INTRANET TOUR | Highlights from Fuscoe Engineering's Transition to Synthesis 6

Well, good morning or afternoon. My name is Susan Strom and I'm the Chief Client Officer here at Knowledge Architecture. With me today is Brandon Norton, the Multimedia Manager at Fusco Engineering. And you are in a Synthesis Spotlight, which is where we share stories about how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AAC firms. Today, Brandon is going to give us a tour of Busco's recently deployed Synthesis 6 intranet. He'll share highlights and lessons learned from their transition from synthesis 5 and answer your questions a little bit about Brandon. So Brandon is an accomplished graphic designer with a classic creative style who is responsible for Fusco's print and digital assets, including their Synthesis Internet arc. Brandon was part of the original ARC Intranet team back in 2016 and led ARC synthesis six transition this past year. He has the distinction of being one of the first people outside of Knowledge Architecture to work directly with Synthesis 6 in its early 2022 beta release, for which we are very grateful. You might have seen some of Brandon and Fusco's work in our recently released Design Inspiration Gallery, and we're really excited to take you behind the scenes on some of that today. So, Brandon, I'd like to hand it over to you to share a little bit about Fox. Go Fusco to give us context for, like, what is the environment within which you'd made this transition. So if you could just share a little bit about, like, how many employees Fesco has, number of offices, the services you provide, and just like what's going on in the business right now.

Yeah, sure. Well, good morning everyone. Thank you, Susan, for having me. It's a pleasure to share. So again, my name is Brandon, first name basis. Don't call me Mr. Norton, that's my dad. Anyway, so Multimedia Manager at Fusco Engineering. I've been here for 16 years and we currently have just shy of 200 people, 200 employees company wide, and that's over four offices located in Southern California, Louisiana, San Diego, inland Empire region, and I'm missing one, Orange county, my own office. We primarily work in civil engineering, land development as our core service, but do a lot of survey mapping work, geospatial work. We're integrating a lot of fun new technologies into that side as well as our engineering. And we offer a lot of stormwater management services as well. We have quite the workload right now. It's pretty diverse, which is really, really great. It's a happy, healthy, functioning company. It's very fun to be a part of. It's something new every day and there's just Been so much going on over the last, gosh, six months. We've had a large corporate office move. We've celebrated 30 years as a company as Fusco Engineering. We've had a leadership change. And our former CEO and namesake, Pat Fusco has retired. Now we have complete new leadership structure. And as recent as December. I'm maybe forgetting some of my dates. We just became 100% employee owned as well. So we're 100% employee owned ESOP. So lots of change, lots of transition. We just rebranded, so we have a new logo, we have a new look, and we thought, why not change our Internet as well at the same time? So here we are.

Why not?

Why not?

Cool. That is really helpful to understand there's so much change happening I love at this point for you just to take us in to your new intranet and share how you organize content like your own highlights. Just give us a sense of how it works on the new platform.

