Habitat for Humanity GIK

Situation

Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) faced a challenge common to many large, geographically distributed organizations: How do you build a website that can effectively communicate your entire institutional knowledge while at the same time make it easy for individual users to find the information they need?

PartnerNet, HFHI's extranet, was the primary mechanism used to communicate with 1,600-plus affiliates throughout the United States and partners around the world. Its success is critical to the organization, and their existing extranet was not up to the challenge. It was fractured, with no global navigation, hundreds of outdated/irrelevant documents, and an inadequate search engine.

HFHI wanted to overhaul PartnerNet to create a portal that would allow each of the organization's 25 programs and departments to provide service, education, and support to their entire network of affiliates. Recognizing that many great ideas come from the folks in the field who are actually building the houses, HFHI also wanted the portal to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the entire Habitat community.

Solution

When HFHI first engaged AW Systems to take on the PartnerNet challenge, there were many unknowns. They were unsure what technology to use, which applications needed to be integrated, and how to manage the content. Through the Solution Design process, we interviewed key stakeholders, investigated the technology landscape, and audited existing content in order to fully understand the requirements and develop our recommendations.

In a very collaborative process, and using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as a development platform, we redesigned PartnerNet into an organized collection of global and regional program/department websites. This enabled each program/department to build out its own site and manage the content, including a news blog, wiki, frequently asked questions, events calendar, document library, and discussion forum. We also built a subscription system, which would allow users to customize their user experience.

Results

The site launched in April 2007 with great success: it was the subject of a Microsoft Case Study and the grand prize winner of Microsoft's 2007 global “Develop Without Borders” contest. Since the launch, AW Systems has continued to extend the solution into what is now called My.Habitat. And at the end of 2009 we launched a beta version of “My.Habitat 2.0”, built on Content Slammer.