SOMO – SOMO Community
A modern intranet solution for a non-profit organization with 40 employees that offers a simple user interface and ensures simplified communication and optimized work processes with personalized news channels, microblog, team areas and people search.
Who is SOMO?
The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) is a non-profit research organization based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and employs around 40 people. SOMO conducts research to uncover the impact and power of multinational corporations. This includes issues such as child labor, dangerous working conditions, environmental damage, tax evasion and many more pressing topics. The researchers work with hundreds of organizations around the world to ensure that the information reaches where it has the most impact: from communities and courtrooms to civil organizations, media and politicians.
SOMO at AEC Linchpin 2021
The SOMO Community has become a very important internal communications channel for us particularly in times of corona. The adoption rate has been great and the Linchpin Internet Suite has played an important role in its success.
The SOMO Intranet
SOMO’s intranet is called ‘SOMO Community’ and at its core consists of Atlassian Confluence, the Refined Theme and the Linchpin Intranet Suite. The SOMO Community was launched in January 2020 and since then it has been widely used by employees. In the future, the system may also be expanded to include an extranet component so that partner organizations can collaborate even more effectively with SOMO. Currently, the community edition of Confluence Server is in use.
News
The company news section reflects the dashboard of the SOMO intranet and is powered by the Linchpin Intranet Suite. According to SOMO, this is a huge improvement over the default news feature in Confluence. The Linchpin Intranet Suite solution not only looks more attractive, but also offers the opportunity to schedule news, and combine and personalize news channels. Internal newsletters are a thing of the past! The news posted in the main staff space automatically triggers an e-mail notification to all employees, which is a real time-saver.
Microblog
For SOMO, the microblog is a great way to facilitate online conversations. Most employees now share information and updates through the microblog, instead of sending traditional emails. Of course, this has reduced the volume of emails being send, and inspired people to share fun things as well! If employees only want to see work-related posts, they can change the settings on the microblog. By default, updates are automatically displayed on the start page for both the news are and the microblog – but of course, users can also simply select the areas they would like to follow.
Team Spaces
In the SOMO community, each team has its very own team area. Immediately after SOMO began rolling out the feature, some colleagues, without ever having a training course, were already actively using the team areas. The news and microblog functions can be used in the team area: each area has its very own news area and microblog that can be shared and used by corresponding teams.
Profile Page
Other useful functions for SOMO are the person directory and the personal profile pages, which are made possible by Linchpin. A few additional fields were added to the standard profile in the SOMO Community so that users can list their contact details, in addition to their skills, hobbies and other relevant information. The people directory is integrated via the search, which makes it much easier to find colleagues with a particular skill or hobby. Need a Spanish speaker? Using the search function, you can instantly find a Spanish-speaking employee.
