Intranet Case Studies

ThoughtFarmer Helps Entropic Unite After Flurry of Acquisitions

Entropic Communications, a semiconductor company that makes home entertainment networking systems, is the classic engineering success story. But as often happens, its very success created some of its biggest challenges.

Entropic started with a few visionaries creating innovative products for an emerging market, and grew organically. Then two years ago the company broke out with a flurry of acquisitions and an IPO.

Result: an organization with lots of smart people doing great work, but with little cohesion or synergy (five offices, three continents), and little control over its rich information resources.

ThoughtFarmer helped Entropic unite after a flurry of acquisitions

“We were looking for something to centralize control and dissemination of information, impose some security – and help integrate the company,” says senior IT manager Frank Finnerty.

What it found was ThoughtFarmer.

ENTRance, the company’s ThoughtFarmer intranet, launched twelve months ago, helping unite the company after mergers and acquisitions had created an uneasy federation. “There was a barrier there,” Finnerty says now. “You worked for one company or the other.”

But ENTRance quickly became the go-to resource for forms, policies, company and departmental news and documents – and online introductions to new colleagues. It helped forge a fresh identity for Entropic.

The payback is difficult to quantify, Finnerty says, but real. Just ensuring that high-priced talent doesn’t waste time re-doing tasks because they used an outdated form the first time can be significant.

“And it’s crucial when you’re communicating with suppliers and customers that you know where to find the current version of information. It’s all up there on ENTRance now.”

Entropic recently implemented new e-mail policies designed to reduce exposure in the event of litigation. Messages will be kept no more than a year. It means teams can no longer rely on e-mail as a collaboration medium.  “ThoughtFarmer is how we’ll do collaboration now,” Finnerty says.

Some engineering groups were already using informal wikis for collaboration, but security was a concern. ThoughtFarmer, which is integrated with Microsoft’s Active Directory single-sign-on authentication system, solves that problem.

Entropic considered other solutions, including Microsoft SharePoint (too expensive and difficult to customize) and Joomla, an open source content management system (inadequate support).

ThoughtFarmer’s social networking features appealed to younger employees

ThoughtFarmer also made it easy for Entropic to integrate WebSpace, a business process automation tool from Nexprise that the company was implementing at the same time. Now employees can get a quick view of assignments and to-dos right on their ENTRance home page.

Finally, there were ThoughtFarmer’s intangibles. The right look and feel to appeal to engineering and design types. The ability to personalize pages. The social networking features to attract younger employees raised with those modes of communication.

And the ease of use. “At the time, we were running a hundred miles an hour,” Finnerty says. “Moving into a new facility, merging, trying to go public. We needed something very intuitive.”

ThoughtFarmer gave it to them. When a new marketing admin assistant started recently, training her to use ENTRance took all of 30 minutes, he says. “We’re really happy with the ease of use.”