Workscape

Improving the Employee Portal Experience

Headquartered in Framingham, MA, Workscape builds Internet solutions for human capital management (HCM) and employee benefits administration that strengthen relationships among employers, employees and HR suppliers.

Customer Challenges

Improve services to enterprise customers
Leverage existing technology components
Provide remote access to services and content behind the firewall

Solution

Workscape deployed the Sun Portal Server running Solaris as the platform for its Employee.com HCM portal solution.

Business Results

Provides a secure community for partners, suppliers and employees
Protects information assets
Increases usability for end-users and managers
Speeds up development
Scales up for large deployments

Products and Services

Story Details

Workscape offers a revolutionary open platform technology for HCM that combines an employee portal (Employee.com) with human relations (HR) self-service and workforce management applications, productivity tools and an HR marketplace. By tapping into Employee.com, employees of large companies can update their benefits, get company news and information, collaborate with one another on company or community projects, make purchases and enjoy entertainment options—all from their desktops at work or from home. "Most of our clients have very lean HR staffs because they've made a commitment to strategic HR," says Tim McDonald, Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Workscape. "Outsourcing arrangements greatly reduce a client's dependence on HR staff members. Clients such as GM and DaimlerChrysler are leading the strategic push to leverage technology for HR administrative services."

Workscape needed an underlying technology platform for this solution and chose the powerful, secure and scalable Sun Java System Portal Server. "One attribute is the Secure Remote Access gateway capability embedded in the portal server," says Lee Ingram, Chief Technology Officer at Workscape. "The gateway allows remote users to access internal, behind-the-firewall content as if they were inside their organizations. The portal itself presents information that is maintained behind the client's respective firewall. We find it essential in delivering an HR-focused portal environment."

" Sun's Solaris Operating Environment running on Sun hardware allowed us to scale out to over 40,000 concurrent users during our simulated load testing. With a site that large, it would be near impossible to do it with any other technology. "

— Lee Ingram, Chief Technical Officer, Workscape

"Sun's scalability features allow us to scale to a high level," adds Ingram. "In terms of reliability, our Sun systems have proven themselves in months of operational uptime as far as availability to us and to the customer. These enterprise-class machines have the intelligence and diagnostics necessary to support a high order of reliability. Plus, our Sun maintenance relationships provide crucial equipment monitoring and expedited services even before a machine fails."

As a result of using Sun technology, Employee.com is much more than an employee portal, according to Ingram. "It is an Internet service delivery platform that in the future will leverage a number of Sun Portal Server components. It enhances a rapid development environment for new applications and also supports the integration of a client's legacy applications in a portal view. The tight integration significantly improves the end-user experience."