks all spaces that belong to a category in realtime.” – Lars Bachmann