Sector(s)
IOTA is a non-profit intergovernmental organisation, which provides a forum to assist its members to improve tax administration. The main field of its activity is organizing workshops to exchange views, experiences and best practices about the most important and current issues in the field of taxation. IOTA also promotes cooperation among tax administrations in Europe and supports their development according to their individual needs.
Brainsum went on to help the organisation to fulfill their vision of a web application possible to use as an intranet and a communication platform in one.
About the project
We have created a news portal and communication platform extended with an intranet for the members.
Goals
The main goals of the project were to create an opportunity for the 44 member countries to
- Find a way for knowledge sharing and smooth communication
- Facilitate the way of cooperation between the members
- Create a structured database of users and documentations
- Enable online workflow management
Requirements
To fulfill the above mentioned goals we faced several requirements during the development, the main ones were the following:
- News portal for the members and for the public visitors as well
- Intranet for the IOTA staff to support their event planning and organizational workflows by allowing them to create, collect and store documentation supported by a private forum system and permission based notification options
- Event Management and creation is one of the core functions of IOTA. Website is used not only for announcing future programs but also for managing participant admission, helping them in preparation for an upcoming event, document the outcome of each gathering, and saving past occasions as an archive timeline
- The web site also serves as a registration interface for all potential event attendees by allowing them access the event information, receiving notifications and signing up
- Knowledge Base for all their documents since the existence of the IOTA with permission handling module and automated tests
- Categorised and searchable contents and documents (even inside the document), constantly growing from multiple sources and discussed by the members since the existence of the organisation
- Technical Enquiry, a complex permission-based feature which allows the Principal Contact Persons of the member countries to share their know-how on specific tax-related topics. Furthermore, they can invite professional outsiders to resolve definite cases or to ask specific questions from the related countries' delegates. The component's strict workflow makes the international work easier and improves the communication between the partner countries.
- Forum with automatic topic creation of the event’s pages
- A survey and communication tool for members to help amass the leading practices, managed through complex confirmation levels
- Issue Management
- Publication Collections
- Built-in support channel for users
- Custom Reports, event statistics, annual reports
- Custom Notifications, highly customisable email and web based notifications, reminders managed by the IOTA Secretariat
- Form Builder for creating and cloning custom forms as well as result analysis. Custom form handling by form builder based on Entityforms, extended functionality of the module and interface via custom modules.
- REST API for machine-to-machine communication between the web and the mobile application
- Custom role and permission handling module, since the site is managing cca. 30 roles for 3700+ users
- Automated test for the core functionalities and permission handling on the site
The full process workflow diagram of the Technical Enquiry
Outcome
A visually attractive web application was created, used by almost 4000 users monthly. The site is currently under an ongoing transportation to HTML5, supplemented with a face-lift and UX improvements. Despite the launched MVP we are still completing the web with new features, continuous maintenance and support. We are working on the automated test to cover even more functionalities to avoid any regression.
Why Drupal was chosen
The previous site running on a different open source CMS became outdated, unwieldy with limited options. The struggles called for a more mature solution. That was the opportunity for Drupal to be brought into the fold. The most important arguments were the followings:
- Free and community-based open source technology without any proprietary limitations
- Advanced system for role, permission and workflow management
- Sustainability and security
- Performance capacity
- Modularity and high scalability for Drupal 7
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
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