Okay. All right, here we go. You should all be seeing my screen. Somebody just shout if something goes haywire. I hit a button by mistake during this presentation. But you're looking at our Synthesis 6 Internet, which we call ARC. Part of our branding here at Fusco is Full circle thinking. That's our official company tagline. So you'll see a lot of references to circular speak. So arcs and circumferences and radiuses and what have you. So we call it arc, short for ask, read, connect as well. So it's a hub for all three of those activities. So our homepage, this is our structure. It's a. It's a bit different from what we had in Synthesis five. We've strayed away from the more traditional stream view to a more condensed grid view just to get more information up above that fold, to put more information in front of more eyes. We have a very consistent theme running with color. As part of our rebrand, we've expanded just from using blue and green to using blue, green spectrum, so everything in between. So we're really trying to represent that spectrum throughout the page and you'll see that transition from community to community, moving from like darker blues all the way to, like, bright greens. Super consistent with use of the tools that we're given, with consistency and page design and layout, consistency and icons and graphic assets. But anyway, so you're looking at our homepage, just quick information, ways to navigate quickly, get support, give suggestions, jump out to external resources and social media links, vantage point and talk about our new people and people who are having birthdays. Because our People are number one for us, so we want them to feel welcome and included. So that's what you're seeing here. That's our homepage. It's a really basic structure. The one unique part about this is we are including our share something stream exclusively on our homepage and that's something that I'll dig into as I go through this tour. It was a decision we made pretty early on in the process of having this kind of be the home for posting, communication and our other pages being more of a home for information and resources. With that said, I will jump in to kind of introduce something we have under our homepage under about us. So this is kind of our navigation structure. So it was really important as a graphic designer myself just to be, you know, visual about everything and very intentional and purposeful and consistent. So we, you know, use this icon system. We went back and forth with many different navigation solutions anywhere from like the periodic table charts to colored shapes eventually landed on these kind of pictograms as a way to kind of hint and have fun at the content that you're about to reveal. So, so what you're seeing here under home, we've got a dark blue color scheme. Kind of keep that in mind for as we go down the road, you'll see that change and evolve to green. So about us, I want to jump over to our Vision and purpose page and introduce you to something that we call mini guides. I'm not going to take full credit for it, Susan. I'll share the credit with you for that term. So patent pending on that. But what the mini guide is. So this is just built as a guide page. We have a few quick sections and this tool is just a way for us to quickly organize tidbits of information without burying so much copy. Excuse me, and text on a page. So we're really putting the information that people need to see in front of them. No more, no less. That's a consistent quality that you're going to see running through arc. So vision, purpose, values, three things that are important to reinforce our brand and to educate new hires on these are our values. Some of our new branding you'll see here as well, which is really fun. A lot of that blue, green bleeds through onto arc. So this is an a good example of kind of a really quick condensed mini guide. I'll expand on this a little bit further and jump over to our employee ownership section. So this is more of an expanded guide. So obviously more pages quick to get at the information, clearly define headings and topics. But what we're starting to integrate here is more tools that are available in Synthesis 6, like our collapsible sections. So this is a Q and A section. So anytime we get questions that are repeated, you know, a certain amount of times, we'll add them to this section and it becomes more of an interactive Q and A so they can look at a question, expand the section, and quickly get a response that's official from the company. So a really cool way to integrate and use the tools and layer the tools that are available in Synthesis six. All right, pause and get a breath. Hope you're all doing well so far. I will take this one step further into our HR and Office section. So I'm here in HR and Office. I'll talk about this layout in just a moment. But while we're on the topic of guides, I want to jump over to our employee handbook. This is a full blown guide. So we saw a short guide, kind of a medium guide with embedded collapsible sections. Now this employee handbook is just this massive guide. You know, how do you organize this information? Well, guides were the obvious choice. This was a quick way for us to delineate our sections. To make these things searchable and indexed within AHRQ is great. This document was previously a PDF and it was printed and it was hand delivered to every new hire. And it was just really clunky and cumbersome to edit and maintain. We don't do that anymore. So we're 100% digital on stuff like this. So anytime our HR team needs to make a change to this document, they go to ARC and they edit it here. And if they need to announce the change, if it's anything worthy of that, they'll make a post and share it and direct people here to the employee guide or employee handbook. So full blown guide. We've seen small, medium and large examples of each. So let's have a look at some other communities. Let me hide this guy just in case you were seeing that. So we're on our homepage again. I mentioned the stream is only kind of exclusive to home. The color scheme on our navigation was a darker blue. I'm going to shift over to our HR and Office section which is now kind of this darker, darkish, medium ish blue. So the things to see here are the lack of a stream. This is strictly intended to be information and resources for people to read and extract. So we wanted to organize our navigation in a navigation block that was visual that echoed the system that we were trying to establish. Introduce key team members, remind our employees of recent hires, and then also put some posts in front of people. Now, this is just a post block that's filtered out by particular set of hashtags. So I think it's people. And maybe I included HR in that tag as well. So that's the structure of this community page. And then if I go to our secondary navigation, you'll see that that color system is consistent within HR and Office. So every section in here is that medium darkish blue is what I'm going to officially call it. I will come up with a more creative name for that later. But within HR and Office, I want to focus on one thing in particular, and that's our benefit center. We have. Sorry, I'm seeing this edit. We have a very consistent theme running here, and that's with these guides, which I just went over before. So we've set our benefit center up in a very similar fashion. So we've separated our medical, dental, vision, et cetera, out within a guide. So if you're looking for medical information, we're narrowing that down. If you're looking for dental, we're narrowing that down. We're also embedding these collapsible sections again within the guide. So if you're on medical insurance and your ppo, you don't have to read through the HMO information or the HSA information to get to ppo. You can just expand PPO and there you are. There's your login information, important documents, anything else that you would need to gather from that is there in that expandable section or collapsible section. So guides made a lot of sense. It was a really great way for us to embed things like videos for our open enrollment. Even our benefits guide that our service provider gives to us as well is available here for employees to download. Okay, so benefit center also set up as a guide. I will jump over to our office resources, which is again under HR and Office Community. As I mentioned before, we have four offices in Southern California, so we thought it was important enough to create a page for each one of those offices. And what you're seeing here is just that repetition of the icon system and having a little bit of fun with the regional representation. So on Orange for Orange county, just I call this Hot for Ontario because it's really hot in Empire. So that's what they get. Hopefully you're noticing some of the consistencies and like the line weight and the little shapes and bubbles and dots rather than a mix of thin lined icons versus filled Icons, you just wanted everything to have that same consistent quality. Okay, so digging into one of our regional