Wade Dixon is the Internal Communications Lead at Evocca College, an Australian-based college with 27 locations and over 900 employees. Here, he relates how Evocca has achieved increased employee efficiency through communication and document management on their intranet.
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Likelihood to recommend Axero – 10/10
Specific scenarios where Axero would be well suited to an organization are:
- companies that are people-focused and committed to frequent and open communication channels from both the top-down and bottom-up.
- It also would suit organizations that are committed to providing the staff opportunities to collaborate, share and actively contribute to company initiatives and planning.
If these aren’t elements of your organization’s culture, the system would still work for you, or for those companies who just want to push information out and have an effective intranet.
Axero would cater to these scenarios just as well and is more than capable of providing that type of simple solution.
How Evocca uses Axero
At Evocca we use Axero across our entire organization (900-1000 employees spread across almost all of Australia). We were searching for a social and engaging intranet solution that could house our corporate documents, foster a sense of community and streamline organization wide communications.
“We use Axero across our entire organization (900-1000 employees spread across almost all of Australia). Axero provides the social elements we were looking for.”
Axero provides the social elements we were looking for and provides opportunities for staff who are living at either ends of the country to still feel connected to other staff members and valued by their colleagues.
The system also allowed for our company wide announcements to be far more engaging than just ‘all staff emails.’
What Evocca loves about their intranet
- Allows for easy customization – This was important for our organization, we wanted to be able to cater the platform to the specific needs of our staff. Most of the system settings were easily accessible and those that required custom work, were provided in appropriate time frames and at a reasonable price.
- Personalized news feeds – Being an education provider we have a very dynamic group of staff members ranging from corporate professionals to community service teaching staff. Axero allowed us to set up appropriate groups and sub groups so that any given staff member can have a news feed that pushes relevant content to them based on their role and position in the organization.
- Active Directory Integration – Evocca has had stages of rapid growth and change. Effective AD integration has made it possible for new starters or those shifting roles within the company to be automatically and immediately grouped with the staff members they need to be grouped with and see the content they need to see within the platform. From a long term system management point of view, this was vital for us.
What could use tweaking?
- Exporting functionality – We look forward to being able to export all and any data from the system which I believe is not currently possible.
- Outlook calendar synchronization – A true two-way sync between Outlook and Axero would allow us to make better use of the calendar function. At the moment we have it turned off to save any confusion or missed appointments from two calendars.
- The ability to sync with Office Online – We would love to be able to work live on documents within Axero. The more elements we could tie into the system the better.
[UPDATE: We added a two-way Outlook calendar sync, Microsoft Office integration, and SharePoint and OneDrive integrations––learn more]
ROI on Axero investment.
- Increased employee efficiency – Staff can now easily, quickly locate resources, information, staff members and company knowledge all from a central search function.
- Increased employee retention – Long term, we view Axero increasing employee retention due to the greater sense of community we are building for those who may have previously felt disconnected.
Axero alternatives?
We also looked at Bloomfire and Jostle.
The customer service from Axero was what initially hooked us—quick, honest and reliable. With the others mentioned above we did receive some good service, some poor service, and at times, virtually no service at all.
As we progressed with trial accounts of each system, Axero was the fastest to respond to our questions and continued to effectively highlight the solutions within their system for what we were describing as our needs. The others may have been able to meet our needs somewhat, but we were not clearly shown how. After the good customer service, it wasn’t long until we talked prices—which were great, custom work requests were going to be achievable and accomplished in a good time frame, and we had progressed so far with them and were enjoying the product which made our decision in the end easy.
