Croydon College is one of the largest providers of Further and Higher Education courses in the South East, with over 13,000 students choosing to study at Croydon each year. The College consists of three constituent colleges each serving a different market (Higher Education, Sixth Form, and Skills/Employer training). Each college has been developed to ensure that the courses on offer, the style of teaching and the way the college is run are right for the students that attend each college.

With three separate colleges sharing information, Croydon’s existing bespoke intranet solution had become hard to maintain. Developed in house with skills that had since been lost, finding information had become difficult and consequently the intranet was not widely used. As time went on, difficulties when sharing information were highlighted, which were not being addressed by the current systems.

Tamsin Jones, Vice Principal for Personalisation said: “With over 800 staff and 13,000 students, communication within our organisation and with the wider community is very important to us. As well as a replacement to our existing intranet we wanted a system with the flexibility to personalise the user experience depending on who you are and which college you are attached to. This ethos also needed to be reflected across our website in time for the new educational year. SORCE were able to help us deliver our new external website in just two weeks to help us meet this deadline.”

In addition to using the pre-built intranet applications provided within SORCE, Croydon College also had ambitious plans to create additional functionality within their intranet. The College worked with SORCE to design and create a custom intranet application that captures and tracks enquiries from prospective new students, allowing the college to provide improved customer service and ultimately increase enrolment numbers.

John Nicklin, Sales and Marketing Director at SORCE said: “Accessed by students and staff, the Croydon College intranet facilitates communication within the organisation while delivering user specific content. Using SORCE to drive both the intranet and website ensures consistency of brand and any content common to both audiences. The ability for the SORCE Intranet to integrate with other core college systems also provides a platform to develop the student portal into a true virtual learning environment.”