Flyte recently finished work for an extranet for Spurwink, a network of professionals providing mental health, educational and residential services to over 4,000 children, adolescents and adults throughout Maine.

With over 850 geographically scattered employees, it was often difficult to share resources and gain access to necessary forms. Spurwink’s previous solution made resources available while inside a Spurwink facility, but employees couldn’t access it from home. Also, changes and additions could only be made by someone with HTML knowledge.

Flyte used Joomla, an open-source Content Management System (CMS) as a platform to build a better tool for Spurwink. Now all employees can gain access to the extranet with their unique username and password. There they’ll have access to the library of professional research, legal, policy and other documents and forms needed to provide the mental health, educational and residential services to their clients.

The extranet also serves as the organizational directory and internal news and events center. Leaders, managers and administrators in all departments have complete control over the content of the extranet through a Joomla interface, requiring no HTML knowledge.

For you Joomla geeks out there, we started with JCE WYSIWYG as a wysiwyg editor, but found it lacking. Spurwink was also underimpressed with that module. The document handling for that module was just a bit weak, which was one of the major concerns for Spurwink. After a bit of searching we found WYSIWYG Pro, which we found to be a much better solution for their document handling needs.

Just our .02.

Rich Brooks
Maine Web Design & Development