pages, I'll go to Irvine. This is just a hub for office information. So if you need to look at a floor plan for the Irvine office, it's available here. Our org chart structure is here. Corporate contacts, regional leaders. Then as I go down the page, templates and resources that are specific to this office or to each office page. So if you're looking for the letterhead with the Irvine address on it, this is your home. If you're looking for address labels or marketing materials that are specific for a region, it's all here. The one thing about this is if you hover over it, you'll see the library icon. So this information is not exclusively uploaded to this page. It is sent to and loaded into a document library that's referenced through this page. So it was a good way for us to set up that structure. So that way, if we did need to make a change to a document, we make the change to that document in the document library one time. We don't have to upload it multiple times to multiple pages. It's one shot and we're done. And it will push the change here to these regional pages. So again, collapsible sections at the top. Directions for visitors, food and shopping. You know what restaurants are close by for, you know, maybe somebody that's visiting from our LA office, they want to kind of get to know what's around here. They want to get lunch and they see a Jimmy John's is close by. Great, I can walk there. Office WI FI information for visitors. It's all available here through collapsible sections. So a lot of repetition. Guides, collapsible sections, structure, icon, color. Let's keep going. So I'm on office resources. I'll touch really quickly on our professional development. We've got job descriptions available. And this just is built again as a guide. And this supports one of our key company values of transparency. So allowing everyone in the company to see a full job description, it creates and kind of aids in that transparency. And it also provides somebody who may be at like an associate engineer level to read and understand what it takes to get to the next level. So if I want to get from associate Engineer to Engineer 2, I need to, I can go here and I can read the job description and see what the new duties are, what the new responsibilities are, what I need to learn to get there. So these are great ways to just reinforce our company culture and build that and also just Promote an environment of learning and advancement as well. All right, so human resources, I am going to shift over to projects and practice and you'll see the change from this darkish medium blue to a. We'll just call this full medium blue now. Consistent, similar icons. So the system is working. It's looking consistent. It's familiar already to all of our users, which is exactly what we're after. So let's dive in. One of the highlights on this page, I think that's fun for us, is our QA qc. So quality assurance, quality control. We have a person specifically dedicated to QA QC and he's in our San Diego office. And you may be wondering, like, what's up with the pipe? In his introductory presentation he used the It's a Rennie Magritte painting of a pipe and it's written in French like this is not a pipe when it clearly is a pipe. And his argument was that it's not a pipe, it's just a drawing of a pipe. And he tied that into. Our plans are not the actual structure or the build itself. They're just a drawing of the plans. But it needs to be representational, it needs to be correct and have quality nonetheless. So when we get in there, you'll see there's Bob and his pipe. We had some fun with that. He got a little red faced over it, but it's all tongue in cheek. Highlight on this page is our QA QC library. So this is just a great resource of documents and videos for people to go watch and learn from. One of our experts, they can upload a plan, a set of plans for him to directly review and coach them through here in this button. But I'll go into our library and nothing is showing. Sometimes a refresh will do the trick. So checklists, example plans and references, videos of lunchtime presentations. Here's that painting I was talking about. And stamps, manuals, etc. So anything having to do with QA QC is organized in this library. Kind of get into the nuts and bolts of our library structure when I get into marketing, but you'll see I've got everything categorized and this is another consistent feature for our libraries. So while we're in projects, in practice I want to jump over to our project directory. It's really awesome that KA has added the custom thumbnails because we have a lot of projects in open Asset that don't have a hero image. So it's great that we still have some kind of visual block other than just an empty gray square for those Projects that we haven't set. So thank you guys at K for providing that resource and tool. This is a really awesome place to get project information. Maybe it's faster for people than going into vantage point just to get project numbers or basic project information as far as who worked on the project. But one of the things I like about this is the map view. This is kind of like a, like a secret thing that only a few people here have seemed to discover. But I think it's got a lot of value. Just showing where our work is in a visual representation on a map is so awesome for me because I have to do a lot of the stuff manually sometimes and just to have something that gets me most of the way there is great. So I can really look into a region like let's pull into la and I can see it's going to want to load some points. All of the projects and all the work that we've done in the LA and surrounding region highlighted in these little points. And as you hover over it tells you what project it was, what the project number is. So a super valuable way to get a quick visual of the amount of work you've done in a, in a region. This is kind of like, it's kind of like a secret still. So hopefully the secret will be out soon and our staff will be using this. So that is Projects and Projects Directory. A question that came up a while ago. Some of you may be on the, the, the dashboard or the comment board through Knowledge Architecture was something about a link library. And the way we've organized ours is again through a guide. This is just really dry information. It's just a list of, you know, an organization or a resource that's a hyperlink. But we wanted to organize it in such a way that it was easy for, you know, employees to find. So here's a list of federal links, Here's a list of la, Santa Barbara county links. Here's a list of Orange county links, San Diego and State of California. So these are links that our technical staff and engineers would be using to find information, say, about pipes and highway design organized in a guide. There may be a better solution. I've always got my ear tuned to that group and it's a great way to learn from others. But this is just kind of the, the solution that seems to be working for us so far. We had this in synthesis 5 and carried it over to 6, but it obviously looks a lot better here. Okay, so we've got projects in practice. I'll move over to Technology, you're going to see a color shift from blue to yay. It's like this turquoise Melanie color. So within technology we have some some fun stuff. This is a great place for our IT team to share information with our staff to learn about things like office equipment. Right? Like I don't know how to work my headset, how do I log into the conference room equipment? It's set up as a guide, so there's that familiarity already with the site. This is all going to be expanded on as we go Forward with using Synthesis 6. But this is a great way for it to save some time and people asking questions. They can go directly to the intranet and find their answer without having to disturb our staff. Within technology, we also have some software application pages. So resources and help for things like Open Asset. Right? What is Open Asset? How can I log in? What's the link? I'm having trouble signing on? Here are some helpful video resources. This was constructed through just a simple table with some embedded YouTube videos and then a collection of posts that are using Open Asset as a hashtag. We also have similar pages for things like Microsoft Teams with helpful videos, a teams stream. And this is me experimenting. I told you guys that we don't have a stream on our other pages and I lied kind of. We are experimenting with this idea of having these post blocks and a stream block on some of these pages just as a way to help build discussion. I was thinking, okay, maybe somebody's looking for information for teams and they just want to directly share something here. If they've got something to share or a helpful tip, they can click here and generate their own post and share something without teams or about teams. And it's going to automatically have a hashtag teams and populate here on this page. So I lied, but kind of. And then support. You can submit a ticket for IT and then here are contacts for that particular technology.

