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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 its decision-making
bodies and representatives. The idea was to speed up internal communication
and make the representative tasks of the Union more effective.
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", says Development Manager
from OAJ.
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."
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 included the major decision
making bodies and committees as well as the employees of the central office.
In the autumn 2001 the system expanded to cover the local trustees and representatives. By the summer 2002 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 SIG's 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.
Through the new system important
documents such as minutes of the meetings, different announcements, press releases
and statements are easily accessible to the users, because the Union's existing
Teamware Library has been integrated with the new system.
"This has improved
the information distribution enormously when we no longer depend on the postal
services but can offer the information to our members in real time. This is
essential for the effective representative work", says Anders Rusk.
After finishing with the intra/extranet solution Teamware renewed OAJ's public web sites. Also these are 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."
- An intra/extra/Internet solution of the trade union
with more than 107.000 members.
- To reinforce interaction and to speed up communication
between different representative bodies.
- Built on the Teamware Pl@za platform.
- Integrated with the existing Teamware Library.
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