Magyar verzió

Working without frontiers - in a network...

The VISP Project (Vitalizing City Centres through Integrated Spatial Planning), is an Interreg IIIB NSP project involving six small and medium size cities in the North Sea region launched on January 1, 2004. The members of the project are: the City of Mölndal ( Lead Partner - (Sweden), the  Municipality of Drammen (Norway), TU-Technology GmbH (Germany), Gemeente Enschede Stadsdeel Ost (The Netherlands), City of Kortrijk (Belgium), the Town  of Matlock (UK) and  the University of Sheffield (UK).

The task

One of the key focus areas of the VISP project is physical and virtual networking and besides the 7 partners around 50 sub partners are involved in the project from the start.
T-Soft was one of the 12 companies participating in the EU tender of the VISP project and the one that received the mandate to implement the tasks of supplying the portal for the VISP project.

  • The external communication solution conveys information about the activity and results of the project in an up-to-date manner, and represents the joint efforts of the partners in an integrated way.
    The portal furthermore supports virtual networking between the partners.
  • The internal communication platform effectively assists teamwork and the circulation and storing of internal project information.

The solution

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION

Editing the web content constructed and managed by  T-Soft is carried out via an editor programme developed by the company, the underlying principle of the editor programme is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
Therefore, the different pages of the portals can be edited freely, through the Internet, without any programming knowledge of the editors. A given page can be edited by several persons if desired, and different levels of authorisation can be defined, in accordance with the wishes of the  network.

The portal of the project entertains visitors with a project magazine under the address www.vispnet.org. Each and every member of the network can publish their articles to the magazine, because each member has their own editor's licence. Publishing an article or releasing news takes only a few minutes. Publishing information about events and programmes is equally simple and fast

Did you know?
The fact that the opening page of the VISP Project Portal is an on-line magazine immediately ensures portal visitors the latest information about project proceedings.             
Why is it useful?

  • Internet search engines (like Google) favour websites that exist on the web permanently, and at the same time their content is renewed from time to time.
  • Visitors always find fresh and up-to-date content, therefore, they feel it is worth coming back again and again.

Within the shared magazine each project member has their own editing license and their own magazine (that can be accessed by clicking on the name of the news-writer concerned), where articles published by them are collected exclusively. The news-writers own magazines are embedded into their own Web-space. A web-space is a separate Internet space belonging to its owner. The space is integrated into the community portal (the project portal) and at the same time it can be used by the owners to introduce themselves.

Besides the magazine, that is, in the header of the portal there are links to the contents of the project portal that don't belong to the magazine and are mostly static. For example, the introduction of the project and the members, description of objectives and tasks, best practices, documents, etc.

Part of these contents (e.g. documents) can be edited by several persons as well,          but this information is usually managed by the portal administrator of appointed the project / portal.

INTERNAL COMMUNICATION

Internal-communication and teamwork within the project is managed by             an Internet-based tool, called DeskNow*. DeskNow can be used as a mobile office                        by the members of the project, since it can be accessed at any time through an Internet connection, and besides mailing it provides an opportunity for storing personal and group documents, creating personal and group calendars, organising chat conferences and ensuring project management in an effective and cost-effective way.

Integration, integration, integration ...

T-Soft Ltd has long standing experience in managing the work of European, national and regional several networks and communities through combining the solutions mentioned above. T-Soft Ltd’s network portal solutions can also be accessed from the mobile phone.

VISP Experience

The portal solution supplied by T-Soft Ltd. ensures an internal and external communication platform for the project that makes it possible to carry out the daily tasks of the network in an easy to use, cost effective way. The portal also serves as an always up-to- date dissemination tool for project proceedings  towards  the different target groups – politicians, citizens of the participating countries and regions, project partners, EU institutions

"(The EU-project) VISP is very satisfied with the services of T-Soft. T-Soft ensures also on-line support for the users enabling thereby enhancing of ICT use among the project actors. 
T-Soft has great experience in working with EU stakeholders and they are therefore easy to cooperate with. We can warmly recommend them as ICT-partner in large multi-stakeholder EU projects."

Harald Kollström
The Municipality of Drammen
Responsible for WP 6 Dissemination
The VISP project
www.vispnet.org

*Trademark of Ventia