Very recently we helped re-launch SWALife, the Corporate Intranet for the Employees of Southwest Airlines. This is exciting for 35,000 reasons – which is roughly the number of Employees who have access to the new and improved Southwest SWALife! Working with Southwest Airlines as we have, they are an extended family. This is a company who carries a passion for its Employees like very few companies do. There are so many vital roles at Southwest Airlines and it was a massive and uplifting opportunity to think through each of the various roles as they would interact with this new Intranet. We feel like with this launch, we have finally been able to reach each and every Employee like we never have before.
We’ve developed many Corporate Intranets in the past and many we don’t talk about since they are internal. Due to the lengthy list of accomplishments and the enthusiasm from Southwest Airlines, we felt this one deserved some chatter.
Southwest Airlines started years ago with SWALife as their Corporate Intranet. Since Southwest Airlines has been well-known for their forward thinking in social media, they felt it necessary to improve upon their Intranet by focusing on content with a community-oriented mindset. At Southwest, a huge part of the culture is to empower Employees to communicate and come up with creative ways of providing better service to Customers. The Intranet is a great mechanism for connecting Employees, which in turn connects Employees to Customers.
The new Southwest Airlines Intranet (SWALife) now features an organized content console that delivers employee content in a socially consumable and user-friendly way. What does this mean? This means Employees can easily view and contribute company updates while interacting in ways similar to familiar tools such as blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
With the success of NutsAboutSouthwest.com, Southwest’s external-facing corporate blog, it was appropriate and feasible to utilize the Drupal platform to serve content and social tools to Employees. Drupal is a content management system that offers a myriad of social integration which assisted the goals of this assignment. This is a platform consistent with NutsAboutSouthwest and is already a familiar tool among Southwest Airlines Bloggers.
There are a number of new features and functions that were included in the launch. Some new and notable user features include:
- Filter by media type – Content is delivered through color coded categories and filterable by types (i.e., Blog, Video, and Podcast). This allows Employees to have all content types available through one view. They can browse content based on the content type they prefer for their content consumption preferences.
- Featured Videos – Videos now have their own real estate on the main page and every page of the blog. They are prominent in the top right rail and are presented in a carousel that allows Employees to scroll through recently featured videos. The videos play directly in the video window and do not require any third-party support to play.
- Podcasts – Much like videos, podcasts also have their own real estate on the main page. Employees can choose between featured videos and podcasts via tabs on the top right rail. Popular podcasts include weekly recorded messages from Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly and Red Belly Radio, which has been the internal radio station of Southwest for some time. Steve Heaser has been the DJ of this station and we’ve heard his podcasts as well on NutsAboutSouthwest.com. Podcasts have descriptive titles, host name, podcast name, duration, comments, and post category. Podcasts are launched and played through the browser window directly from SWALife and are streamed from the web server.
- SWA Pics – If you have ever walked through the halls of Southwest Airlines Corporate Headquarters at Love Field, you surely noticed the thousands of framed pictures hanging all over the hallways. When it comes to pictures online, Southwest Airlines is no different. Their Intranet had to support a MASSIVE amount of photos and the new SWALife galleries do just that. The galleries are organized by events and archives, and photos are also searchable within the gallery section of the Intranet. Employees are able to upload their favorite Southwest photos to the Intranet in batches or individually through the console.
- Voting – Whether it’s the favorite uniform in Southwest history or the Halloween costume of the year, the Intranet now features the ability of voting within posts.
As with the development of any large Corporate Intranet, there were a number of challenges which needed to be confronted. Drupal proved again to be an excellent platform for bringing together the many assets associated with SWALife. With Drupal, Southwest Airlines was able to take advantage of the many content management attributes associated with a best in class content management platform. Additionally, the Southwest Airlines Intranet now presents content in a frequently updated and community-rich style. This approach is more familiar to Employees in how they utilize tools such as Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives, which now transcends into their online experience inside Southwest.
On a more technical note, there were some rather impressive accomplishments that enabled the new SWALife to work fluidly for the Employees of Southwest Airlines. Here are a few of these notable (and more technical) items:
- Single Sign On through multiple levels of authentication for a user base of more than 35,000 Employees
- Single Sign On supports 3 log ins per second while sustaining 400 – 450 concurrent users
- Hardware: hardware load balancer, 2 web servers, 2 database servers (active, failover)
- Modification of core Drupal user lookup query to improve memory & CPU usage
- Substantial Apache & MySQL server tuning
- Introduction of Drupal to SWALife through iFrames
- Custom Drupal photo galleries
- User interface customized in AJAX
- Google search appliance integration
- Multimedia served through customized flowplayer carousel for smooth playing and transitions (including closed captioning)
“The new SWALife brings Southwest Airlines and our Empoyees to the forefront of social media within Employee Communications. It is allowing authentic, two-way, online communication, and the Company has already learned so much from our most valuable, previously untapped resource, our Employees,” said Linda Rutherford, Southwest’s Vice President of Communication and Strategic Outreach. “And, the Employees now have access to more content than ever. But these changes are only the beginning. The new SWALife has laid a foundation for future enhancements, as our Employees are already asking for more! RD2 was a terrific partner with the technical and creative expertise to pull off this terrific new tool for our workforce.”
