About the IET

The Institution of Engineering and Technology represents the profession of electrical, electronic, manufacturing and systems engineering and related sciences.

With more than 150,000 members worldwide, it is the largest professional engineering society in Europe and the second largest in the world.

The challenge

One of the IET's key commitments to its members is to support 'interdisciplinarity', as engineers increasingly need to acquire and use expertise from outside their core discipline.

“We're seeing an overlap within the engineering profession," says Ruth Hall, Manager, Digital Business Unit at the IET. "There's a crossover between life sciences and physical sciences. And we need a way of connecting the disciplines, a place for our members to put content that can become a central repository of information."

The IET approached Magus in January 2005 to explore how Magus's RemoteSearch technology could be used to support this concept of interdisciplinarity.

"The brief was extremely simple," says Ruth Hall. "We knew we could do something online using collaboration tools, but we didn't have too much detail. We turned to Magus to produce a concept."

Defining the goal

Magus worked with the IET to fully analyse their requirements. Collaboration was central to the project: the IET's greatest resource is its own members, and leveraging their expertise was the key to success.

"Magus were extremely good in terms of guidance and advice," says Ruth Hall. "Their level of expertise was very high."

The solution: a learning portal for online collaboration

Phase 1 of the project was a 'proof of concept' portal for one of the IET's membership areas - Intelligent Transport Systems. This was launched at the end of March 2005.

The portal allows engineers to quickly and easily locate relevant, high-quality information from an expert-selected content set. Users can perform full-text searches, browse websites in the directory and view premium news feeds from a variety of key industry sources.

The IET portal is fully Web 2.0-enabled - growing, learning and adapting as users search for information:

• The Popular Searches feature allows users to see a list of the top search terms at any given time.
• Users can bookmark individual search results for future reference and to create and share lists of key results.
• Websites can be recommended for inclusion in the directory.
• Users will be able to rate websites and see how their peers have rated them.

"The feedback from this 'social networking' has been really positive,” says Ruth Hall. "Users are thrilled with it."

Moving to the next level

Phase 2 of the project will see the rollout of the portal to additional disciplines, including the Power and Communications sectors. An IET metaportal will link the sector portals together and foster interdisciplinarity.

"The portal has meant that the website is now being used properly," says Ruth Hall. "It's no longer just brochureware. The portal is a key selling point, a hook to bring people to the site."

The portal framework has been developed to be modular and scalable. As it is rolled out to include other networks, more collaboration tools will be added to further enable social networking.

"Magus have been incredibly professional, straight-talking and proactive," says Ruth Hall. "They know our site, our content and our goals, and they're very good at identifying what we need."

"They don't oversell functionality or push technology for technology's sake," she continues. "I've loved working with them."