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Exide Technologies

With operations in 89 countries, Exide Technologies is one of the world’s largest producers and recyclers
of lead-acid batteries. The company’s four global business groups provide a comprehensive range of
stored electrical energy products and services for industrial and transportation applications.
Challenge

Exide needed a better, more functional way to collaborate and share documents and content within a
more intuitive, organized manner on their Intranet. Exide needed a quick-to-deploy Intranet solution
that would provide them with the flexibility to support their multi-language needs, while giving them
the opportunity to establish meaningful communities and target content to the right users within their
company. After exploring the capabilities of BEA's document management functionality, Exide
determined that Enterpulse's offering provided an easier-to-use user interface and more closely
matched its specific requirements.
Solution

Many of the features Exide needed to launch a
full-scale
Intranet portal
for
its global
workforce were enterprise collaboration and
asset
management
Intranet/Extranet
capabilities
that Enterpulse already had
available within its asset repository. Taking
advantage of the pre-built, enterprise portal
features, Exide looked to Enterpulse to tailor
these reusable assets to meet their specific
business processes. Enterpulse installed the
baseline portal framework and customized
specific components to ensure the usability of
the product within
the communication
paradigms posed by Exide’s business. The
enterpulse solution provided Exide with:

• Design and Taxonomy: The team designed both a new logo (“insideEXIDE”) and two custom
look-and-feel options from which to choose as the face of the Intranet. To define the
navigation, Enterpulse also reviewed Exide’s business processes to recommend and implement
a taxonomy that would offer an intuitive organization of community content as part of an
overall menu and portlet structure for the Intranet.
• Document Library: Leveraging our asset management portlet, Enterpulse provided Exide with a
structured library to categorize, post, and search for up-to-date files and documents—an

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enormously valuable feature for a document-intensive company. An additional “Popular
Document” feature offers quick access to the most frequently used documents.

• Collaboration Portlets: With portlets that include Calendar, Discussion, News, RSS News Feeds,
Stock Quotes, Quick Links, and more, Enterpulse’s library of collaboration features offers
employees the opportunity to stay up-to-date on happenings, communicate using contextual
topics and threads, and save valuable time by quickly linking to common applications and
content.

• Custom Communities: Each of Exide’s communities—defined with assistance from Enterpulse—
has its own set of collaboration and document management portlets; currently, Human
Resources, Legal, and IT each have their own departmental space with the portlets of value to
them, while additional communities can be added at any time—without additional coding.

• Content Editor and Workflow: The easy-to-use content editor allows Exide’s authenticated
users to quickly add and update portlet content—such as Welcome text—using a Rich Text
Editor that offers standard word-processing formatting features, including the ability to link
HTML files. And with the workflow capabilities Exide is provided with automated review,
approval, and publishing processes—complete with email notification—that are often
associated with much more expensive enterprise content management systems.

• Administration and Authentication: Leveraging the BEA platform’s security framework,
Enterpulse designed the authentication to provide users with role-based access and visitor
entitlements to the communities of relevance to them. Additionally, administration
management efficiency is achieved by delegated administration. Each community has a
designated portal administrator who can easily “turn on” specific portlets from the available
pool depending on that community’s needs.

• Multi-Language Support: With 89 countries and five different languages, providing Exide with
the ability to easily change the Intranet to display local language with a single menu click is
extremely valuable. We customized portlet titles, menu items, quick links, documents, and
more that easily can be changed to support one of the five languages (English, French, German,
Italian, and Spanish).
Results

Exide is now equipped with a secure, flexible, and customizable communication and document
management tool that supports its employees worldwide. Using the suite of Enterpulse’s reusable
assets as a baseline, employees enjoy a more intuitive organization of content, along with standards
applied across newly defined communities. Exide can promote the productivity of its workforce by
enabling easy access to all corporate, department, and other information. Using the Enterpulse-
developed portal framework, “insideEXIDE” has become employees’ go-to source for all of their daily
work needs.