Website with SharePoint 2013

Starting in May 2015, the Technical College of Düsseldorf (FH D) was renamed to the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences (HSD). The renaming and the simultaneous relocation of the university to a new campus were accompanied by the introduction of a new, innovative corporate design. The goal of the university’s central WebRelaunch project group was, using the specifications of the new visual appearance, to design a corresponding website. The project, based on Microsoft SharePoint Publishing, was technically implemented by Alight.

For a contemporary university website, which provided a common base of information for users, a primary representative-oriented structure and an intuitive operation was offered. Although almost all of the content is publicly available, there are also protected areas for internal university users and external users. The idea of the new internet presence was immediately met with a positive response. The focus was to be a simpler, self-sufficient configurability and the user-friendly presentation of information, using the new university-specific design, which was present on all pages. The implementation of the new internet presence was constantly enriched with new ideas from the university and supported by Alight.

“I am pleased that the structural, creative and technical implementation of the new HSD internet pages has worked so smoothly and that we now have an innovative, contemporary website, which reflects the modernity and innovation of the university against the background of the new corporate design and our new location.”

Loretta Salvagno
Vizepräsidentin für Wirtschafts– und Personalverwaltung der HSD

The website consists of multiple areas and each organizational group can administrate these themselves. The university attached great importance to a quick orientation and an easy information search functionality. The headers list the individual departments along with their acronyms in the university design and current news announcements. Each department lists the most up-to-date department-specific information and events.
The university logo takes the user back to the university’s home page at any time. This follows a division of content into four areas, consisting of general information on the university, departments, studies, and teaching, as well as research and transfer. Each page has a search function, QuickLinks, and a help function. The internet presence is rounded off by the staff’s personal profile pages, including subject area, department, responsibilities and contact information. These should make it easier to find the university staff. The profiles are synchronized daily with the centralized user administration and can be enhanced with further personal data using the tailored form. The search and filtering functions allow the users to search for content across various departments as well as centralized facilities. This makes the listings of people, research activities, study programs and reports across disciplines possible. Well-engineered configuration options allow individual pages to be displayed as list views for individual purposes. Visual effects are achieved through slideshows and videos in the background of the page as well as with image galleries. The university’s website is available in the German and English languages. Mobile access with all functionalities is ensured.

“Upon completion of this exciting project, what thrilled me the most was that using SharePoint had achieved such an impressively responsive solution.”

Dr. Sabine Rathmayer
IT Projektleiterin