With more than 107.000 members, OAJ is the largest member organization of the Confederation of Unions for Academic Professionals in Finland AKAVA. The Union represents teachers of various school levels and in institutes of learning, ranging from day-care center teachers to lecturers in universities and vocational school teachers. It has a strong regional and local network of representatives in addition to the head office in Helsinki.

OAJ wanted to enhance its member services by launching an intranet/extranet service for the decision-making bodies and representatives.
"Our initial goal was to speed up internal communication and, therefore, make the representative tasks of the Union more effective. Our representatives can now communicate with each other regardless of time or location", says Development Manager Anders Rusk from OAJ.

Important integration
Being a Teamware Office user for many years, it was natural for OAJ to contact Teamware when thinking about expanding their system into an intra/extranet environment. The specifications for the new system were made in co-operation with Teamware after which several ISP's were contacted. After reviewing the different tenders OAJ chose Teamware to deliver the solution.
"We had very good co-operation during the specifications phase, which was one of the major reasons why we wanted to continue working with Teamware. Teamware also had the clearest pricing policy of all", states Rusk.

It was important for OAJ that they were able to integrate their existing Teamware Office database to the new system. "One of the reasons why we decided in favor of Teamware was the compatibility of the Teamware Office and the Teamware Pl@za -software. We can utilize our existing Teamware Library without having to file the documents separately for the new system's purposes", says Rusk. "This also makes the overall archiving very much easier once our central database is accessible also to our local representatives as they won't need to file paper copies of the official documents into their own archives."

Smoother decision-making process
OAJ's intranet/extranet system is built on the Teamware Pl@za -platform. It has been personalized according to different user groups. In the first phase it includes the major decision making bodies and committees as well as the employees of the central office. In the autumn 2001 the system will expand to cover the local trustees and representatives and in a year there will be a total of 5000 users, when the system will cover regional and national teacher associations.

The service consists of general news and information pages that can be accessed by all the dedicated users and are updated daily from the central office as well as the closed SIG's (Special Interest Groups) of different user groups. The SIGs include for example discussion groups and shared document folders and offer the geographically dispersed groups an opportunity to share ideas over the Internet regardless of the time or the location. Additionally the system is a fast feedback channel from the field to the central office.

Each user has his/her own IBC (Teamware Interactive Business Card), where they can save information useful to other members. Also through the IBC it is possible to contact the member in question by simply clicking his/her contact information and sending him/her an e-mail or an SMS message.

Internet will follow
Now Teamware has started to renew OAJ's public Web sites, which will also be built on the Teamware Pl@za platform.
"The updating of the Teamware Pl@za sites is made extremely easy. By bringing also the public Web site under the same structure with the internal sites we will be able to utilize the same content for the intra/extra- and Internet simply by defining access rights for different users."

• Further information on OAJ (mostly in Finnish)