Business Unit Training :: A place to share information outside corporate restrictions 

Project: Offer new and frequently updated training courses in Environmental, Health, and Safety, meet communication requirements by providing access to information, news, and the Policy for employees, contractors, and the public.

Issues: The business unit needed to provide training to personnel in environmental, health, and safety. They were expected to communicate to all employees, contractors, and the public the most current requirements, any pertinent events, and documents relating to their efforts in this area. IT had a set of protocols for posting information, creating courses, and other uses of their corporate servers. These protocols were designed to protect the integrity of internal databases, keep their corporate sites running optimally, to minimize risks of viruses and other malicious attacks to not only the servers, but to all workstations. These two sets of needs were in acting in opposition to one another.

Solution: Albany Analytical created a stand-alone Moodle site for the business unit to fulfill all of its requirements; fast creation of training, tracking of activities, ease of access for remote personnel (employees and contractors) news forums, and public access to EH&S policies and events. New courses could be continually created and updated on the Moodle site for immediate use, and later be transferred for long-term training within the corporate LMS. The corporate servers were not involved in the posting of news items or forum questions which were on-going.

Results: The Moodle site and first course were online in less than one month. The business unit was able to modify the training without the usual formal change documents, with little or no lead time, post news, post the Policy for the public read, and link to internal websites securely.