Intro:
The AOLadvertising resource center (ARC) is a large intranet portal for all things advertising related. A centralized online repository that acts as a reference library of information for the internal sales and strategy teams. The purposeof which, is educating and informing new and existing users about products,solutions and creative capabilities.

Problem:
ARC was a site that had a more complicated hierarchy than Wikipedia and was being utilized less and less by the sales team. What resulted was a fragmented approach for providing sales with the information they needed to make a deal. Who has the latest powerpoint for product XYZ? What do the demographics look like for that site? The answer was go look on the shared drive or ask so and so.
 
Solution:
The ARC team asked me to assist in their latest redesign. I was able to steer them away from a seemingly unusable design and a site that just "looked" more modern without improvements in functionality. It became clear in early analysis that the site need to do two things extremely well: manage many different forms of timely collateral (powerpoint, word, pdf, excel documents) and be community driven.

The solution involved a completely new Drupal based site, complete redesign, collateral management tools, vastly improved search functionality that even searched within documents, and commenting abilities.
 
Results:
The results were night and day. File versioning was now completely controlled by the site and you know that you are showing the latest data to a potential client. All collateral authors are now accountable, as the site expires the files in 2 months and sends comments directly to the author.

The site’s new design and organization also lended itself to increasing users ability to find what they needed. My proudest moment working on the site usually comes once a day when I walk across the office and see several people with the site open. A dramatic change from an often ignored site.