Brandon, I can interject with a quick time check. We have about 15 minutes left.

Okay, I will jam. Thank you, Susan. AutoCAD very similar. We've got posts, the ability to share in our contact information as well as training resources. Things like Bluebeam, collection of videos, again built as a table and a collection of posts. So the information's here at everyone's fingertips. Let's jump over to marketing. There's some cool things here. It's near and dear to my heart being on the team. Again, no stream. It's just navigation, information, posts and our team. Let's jump over to Brand. I want to show you our Style guide. Again, this is set up as a guide. This used to be a PDF that was, you know, given to everybody. It was printed. We wanted this to be a resource that people can actually go draw from. So if they need a logo, they can go find a jpeg, a png, click on it, download it, use it on their work. Right away we have information about our new logo, what a brand is and what it isn't. And then something cool on here. Just our color palette that was built using a simple table and filling backgrounds with colors and things like that. So again, just showing ways to use the tools that are already built into Synthesis six. And it's just kind of fun to discover ways to use those simple tools, information about our typefaces and ways to download fonts. So there is a style guide, templates and collateral library. I alluded to that earlier. This is the structure that we've set up for our templates and collateral and document resource libraries. We've set up these custom categories as a way to structure or kind of be intuitive about what people may be looking for. You know, they may be looking for corporate fonts, leave behinds, letterhead, logos, whatever the case is. Even some of our retired documents with our old branding is available on here. This is all searchable and filterable by document type or file type, all done through the custom fields. Let's go to something kind of fun is business cards is part of our new branding. We've kind of shifted away from ordering printed cards for everybody. We're doing digital business cards, which are kind of fun with scannable QR codes that automatically populate in a contact on your phone. So this is a great example of using an embeddable code feature. And this is just a Microsoft Office or a Microsoft Forms form that's embedded into a synthesis page. So I've got an embed code, I've got collapsible sections, I've got an embedded video, I've got a people or an employee block. So this is a great little collection of synthesis resources all within one page. Okay, jump over to learning. I told you I was going to move, Susan. I think I'm doing good. So now we're in learning again, a color shift in this information. We've got some fun things in here. One of the highlights is a technical training library. This is our staff creating courses that are collected and organized by topic in a guide. So if I want to learn about ADA ramp design, I've got a page designed here with a course instructor, with a video, course objectives and Information and then any posts that are collected using that topic. In this case it was ADA and ramp design and I think I used engineering as well and then also including that discussion stream topic. So that way if somebody wanted to create a post right here, if they were inspired by what they saw, they can create a post and it automatically uses those tags and then will be another resource on this page for others to learn from. So we have a various, you know, set of courses available on this page as a resource within learning. We also have our recorded Lunch and learn presentations that are given on various topics like QA qc. Our founder and Executive chairman Pat Fusco gave a series of lunch and learns earlier this year on different topics and we wanted to capture those as resources for people to continue learning from moving into the future. We've got some social media how to's, like how to set up your LinkedIn page and then other posts in a post block down below we also have a video library. So this is just a collection. So any video that we put goes into this library and it gets outsourced to a specific page. So this is a page that is housing or a library that's housing all of our training documents. So I have marketing training here for InDesign. Our technical training videos that you just saw in those training guides are here as well as Lunch and learns and other AutoCAD training videos and things like that.

