An innovator in financial services, The Western Union Company has become an industry leader in global money transfer with approximately 445,000 Agent locations in 200 countries and territories. Western Union offers money order, money transfer, payment and prepaid services.
CHALLENGE
Western Union’s (WU) intranet site needed a complete makeover with login capabilities, customized and personalized content, as well as new and innovative tools to be used by employees. WU needed an agile platform for managed content which could be easily updated by business users without IT intervention. This would enable efficient delivery of member capabilities and content in an easy-to-use interface, while laying the foundation for future capabilities such as mobile delivery, multi-lingual support, and additional personalized employee tools.
Additionally, WU realized the need to create a collaborative, social environment for its employees through enterprise social networking. Perficient’s user experience, portal, and enterprise social networking expertise was the perfect match for delivering Western Union’s next-generation intranet portal.
WU’s existing portal implementation had several problems, chief of which was poor performance even under minimal load. Perficient performed a portal health check to pinpoint the problems causing performance degradation and recommended best-practice actionable solutions.
SOLUTION DEPLOYED
Perficient leveraged a breadth of capabilities to deliver Western Union’s next generation intranet to production in just over three months and then followed with six iterative capability releases. To deliver the solution, Perficient first utilized our national user experience practice to design and implement a fresh user interface consistent with WU’s corporate branding and messaging. Meanwhile, the technical team moved ahead with recommendations from the portal health check, implementing them on WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.4.
The existing implementation had improperly used Web 2.0 technologies (such as AJAX), improperly cached content, did not properly use core WebSphere Portal product capabilities, and more. Perficient re-architected and developed the intranet to implement the new user interface design while implementing patterns and best practices gained over our hundreds of portal projects. This reduced page load times of more than 10 seconds in single user scenarios to fewer than four seconds under full load.
The new intranet now delivers corporate information and tools to employees in a highly personalized, customizable and interactive manner. It is the default home page for every WU employee. Beyond the core WebSphere Portal and Connections capabilities leveraged, the solution also uses Interwoven Teamsite for content management, Omniture for web analytics, OmniFind for search, and single sign on between the desktop (using SPNEGO,) the portal, and Lotus Connections.
BUSINESS VALUE DELIVERED
Perficient’s portal and social collaboration solution delivered great business value to Western Union:
- Business users have the ability to manage their own content, decoupling content updates from scheduled releases
- Perficient delivered the new intranet to production in just over three months
- Enables greater social collaboration among Western Unions employees
- Western Union now has an extensible, scalable intranet foundation to support business needs