Prospect Trade Union
- Web address: www.prospect.org.uk
- Company profile: Prospect is a successful Trade Union with over 100,000 members and represents members of both the public and private sector. Their members include engineers, scientists, managers and specialists in areas as diverse as agriculture, defence, energy, environment, heritage, shipbuilding and transport. They are the largest union in the UK representing professional engineers.
- Purpose of website: To allow various parts of the organisation to be able to communicate with members more effectively, and allow members more input and insight into the Union.
- Period worked on site: Over 2 years
- Much of this site was built by the staff of Artumi Systems when working for another company, Zedcore Systems Limited
Prospect required a "Content management system" which would allow them a very flexible means of managing the site. Prospect, as with any large organisation, has many departments and the responsibility for keeping the various parts of the website correct lies within each department. Therefore they needed to be able to set permissions for administering parts of the websites in a relatively arbitrary way.
Prospect also offer a great deal of information to their members via the site, and based upon the member's role within the Union. For example there are areas of the web site which are only available for Union Representatives. In this section they are given advice on how to best serve their members.
Prospect have always been a forward looking organisation and so it was very important that their website was capable of changing dramatically in a short period of time.
The permissions sytem is role based, the roles are set on an in-house system so that Prospect's membership department were not required to learn a new system, nor administer two separate systems. The new role information is imported daily
The site can use the role information to send emails to lists of members which can be manually entered or generated automatically from role information.
The site is built with PHP, PostgreSQL on top of the Apache server. The site is hosted on Linux.
