St Paul's School — intranet and website

St Paul's School is situated on the bank of the Thames in London, is one of the premier independent boys schools in London and regularly competes for the best exam results in the country.

“Firefly is the best of both worlds: utter simplicity of use for normal mortals together with constant development to include the latest technology. This unusual fusion has been indispensible to the growth and usefulness of the school's Intranet.”Paul Woodruff, Director of Studies

St Paul's had the beginnings of an intranet, but it lacked content and the navigational structure was unclear.  Teachers had to struggle with Microsoft Frontpage and Photoshop, which had to be installed on to their PC, and had to build everything - navigation, design, and content from scratch.  Pupils rarely used it.

It was at St Paul's that Firefly was first deployed.  The simple principle was that if the system could be made easy for staff and pupils alike, an intranet could be an extremely useful tool rather than a hassle.

Firefly allowed all members of staff to get involved in building the intranet, which grew quickly and now contains over 25,000 pages.

The flexibility of the system also meant that soon after the intranet was deployed, the school website moved to run on Firefly as well.  It has just undergone its third re-design since then, but Firefly's separation of look and feel from the underlying technology means that this was easily applied.

The staff handbook is no longer printed but available - always up to date - on the intranet.  Academic Departments use their sections to provide learning material to pupils and share teaching material within the teaching staff.  Modern languages use Firefly's online testing facility to do quick tests of translation and grammar.  And the front page of the intranet links into the school's calendar held in its MIS, and shows news from the website.