Generali achieves a unified and interactive experience for +70,000 employees with Magnolia.

The WE, Generali Portal which serves all Generali countries and business units worldwide, was built on an internal network, but the Group wanted different integration solutions. The portal authentication system, in particular, wasn’t integrated with every country meaning that users couldn’t be identified when accessing the portal. This prevented them from developing interactive tools and two-way communication to engage employees. It also made it impossible to get a clear picture of traffic on the portal.

Meanwhile, the Assicurazioni Generali Intranet had been built on an obsolete structure and had an outdated look & feel, which resulted in a poor user experience. Content authors could not create structured content as the platform only allowed them to insert short texts accompanied by links or downloadable documents.

The previous WE, Generali Portal was built using an open-source PHP CMS, but the company wished to migrate to the same content platform that was powering their public website "generali.com" —Magnolia DXP. Generali Group wanted a secure, enterprise-grade solution that could cope with the most recent digital trends and scale up to accommodate future needs.

They also needed a business partner with local and international experience, knowledgeable about the challenges of handling web and digital marketing in the insurance industry.

The project goal was to build a digital environment with an engaging virtual working space for storytelling, promoting the corporate website as the primary source of information for all employees.

The new WE, Generali Portal also needed to be accessible to all the employees worldwide through a seamless Single Sign-On authentication process (SSO) that would allow for accurate measuring of traffic on the new portal.

Generali Group opted for Magnolia as they had already used the platform for the external website and wanted to maintain consistency. Magnolia’s enterprise-grade platform provided an open architecture for easy integration that was scalable & trusted. It also allowed them to introduce user profiles with links to socials​, ratings​ and likes on articles, all developed by Magnolia implementation partner Tinext​.

Magnolia offered a responsive design and provided many of the features that Generali Group needed in a platform:
 

• Ease of Use: WYSIWYG in-line editing thanks to its hybrid-headless approach
• User Permission and Security: The headless architecture of Magnolia separates the frontend and the backend of the website. A security feature protects content from being edited by people outside the corporate firewall. Magnolia also offers a granular access control system, allowing administrators to define the rights and privileges available to each user.
• Workflow and Publishing: A four-eye (editor-approver/publisher), enterprise-ready jBPM workflow comes built-in with Magnolia to assist web editors on the daily content publication.
• Localization and Languages: Multilingual content is natively supported in Magnolia without requiring add-ons or plugins, making it possible to manage content in one or in as many languages as needed. This is the case with the Assicurazioni Generali Intranet that offers content in both Italian and English, the two languages used in the Business Unit.
• Categorization: Users can create unlimited hierarchies of taxonomies enabling the flexible deployment of content usage models. For example, custom feeds are based on the categories assigned to news and publications.
• Digital Asset Management: Magnolia offers a DAM system integrated with page buildings so users can bulk upload images, PDF files, videos, or any kind of files into the DAM repository with a simple drag & drop action.
• Multichannel & Multi-Language: Content can be easily adapted to alternative channels like mobile devices. If needed, it can also be published on these channels in different languages; such is the case of the Assicurazioni Generali Intranet, where the content is available both in Italian and English.

Magnolia’s open architecture also supports integrations with Generali Group’s existing tools and enabled to build an actual Digital Experience Platform (DXP). This includes SSO MS ADFS service integration, the integration of the address book, Media Asset Management, Search and Analytics tools, Team Collaboration tools, as well as a chatbot, and Recruiting Software. Magnolia’s DX Cloud hosting indeed guarantees unlimited integrations, but also fast deployment of new features and less overall complexity.

Since Magnolia DXP has been introduced as the core digital business platform, Generali Group can centrally operate the Generali Group Intranet (WE, Generali Portal) and the Group Head Office Intranet (Assicurazioni Generali Intranet).

The WE, Generali Portal is now accessible to almost all employees worldwide via SSO. It is a single reference point and has the same look & feel as the Generali corporate website. The intranet is the opening page for every employee across the Group, and the content can be customized based on user's profile and country.

The new Assicurazioni Generali Intranet also mirrors the corporate website, is available in Italian and English, and can host numerous informative bilingual documents.

With this new digital environment, Generali provides its employees with a place to get informed, participate in Group campaigns and initiatives and where they can find all useful materials and links for their daily work and activities.

Moreover, thanks to Magnolia’s easy-to-use interface, the Communications Department can run some features of the channel independently, gathering input from every other department in the group. It can now work faster and more effectively, autonomously managing the uploading and categorization of service orders.

Content publication is also under control thanks to approval workflows and a staging environment where an “editor” can create or modify the content before approval by a “publisher.”

Whenever an editor user requests a publication, a message will be sent via Pulse to all users of the publisher group. Any publisher who receives the notification can decide whether to publish the page or reject the publication.