Building SFR Altice's secure intranet for 12,000+ users

From the merger between Numericable and the SFR group, the SFR-Altice group aims to create, from the first fiber-optic network and a leading mobile network, the National leader of a Very High Speed Fixed-mobile convergence. Owner of its infrastructure, the group combines two powerful networks and, through its investments, SFR-Altice aims to rapidly expand the Fiber coverage and the 4G network, as well as to offer optimal service quality.

A global operator, SFR-Altice holds major positions throughout the French telecommunications market, among the general public, as well as businesses, communities, or the wholesale market. Given the complementarity of its brands, the group provides a full-service offering, including Internet, mobile telephony, and audiovisual services. It has 22.5 million mobile customers and 6.5 million households subscribed to broadband. It operates under the following brands: SFR-Altice, SFR, RED by SFR, and Virgin Mobile. Regarding its corporate identity, it operates under the SFR Business Team brand, Completel and Telindus, serving 190,000 companies.

Listed on Euronext Paris (Euronext NUM), with 78% owned by Altice, the SFR-Altice Group generated a proforma revenue of 11.4 billion euros in 2014 and has brought together 16,500 employees until now.

The merger between Numericable and SFR (now SFR-Altice) resulted in bringing together more than 12,000 employees within a single group, at the end of 2014. One challenge with this type of merger is to provide mutual and simultaneous information to all Group employees, regardless of their employing company.

The internal communication tool implemented had to endure simultaneous and secure access to more than 12,000 people in a relatively short time, to allow the possibility of rapid evolution in order to accommodate the visit of up to 17, 000 employees (the case today) or even more to cope with the new developments of the group. The tool needed to be a "top layer" containing global information about the Group and allowing access to various Intranets of the Group companies.

The Open Source dimension was in turn required in order to facilitate the transfer of competence with minimum maintenance by SFR-Altice. This also allows changing at will the solution in place, in the manner of a "shelf solution", choosing the existing modules or developing them accordingly.

Once the project guidelines were established, the selection was carried out in September 2014, based on three major axes: autonomy, cost, and timeliness.

The solution had to be simple enough to allow the SFR-Altice group IS teams to evolve quickly and in the right direction. Also, in case of incidents, the teams needed the ability to correct any technical bugs internally and, if necessary, without the intervention of external teams.

Finally, the solution had to be delivered within less than 2 months, with the official launch being at the end of November 2014. Following an audit of several Open Source players, ultimately the solution offered by XWiki was selected.

The criteria that lead to the choice of XWiki were its ease of implementation, its cost, as well as the confidence of the teams already working with Numericable (before the merger with the SFR-Altice group). The Numericable management, which ruled in favor of XWiki, was already using the XWiki technology for its intranet dedicated to the Numericable, Completel and LTI Telecom companies.

XWiki has customized the standard XWiki Enterprise platform according to the group's brand identity. The engine and its components have been installed on Numericable's internal servers. A cluster was also set up in order to deal with the potentially significant visits overload on the Intranet.

For the basic support service, the XWiki teams reacted according to the urgency of any kind of development requests or bug fixes. User administrators were also able to create as many pages as necessary, and backup was set to take place each night on the servers in order to save the information.

The solution was deployed in November 2014. XWiki's offer includes daily usage within the group. The internal communication teams of the SFR-Altice group have the liberty to bring all the desired changes to their Intranet design, in addition to the daily information updates on the website.

The “Link 2.0" solution implemented allows all the company's employees to view the latest news on the group, share documents and work together. The solution is integrated within the information system of Numericable (now SFR-Altice), in particular in their directory.

Thus, users have access to the information they need, anytime they need it, while the workflow allows spreading the news to different services.