How should Norway represent itself to the outside world, and what is it associated with: A beautiful country with pristine wilderness, an oil-rich nation, a peace broker or maybe the homeland of Grieg and Ibsen?
The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UD) is tasked with promoting Norwegian interests abroad, and is a link between the government and foreign institutions. UD also plays an important role in creating Norway’s international profile. Using a new Web solution, the Ministry wanted to provide a positive and comprehensive national portrait that could be used to profile Norwegian industry, culture, tourism and politics. UD wanted a portal solution that could exploit digital opportunities and offer an effective channel for dialogue. Itera Consulting was responsible for creating the existing Web solution in 2003, and was entrusted to develop the new solution.
The present solution, called ‘Norgesportalen’, incorporates 120 sub-sites in 19 languages, and has a monthly avarege of 500,000 end-users. The Web portal is a homepage for Norwegian embassies, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s key tool for providing information and profiling Norway abroad.
The solution is based on EPiServer and FAST, and has some particularly innovative Web search functionality. End-users find relevant information faster, and editors can work more efficiently and produce better quality articles due to improved research opportunities. In a portal that contains more than 100,000 articles, this is a major time saver.
Tone Mangset, a consultant at the UD department responsible for profiling, reputation and Web, had one short comment on the project and Itera Consulting’s role in it: “Itera Consulting did it again!”