Centacare Employment Services Brisbane (Centacare) is the principal Diocesan-based Catholic social welfare organisation of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.

The services of Centacare include but are not limited to:

• Recruitment agencies (Centacare Employment with offices in Chermside, Goodna, Redcliffe and Browns Plains)
• Recruitment agencies for people with a disability (Specialised Employment Group, with offices in Toowong, Stones Corner, Caboolture, Southport and Palm Beach)

Having only one copy of the policies and procedures per agency started to become a problem. If several employees needed to consult them at the same time, only one was available. Updating them after a revision was made was not an easy task either. The chapter needed to be reprinted and mailed to the agencies. Keeping the policies and procedures updated across agencies was becoming an expensive and time consuming exercise.

Standard forms started to become a problem too. Each site had a folder located in the site's server with the forms they required in Microsoft Word format, allowing people to modify them without the knowledge of the creators of the form. As a result there were several “versions” of the same form across sites. Updating the forms files with new versions was not an easy task either.

At the same time, with more than 100 staff members, trying to find the email, location or the phone number of any employee was becoming increasingly hard.

Because of these problems, Centacare was looking for an efficient way to distribute and publish information within their agencies.

On Q Web was approached by Centacare to implement an intranet. On Q Web suggested the installation of an intranet with Content Management capabilities.

This intranet is for members only and available through the Internet. A designated staff member was trained to update the contents of the intranet (intranet author). Now whenever there's a change in the policies and procedures it can become available to all agencies immediately, after the intranet author updates the change.

To solve the forms problem, a Portable Document Format or PDF converter was implemented. When a document is converted to PDF it is really difficult to alter it. Forms are still created in Microsoft Word format and then uploaded to the intranet to become available to all the staff members. During the uploading process they are automatically converted into a PDF and a link is added to the intranet page where it was uploaded for easy download.

The PDF converter can be used not only to upload the forms, but any other Microsoft Office or Open Office document that needs to be distributed between agencies. There is no need to buy Adobe Acrobat Distiller or similar software to perform the conversions.

In order to create access restrictions, all staff members had to be added into the CMS. This served two purposes: restricting areas of the intranet and also keeping the contact details of staff members updated. That information is currently used in the “address book” of the intranet.

• By distributing information in a centralized way, employees can always be sure of getting the latest version of their policies and procedures, forms and staff members contact information.
• Thanks to the use of a CMS a designated author can update the website anytime/anywhere without suffering from webmaster bottleneck.
• Publishing the information in digital form saves money and trees. It can also be indexed and searched easily.
• The only tool a staff member needs to access the information is a computer connected to the Internet and an Internet browser. Most organisations have that configuration readily available, making this solution very cost effective.
• Accessibility anywhere/anytime as the intranet can be reached via the Internet.

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