A: This application looks so rigid and old … (she yawns)

B: Yes, these colors and tables are bugging me too. My eyes are so sore. (he is rubbing his face)

A: We should do something with this platform. I am so tired of its current look. (she is drinking coffee)

B: I need something to lift me up, to get excited again. (he is scratching his head)

A: How about… a journey to space?! Wouldn’t that be awesome? (she gets excited)

B: No, my colleague. What WE need is SPACEFi!

Like it or not, we all need a change once in a while. Otherwise we just don’t advance. This also applies to the IT world. We may have established systems that work quite fine, but users often want more than that. We should listen to them and their needs, and also consider the latest trends.

We at the CEF recently came to the decision that it’s about time to renovate one of our vital platforms – a web application that provides great support to all our program activities.

We came up with the following idea:

The new platform is a catchy CEF app space with a modern look and feel, designed to be even more user-friendly and intuitive than its ancestor. It is a place where the CEF can create custom internal fancy apps like the Intranet: news along with comments and documents, helpdesk request, event order with a calendar, online learning request, special IT apps and much more, all to support the CEF activities.

There were quite a few challenges to overcome: which framework to use, what would be the final name and logo, which modules to port to the new platform, how some new handy modules should look like, which colors to use, etc. After some research, tests and meetings we got all the information that we needed. What was next was just work and time to make it happen.

At the end we developed an internal information space for our colleagues. It is a catchy “meeting space”, a login system, where we share with each other useful information related to work. We call it SPACEfi – from the keywords SPACE, CEF and information.

For developers it represents a “fredoom” and for our users it represents an “experience”. OK, maybe it is not as exciting as a journey to space, but it’s ours and it’s exciting for us.