Schmolz + Bickenbach

Schmolz + Bickenbach AG is the world market leader in special solutions for highest quality steels. With around 10,000 employees and its own manufacturing and distribution companies on five continents, the group can guarantee a global service to its international clientele. In only five months of work, AOE media built the company's bilingual Intranet to serve the information needs of its staff worldwide, as well as those of its subsidiaries. A two-stage access security system, requiring IP-Address as well as login and password was also implemented. The project was carried out in collaboration with the Essen design agency Image Transfer.

For the world's biggest manufacturer, processor and distributor of special steel products, the company's entire in-house Intranet was converted to TYPO3. With current news and press articles via News-Extension, a list of events via Calender-Extension, as well as a link to the latest edition of the staff newsletter - all on the Intranet homepage - fast and effective information flow is guaranteed. Together with the comprehensive migration of the entire content and the complex templating necessary for this highly info-intensive site, the AOE media designers were faced with another significant challenge: a two-stage access security valve using IP address as well as login and password.

This system only permits Intranet access to those employees who introduce an IP-number from a previously defined address field. To this end, a special extension was programmed, referring back to the TYPO3 authentication service and its attached class library, which are part of the T3 core, then connecting and comparing this to the IP database. This means that IP addresses which do not feature in the pre-defined database, and are therefore openly available, are prevented from accessing the Intranet. This step gives the employee initial consumer access to the general content of the Intranet. Beyond this there are secured areas for the individual departments, which can only be accessed via a Schmolz & Bickenbach staff user-name login and password. Someone on the marketing staff, for example, must log in to access restricted market research information. These rights, in contrast to the automatic IP identification process, are enabled by the system's TYPO3 Adminstrator.

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A further highlight of this Intranet is the particularly detailed range of choices available for staff to download of images, press releases, news bulletins or find the appropriate catalog or brochure. Specially customized appendixes were programmed onto the news extensions and adapted to the indexed search function. To give an example: not only can images of a particular component stored in the Digital Asset Management (DAM-) gallery be individually chosen from a drop-down menu, but that choice can also be refined by the results of a search. Thus a user can pull out pictures of all stainless steel pipes within a certain diameter manufactured by Schmolz & Bickenbach. The same also applies to press releases or publications.

In addition, staff can also download and save the chosen document as a PDF file. For this another AOE media extension proved useful, one which uses the interface of the “normal” news extension, links the search result to the content databank and holds the exact document required ready as a PDF under the press release or news article description given. Furthermore, the Schmolz + Bickenbach Intranet includes a variety of documents that are available as company data sheets for downloading. Thus staff can quickly find all company guidelines for corporate design, investment or cost analyses, ready to read, download and work on.

Thanks to another AOE media adapted extension, automatic updating and adaptation of the news module on the Schmolz + Bickenbach website with that of the Intranet is also assured. Newly released press articles and news bulletns that appear on the online portal, are automatically and synchronously converted into the Intranet content and serve to keep the employees up to speed on all development in and around the company. The obligatory sitemap and integrated, indexed search engine on the homepage complete the package.