Looks like Brendan dropped off. Hopefully he's able to rejoin. I wonder if I can take any of these for him. Well, while we wait for that, I see a question from Judith. Well, actually maybe Jason's question is something I can answer better. Jason, you wrote in that you're curious about the digital business cards. I believe that business cards, it's not that they're digital, it's at the form of digital. So they created a form in Microsoft forms. You can embed code out of that. So they embedded that on page on a page. They've done that a number of places on the Internet. That's the business card was just like one great one that we, we thought we'd show here today. And then on the back end they have. I don't remember if they used Microsoft Automate or something else, but something to like kind of route the, the form and content to the right person. Sarah, any news from Brandon? No news yet. I reached out but I haven't heard a reply. Yeah. Oh man. Poor guy. I'm sure he was shuffling trying to figure things out. Let's see, any other questions I can answer? Bill, you Asked a question about the brand page with templates and collateral and if there any of that is tied to Open Asset or another Asset browser. I don't think so. I think the assets that you saw there with like the logos, the fonts, those are, those are just uploaded to synthesis. And I think that because the document library and asset library in synthesis you can upload assets to. But there's no connection between a document library and open assets. There wouldn't be a way to pull in open asset images into a library. There's other things I can answer. How many people were involved in the development of Synthesis 6 before launch. I can answer that question. That was something that Brendan and I were going to talk about. So they. He really had five people involved in the launch. There was himself and he self reportedly said he did about 90% of the work himself. Oh, and I see Brandon's coming back. Brandon, while you get up and running there, someone asked about like who worked on the project. So I'm just answering that question. Yeah, so there was. Brandon did like 90% of the work and then he had an IT director who is the sponsor who really just advocated for the project of leadership. He had a IT admin who was like part of his team not for any IT stuff but for like a voice of the user collaborator to bounce ideas, help him iterate really quickly, provide quick feedback. A graphic designer who was concurrently working on the rebrand who just like built logos into the thumbnails and like other graphical elements. And then the CEO's senior executive assistant who I think was like the, a little magic in their implementation that was unexpected, who refreshed like just a ton of forms and documents as part of the rebrand, but was like had such an attention to detail that like everything got scrubbed. Like she would notice that a font wasn't updated and she would fix it or send it to Brandon. So that was the team leading into launch and then after launch now Brandon is starting to work on bringing on the content editors and if we have time we can talk about that. Hey, welcome back.

