Australia's billion dollar research giant the CSIRO is underway with a comprehensive program to migrate 28 different intranet platforms in use across the organisation to the Sitecore web CMS.

The CSIRO intranet is used by more than 6500 staff inside the organisation and regularly accessed by up to 500 external PhD students and researchers.

Catherina O'Leary, Manager Internal & Online Communication at the CSIRO, said the move to a single intranet platform would provide better manageability, be easier to maintain and result in significant savings in the long term.

The intranet will continue to use the Funnelback search platform which was developed in-house by CSIRO scientists and sold last year to Australian MySourceMatrix CMS developer, Squiz.

The first phase of intranet development will focus on providing a common Web interface across the entire organisation. Future phases will include integration with CSIRO's SAP enterprise applications and systems built in-house that are used to track workflow of documents created collaboratively by CSIRO researchers.

There are presently a wide range of different solutions used across the different divisions of the CSIRO, including flat HTML, SharePoint sites and custom in-house developed CMS solutions.

"An organisation like the CSIRO has many clever individuals, and some have developed their own CMS solutions, However we are left with a problem when these individuals leave, especially if they don't leave behind sufficient documentation."

O'Leary would not reveal the budget for the Sitecore intranet migration, although she did say it was "more than we expected."

The CSIRO reported over $A1.3 billion in revenue for 2008-2009, with just over half received directly from the federal government. In 2008-2009 this included over $A200 million in revenue from patent revenues, with the bulk coming from the groundbreaking 802.11 WiFi wireless technology developed at the CSIRO and now used around the globe by more than a billion devices.

The Danish Sitecore web Content Management System (CMS) was selected by the CSIRO in late 2009. O'Leary acknowledges there was pressure from within the organisation towards open source solutions, however she said," it kept coming back to the warranty issue."

Having a single "throat to choke" if any problems arose with the CMS platform was seen as essential.

The intranet CMS will be hosted centrally, which is also expected to result in savings as the CSIRO is able to close down a lot of small servers hosting local intranets, stop paying license fees and free staff from local administration.

In preparation for the Sitecore migration, the communications team at CSIRO has spent the past 12 months doing some essential housekeeping on corporate documents.

The number of corporate files on the intranet has been whittled down from 87,000 to around 20,000.

"We needed to do this to reduce the workload on making the transition to the new CMS," said O'Leary.

"Many of our divisions within CSIRO will be faced with a similar task as they have content going back to 2001.

"We did look at tools to automate the migration of content, but it was decided it was worth the pain and effort to review content manually. Staff are less likely to maintain stuff that is not essential if it is a manual process."

"It also provides a great opportunity to make sure a lot of unstructured content we have on the intranet becomes compliant with the AGLS metadata standards we adhere to at CSIRO."

"Making it a manual process may mean the communications department at CSIRO won't be popular for a while, but it will be for the best."

The CSIRO has begun development of three intranet sites that will launch in pilot version using the Sitecore CMS in March 2010, with the remaining sites expected to migrate by July.