The University of Ottawa Heart Institute

The University of Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI) is Canada’s largest and foremost heart health centre dedicated to understanding, treating, and preventing heart disease. Digital Echidna was solicited to develop a redesigned, user‐tested Heart Institute corporate website and an intranet solution capable of enhancing their capacity to inform, communicate and manage effectively throughout a period of change and rapid growth.

The University of Ottawa Heart Institute’s new Heart Hub ushers in a new level of internal communication and collaboration for UOHI. This multi-site, multi-role intranet solution features department based collaboration tools, light-weight document management and detailed content creation and approval workflows. It boasts a custom Single Sign On mixed authentication and Active Directory integration, allowing seamless intranet access from both desktop and handheld devices. It is AODA compliant, has advanced full-text search capabilities, offers revision history with roll-back on all content and features personalization for content and calendars.

The University of Ottawa Heart Institute’s new external website is a multi-lingual solution built on the Drupal 7 content management framework. To deliver advanced search capabilities Digital Echidna executed a three-pronged strategy: first, developing the information architecture using an audience-based approach to the main navigation; second, creating a rich mega menu system with the ability to seek and find content amidst hundreds of pages; and third, incorporating a powerful open-source Solr search solution with a relevance based search including but not limited to web content, PDFs, Word and Excel documents.