Background:
To consolidate and make knowledge easily accessible within the Human Resources Department of the Canton of Solothurn, the Canton sought a contemporary and established knowledge database software, evaluating various solutions. The knowledge was intended to be made available online in the form of thematically organized articles for internal use by Human Resources Department employees and all other Canton employees. Additionally, parts of the knowledge database articles should be accessible to the public through the cantonal website. The contents should, therefore, be utilized within the same knowledge database by various internal user groups and externally via the website by anonymous users, depending on their permissions.

Other important requirements of the Canton of Solothurn included:

• Easy creation, management, and categorization of an unlimited number of articles with an integrated text editor.
• Integration of various media files (e.g., screenshots, images, videos, and various file formats such as PDF, Word, or Excel files).
• User rating of articles for quality assurance and corresponding reporting.
• Comment functionality for internal employees.
• Seamless integration of the knowledge database into the cantonal website.
• Connection to the Active Directory for Single Sign-On (SSO), thus eliminating duplicate user administration.
• Operation within the cantonal IT infrastructure with Docker technology.
• External security audit and assurance of system security.
• Improvement of internal communication.

After evaluating suitable software and a competent partner for integration, the Canton of Solothurn chose the knowledge database solution from zehnplus. The strengths of zehnplus and the online knowledge database consistently convince national and international companies, organizations, and authorities to select zehnplus as a partner in the field of knowledge management and online support. There are important reasons for this:

“The software was developed in a challenging environment, in collaboration with Sunrise and XING, with the primary goal of sharing information rapidly, with high user-friendliness and quality, among employees and/or answering customer inquiries via the online channel, thereby saving significant costs and providing contemporary digital service. The collaboration in development and ongoing improvement makes zehnplus’s solution efficient and market-proven.”

Tweet

zehnplus has extensive experience in building and operating internal and external knowledge systems. This means that customers receive not only software but also our expertise in the substantive structure and subsequent operation and processes around successful knowledge management and digital customer support.

The knowledge database is used by many different customers, and their new requirements lead to new features, benefiting all our customers.The software is continuously optimized and developed.

The zehnplus knowledge database implemented for the Canton of Solothurn offers many special features:

• Group-based information access: The knowledge database can be used both internally and externally (via the website). There is an intersection of information available both internally and externally. Internally, more content is available, but only one knowledge database is maintained. Further content restrictions on specific groups and departments are possible internally.
• Artificial intelligence assists in prioritizing and relevance of content: All knowledge database articles have an energy level that dynamically influences their positioning in category lists or search results, changing and optimizing based on user behavior. Various actions increase or decrease the energy level of articles. The energy level of an article is not constant, and like the half-life of radioactivity, the energy of an article also decreases over time if no new action occurs. This algorithm ensures that the most relevant answers always receive the highest relevance and priority, making them quickly accessible to users.

• Flexible and easy content management: Creating and managing content for content managers is simple and intuitive. In addition to normal content, many additional elements (e.g., media types such as videos, images, any type of attachments, accordions, etc.) can be added, allowing step-by-step instructions with structured and clear images/videos and text. Various backend user roles are available, and workflows, such as approval processes in content publication, can be integrated as automated workflows. New articles can be created and made publicly accessible in a few minutes by content managers in different organizational areas in urgent cases.
• Active Directory Integration: All cantonal employees are recorded in the system as users via the AD interface, and user data is automatically synchronized and added in case of mutations. User administration is not duplicated, and authentication via Single Sign-On (SSO) is implemented.
• Security: The system has been audited by an external IT security company and is very secure. Security updates are regularly applied during operation.
• Integration into the Website: The knowledge database can be completely integrated into the existing website with minimal effort and appears as a part of the website. The user experience is accordingly high.
• Interaction possibilities: Users have the ability to rate content and provide feedback on the reason for the rating in case of a negative assessment. This direct feedback on the quality of the content helps content owners maintain and continuously improve content quality. Additionally, internal users have the ability to comment on articles, facilitating and supporting internal communication.
• Flexible dynamic content containers: An extension module allows content managers to generate a specific selection of articles from one or more categories in the backend. This dynamic selection of articles can then be integrated as a dynamic content container on any thematically relevant content page via iFrame code or as XML, JSON. Contextually, a dynamic content container with, for example, the top 5 most important questions on a topic can be directly integrated on a content page of the website. The content of the container is dynamic, showing articles with the currently highest energy level.
• Intelligent search mechanism and relevance ranking: Intelligent search mechanism (automatic completion, automatic suggestions, synonyms) to enable an optimal user experience. Dynamic sorting of results by relevance based on user behavior. After a search, results can be filtered based on categories.
• Optimized for search engines: Meta descriptions and image titles, clean markup, fast response times, speaking URLs.

The project for the Human Resources Department of the Canton of Solothurn was implemented by zehnplus in the desired time and the usual high quality. In the first step, the knowledge database is used internally in the canton, and then the content will be made accessible to the public through website integration. Currently, the canton is considering the use of the information and communication platform for other departments.

Quote from the Canton of Solothurn:

“From product presentation through conceptualization to implementation, 10+ provided a consistently pleasant user experience. Our needs were accurately identified and implemented within a useful timeframe. Thank you very much!”

Steve Käsermann, Project Manager Knowledge Database, Human Resources Department, Canton of Solothurn

Tweet