Yeah, sorry about that. I was talking about our, our other community for sharing fun stuff because who doesn't want fun? We have a community for that called the Bubble, which is named after our little arc icon, the Bubble. And this is for fun, travel, music, food, games, etc. So that stuff is on the bubble. What's off the bubble, People, projects, practice and our work that should stay within one of the communities that we've just reviewed. So we wanted to have a place that was fun for people to share vacation photos and have some fun with games and sell Girl Scout cookies and things like that. So anyway, with that said and technical difficulties aside, that is a snapshot of ARC and our transition to Synthesis six.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

It's beautiful. I don't know if you're probably not seeing the Q and A, especially with the restarts, but lots of comments about just how impressive it is. Reiterate those.

Awesome.

I did clear a few questions before you, you know, while we were in between seeing you, and I invite anyone who has questions to go ahead and drop those in the chat. We'll get to as many as we can. There were a couple questions about your choice to use have the stream really just be on the homepage and I'll just read one of them to you. Love to know more about this decision. Do you experience information overload on your homepage? Since everything shows up there? Do you have guidelines or limitations on what is posted or who can post? And then there is a note. Does the front page aggregate posts from the various communities? I think the answer to that is like, no, really, people just post here. It does aggregate from, you know, if people post on a hashtag on one of those, the sub pages you showed, it aggregates up onto home. But home really is everything like, are you experiencing information overload? Are there any rules or limitations around that?

Yeah, no, those are. Those are good questions and all things that we considered when we made this switch over. We had the benefit of having six years of use with Synthesis five. So we really got an idea of how our users engaged with the platform and how and what we found is people were just really not using the communities for posting. Within that community, everybody was just always on home and I was always finding myself having to go in and edit posts and add hashtags and add tags to put them within the respective communities. So we just made the decision, look, we're going to take that variable out of it and just make a stream on home. We want it to be hey, post. We don't want there to be a bunch of don't do this, don't do that. We just, we would rather have somebody try something and have it be either a misstep or a mistake than just to not try at all. So we want really to encourage people to post and share. And so far I think that's been a successful way of thinking for us. I'm not saying that's going to be the right approach for everybody, but at least with our company and our people and our culture. This seems to be a solution for us.

I was staying with that and like, how this is fitting in with Fosco's culture and the employee experience. Could you. There was a writing question about how has it been received? How did the people, how did Tusconians feel about the previous Internet and how do they feel about this one? So if you could just give us a sense of the kind of feedback you've received, I think that would be helpful.

Yeah, I think initially the reception to Synthesis when we launched in 2016 was, oh, wow, we finally have an organized home for intranet, which was great. We had a lot of fun with the launch and the engagement campaigns. And then it just started to get a little tiresome. It was difficult for others to get involved with, to make changes and edits and help me help manage, and it just kind of became a big burden for me. So the switch over once we made that go live was just kind of instantaneous. I was just totally inundated with positive responses like, oh my gosh, this looks so fresh and it looks so clean. And I love the. The simple colors. I just feel like all kinds of fusco when I look at this page. It's so easy for me to find what I need. I really have yet to see or hear, you know, any major criticisms so far. It seems to be an overall win for our staff.

That's so great to hear. I'd love to build on that and talk about people's ability to edit it and maintain it. And, you know, while you did, again, like 90% of the work leading up to this, that's. That's not always going to be the case. Yeah, I know. You're starting to onboard content editors. I know when we're on the HR page, we saw someone was editing that page who wasn't you. So tell us about onboarding content editors now that you're cut over.

Yeah. So part of the rationale behind doing most of the work myself was just to set it up the right way. So when we got to this point, it was easy for me to pass the baton. And it feels really good to be at that phase. I just had a training with a couple staff members this week on how to go in through the content editor and make changes to pages and upload documents and. And the comments were, oh, wow, this is so easy. Like, I had no idea it was this easy. So that's a really good feeling. It feels great to be at that phase of this process. I've got a handful of people in mind now who I can go target for specific pages. You mentioned our HR team. So they're on or have access to this now. Our CAD manager will have access to up, uploading and updating our CAD side and creating some resources there, onboarding, more engineering, technical staff as well. And it's just kind of assuring them that, yeah, it's going to be a little bit of effort, but it's not going to take hours of time to go in and make changes.

