Thomas Cook North America (Thomas Cook) is a travel company with their Head Quarters based in Toronto, Canada. They comprise of market leading tour operators, wholesalers and travel agencies that are located in Canada and the United States. Their aim is to be the best source of leisure travel in North America. They have 1200 members of staff.

When Thomas Cook decided to implement a new intranet, one of their main priorities was for it to be fun, dynamic and interactive for their employees. It was also important that they introduce a multilingual intranet in French and English to involve their French speaking staff in group communications.

With many of their employees accustomed to using Web 2.0 technology such as Facebook and Twitter, Thomas Cook wanted to incorporate a social networking style to their new intranet to encourage staff interaction.

Thomas Cook had the following requirements for their new intranet:-

• Their ability to implement within a very short timeframe.
• The new intranet must be multilingual (in both English and French).
• A social networking “Facebook” style to the intranet.

Having decided on their criteria,Thomas Cook looked at various local and global intranet suppliers. After careful consideration, SORCE were chosen to implement their intranet for the following reasons:-

• Impressive expertise and creativity of staff.
• Ability to deliver multilingual content site within short timeframe.
• A flexible intranet platform.
• Scalability of the product.

Thomas Cook also had previous positive experience working with SORCE. The UK division’s intranet had been successfully implemented by the company.

John Nicklin, Commercial Director at SORCE said “This has been an exciting venture for us. The intranets that are normally requested have a large element of business content.Thomas Cook North America have turned this on its head. They have fully embraced the concept of social media”.

Thomas Cook now has a dynamic new intranet called ‘i connexion’ with a very social and interactive element that engages both their English and French speaking employees. Employees can post messages and respond to messages left by others. Other interactive areas include a photo wall for employees to share their pictures and an image gallery to share videos.