Powering the intranet

A large electric co-op is using content management software to improve business efficiency and manage information on its intranet.

Georgia Southern System Operations Corp. (GSOC) implemented Stellent Content Management to merge three organizations' document repositories into a single enterprise platform. The energy companies--Oglethorpe Power, Georgia Transmission and Georgia System Operations--have 750 non-technical workers who contribute content to the Stellent Content Server in native formats such as word processing, spreadsheet and image files. The system automatically converts the content into a variety of Web formats, such as HTML, XML and PDF.

"By empowering non-technical employees with the tools to manage and publish content on the intranet," says Gary Williamson, chief director of IT for GSOC, "the system has freed up some of our IT staff to work on more critical IT systems projects. Before the implementation, our storage requirements were growing almost uncontrollably. Our three companies stored data haphazardly on a file server system, so there was never one place for storing or sharing company content. The new software has enabled us to create an intranet site for the hundreds of thousands of documents already in our existing system, generating cost savings as well as increased productivity for the companies."

According to a recent press release from Stellent, security and personalization features of the solution enable GSOC to provide its three companies with a shared intranet, allowing appropriate cross-company access to documents while giving each separate company its own secure portion of the intranet. User profiles authenticate employees' company affiliations and access rights, ensuring they only access content that they are entitled to see.