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The RFU (Rugby Football Union) is the governing body of rugby in England and with a Rugby World Cup on home soil fast approaching in 2015, they recognised an opportunity to invest in their technology to improve internal communication and collaboration and support their work in creating a lasting legacy from the tournament.
![rfu2_Thumb[1]](https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/03/rfu2_Thumb1.png)
The RFU has a 550-strong workforce helping to grow rugby within clubs, schools and universities, right the way through to professional level. With its headquarters in the 82,000-seater Twickenham Stadium, and a large team operating from geographically dispersed locations around the country, they needed a new robust intranet platform that would bring colleagues, information and resources together in one digital location.
The RFU’s new intranet solution was created with enterprise social tools at its heart, to match the organisation’s culture, which also reflects the core values of the sport itself: Teamwork, Respect, Enjoyment, Discipline and Sportsmanship.
In searching for the right partners to collaborate with on this ambitious project, the RFU assessed their needs and their options, and decided to work with BrightStarr, Microsoft and Yammer.
“The initial Customer Immersion Experience gave us a great opportunity to get to know our partners and what they could deliver for us in this project. It was really useful to get round a table and see how the technology would work in our intranet through exploring some realistic working scenarios.” – Tom Brewis, RFU Project Manager
Working with the right partners was essential to the success of RFU’s intranet project and gave them the right balance of knowledge, expertise and technology, to build an effective intranet solution.
Their system incorporated many of the more traditional intranet features such as a news centre, company event calendar, HR portal and a document library for important internal forms.
The solution also featured integration with the social features of Yammer, which gave both office and field-based staff new ways to share information with each other. Their intranet used embedded feeds from key Yammer groups to surface social content alongside the more traditional static information. Together with a new internal phonebook, the platform has really supported greater information sharing, collaboration and an increasingly connected workforce.
At each stage of this project BrightStarr worked very closely with Microsoft and Yammer to deliver the RFU’s intranet, ‘RFU Connected.’
“It is incredibly useful to be able to work so closely with the Microsoft and Yammer teams as we implement their technologies for our clients. We gain key insights collaborating with them that help us deliver world-class solutions time and time again, and this is why BrightStarr is a Microsoft Gold Partner.” – Will Saville, BrightStarr CEO
