Hero background image for the EEX intranet success story

Case Study · Energy trading

Dynamic Redesign of the EEX Intranet with Refined

EEX Group needed a new intranet in two and a half weeks – the old one was still running on a different platform. With Confluence and Refined, it became a work platform for around 700 employees: a mega menu instead of searching, its own corporate design, and content maintained by the teams themselves.

hard facts about the project

Products used

Confluence Data Center, Refined for Confluence / Sites & Themes, Refined Toolkit for Confluence, other plugins from the Marketplace (including Word-Exporter, Content Scheduler), Advanced Image Gallery for Confluence

Solution and methodology

Migration to a new intranet platform, joint evaluation of apps, user permission management, corporate branding, introduction and workshops on editorial use

About EEX

European Energy Exchange (EEX) is part of the EEX Group, a globally active group of various companies and trading participants serving the international commodity markets. EEX is the world's leading exchange for trading energy and energy-related products.

In doing so, EEX develops, operates and connects transparent markets for energy, among other things, and offers trading in power, gas, freight, agricultural products and emission allowances.

Intranet Migration Within Two Weeks

Confluence offers a suitable foundation for creating an internal company intranet as well as a digital collaboration solution. Companies already using Confluence also get the option to quickly build a new, high-quality intranet within their existing system.

Against this background, EEX Group approached XALT in early February 2020 and requested an intranet solution built entirely in Confluence. By the end of February or early March, within just two and a half weeks, a migration and replacement of the old intranet with the new environment was carried out.

Software from Atlassian – primarily Jira and Confluence – had already been in use internally at EEX in various areas for some time. Until the technical migration was completed, EEX ran a proprietary intranet based on Liveray.

The expanded mega menu of the EEX intranet: five columns of links to HR topics, below it three image tiles for the HR team, job openings and development

Challenge 1 – With an intranet at larger companies, one challenge is organizing the enormous amount of content in an understandable way and making it accessible to users.

Solution 1 – With the built-in organization and structuring capabilities of Refined for Confluence, content could be structured quickly and easily via a mega menu as well as individual spaces. This makes it possible to create and exchange more content in the intranet without it getting lost or becoming hard to find. The intranet's structure can also be adjusted very easily via drag and drop.

Challenge 2 – A solution needed to be created that reflects EEX's corporate culture, aligns with its company values and matches its corporate design.

Solution 2 – To create a modern, attractive interface in line with the corporate design, the built-in theme editor and layout function of Refined for Confluence were used. Beyond style and colors, themes can be created and applied individually and flexibly to areas, categories or individual pages. In EEX's case, a global theme aligned with the corporate identity was created and applied to all areas.

The "Sport Events" section of the EEX intranet: navigation tree on the left, a search banner and page tiles for ball sports, training and running

Challenge 3 – Another challenge was designing the intranet collaboratively, so that content could be accessed and changed simultaneously by users as well as smaller teams.

Solution 3 – With the new social intranet, the collaboration aspect that mattered so much to EEX could be realized. For example, the marketing team was given the ability to jointly write, edit and publish its content via blog posts and news articles. Areas are planned in the future for teams and projects, to be maintained content-wise by group editors, leading to more efficient work. Cross-team collaboration will be created through community and event pages.

Accompanying Step-by-Step Implementation and Added Benefit

In the first step, in ongoing coordination with the marketing team, the overall structure, the individual areas and an appealing layout were created. Once the foundation of the new intranet was in place, work began migrating the existing content into the new system. In the final step, a permission concept for user management was created together. Throughout the whole implementation, we committed to advising EEX and helping identify the necessary steps for the best possible outcome.

For the EEX Group project, it turned out that the ideal platform is a combination of wiki and social intranet. Thanks to experience from past projects, we knew how to best combine Confluence and Refined to build the new intranet. We were also aware that mixing wikis and social intranets can often be unstructured and confusing. Through the features of Refined for Confluence and our own technical know-how, an outstanding solution with a modern look and easy handling was nonetheless found.

The following apps are – among others – tied into the solution:

Refined for Confluence
Word-Exporter for Confluence
Content Scheduler for Confluence
User Profiles for Confluence
Advanced Image Gallery for Confluence

EEX Group today works with a highly efficient collaboration platform based on Confluence and Refined for around 700 employees.

more information

Want to know more about this Confluence intranet success story? Feel free to contact us for a free consultation.

Get in touch

We help your team achieve greatness in every aspect

Want to know more about this success story or about our solution? We help you get the best out of your company. Feel free to contact us by phone, email, or visit us at our office.