EMIS Telligent Support Community
Creating a community with very smart answers
Background
EMIS is relied upon for medical record storage by more than half the UK's GP practices - this equates to over 34 million patient records held on EMIS' systems.
The company's ambition was to develop an online delivery channel, to allow customers to quickly find support and issue solutions within existing documentation or forum posts.
Establishing this channel would have the effect of reducing technical enquiries to the organisation's call centre. The platform would need to have integration points with EMIS' existing Windows Forms-based software, and provide simple integration options for authentication.
Solution
Building Block's in depth experience of Telligent Community and similar projects dovetailed very effectively with the EMIS IT team's expertise. The resulting solution has provided real operational and cost-saving benefits:
- Building Blocks installed and configured the Telligent Community application in EMIS's technical environment based on best practice
- EMIS' specific requirements met by the Telligent Community platform and a number of Building Blocks customisations
- Building Blocks' designers and front end developers applied EMIS brand guidelines to 'skin' community server in a matter of days
- Single Sign On developed using ASP.NET to link online Community with EMIS' installed Windows forms application
- Building Blocks' Telligent consultants also created an integration to allow users to ask questions, and gain answers from similar enquiries, responses and entries held in the Telligent Community database directly through the Windows Forms interface
- Best practice techniques were used to extend and customise the out-of-the-box Telligent Community solution to meet EMIS' requirements
- These widgets and CS module add-ons were created in a modular format, to avoid altering the underlying Telligent Community code, and allow for easy upgrades in future
- Telligent's integration with the open source SOLR enterprise search solution enables users to search documentation as well as user generated content. Additionally, binary files such as software manuals in Word and Adobe Reader are indexed by the SOLR search engine