And they get to be part of continuing to make this all kinds of Fesco.

Yeah, it's culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So branding was, or the brand transformation that you're going through in concurrently with the Internet launch is something I'd like to illuminate a little bit. You did a lot just with the tools that are in synthesis. So I want to start by asking you to just like show us a few things that more cool, unique, special that you did to bring the brand forward without doing anything in CSS or JavaScript, just like using the tools as they are. And then I'm going to ask the other side of that question.

Yeah. So, you know, I have the. What's good for me is I have the knowledge of getting under the hood and making some of those deeper changes. What's great about synthesis 6 is the ability to make some simple brand decisions just using the, the branding settings that are built within your settings. So if I go to branding, I can upload my logo, I can set colors with the style editor and fonts that is probably, you know, getting on like second or third base. So if you just take the time to really comb through that and set your brand colors, set your fonts, upload logos, upload placeholder images, you're getting on second base already without having to really dig into CSS or custom code. The other side of that was really taking the time to think about what our navigation structure was going to be, coming up with a consistent style of icon varying, you know, color to color from page to page, using the same gradient that we have in our new logo within our intranet logo, and then reflecting those colors in each of the communities. And then also just, you know, the little thumbnails, creating thumbnails for videos that were reflective on the community color and the icon that it. That led you to that video. So these are all things that, that you can do without really, you know, having to know code or CSS that really help you kind of create this branded feel.

And now the other side of the.

Coin, now the other side so in synthesis five, a lot of these tools weren't available, so you've really had to dig in to CSS to make some, some wholesale changes. But now it's, it's more minimal for me, which is really great. But I can go. You'll see under my custom CSS, I have, you know, only 50 or so lines of code, whereas before I had hundreds. But I'm doing things like creating these buttons right now. There's not a button shortcode in synthesis, so I created a quick script to create these buttons for our, our pages. I wrote a quick script to stylize the fonts a little bit. Part of our branded, branded style is to kind of squish and compress and push things together. A lot of real subtle changes. There's nothing that's too crazy. Most of this code is just setting the styles for those buttons. Everything else is adding little pixels of margin around things or changing background colors on things that I didn't have control over in the branding, in the built in branding section. But very minimal as far as what I had to do versus what I had to do in synthesis 5.

Thanks for taking us behind the scenes there. Yeah, yeah, appreciate it. There's a question in from Donovan about the migration of content from 5 to 6, and it's what, what was the percentage or what percentage did you migrate versus create new? And I think there's maybe an in between there, which is like, of the stuff you migrated, what percentage did you just kind of accept as is? You know, it migrated done versus put a little time into maybe, versus like put a lot of time into.

Yeah, that's a good question. I would say percentage of things that were migrated and just left as is was zero. If we were going to take the time to build a new platform and to move that information, we wanted to. To either vet it as. As correct and current or remove it entirely or, you know, edit it and make it correct. So everything was looked at, everything was changed percentage wise of migrated content. Probably like near like 40%, maybe a little less. Was, was actually migrated. Once it was migrated, it was edited and stylized and then the remainder of that content was just blank canvas. I'm going to bring over only what we need and organize it from there.

Thank you. I think that that closes out our questions and brings us basically to the top of the hour. So I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. Brandon, thank you so much for doing this work, putting the thought and time into it. I think a lot of people I've just seen the chat and the questions Drew have drawn a lot of inspiration from what you've done and it will impact their work and their employees experience. And I know that that's at the heart of what you do like as a firm. If we take care of our people, then we are the brand we want to be. And I don't know, I think to some degree that like spreads out to the industry. If we take care of our people, then we can build the world we want to be in.

Yeah, we're all like minded. We all take inspiration from one another and just to have the ability to look at another's work. I've been on the other side of this many times and it's always been inspiring. So it's a pleasure for me to be on this side of it for a change.

Yeah. Thank you. So we did record this. We will send that out probably next week. We have another intranet tour coming up with Primera on August 17th at 11. Sarah will go ahead and drop a link or a little information about that and a link to register in the chat. While our last couple of tours have been transition stories, Premier was a launch. They did not have synthesis. They went live with synthesis and they'll be showing synthesis and also talking about that journey. And that's it for today. Thank you again, Brandon. Thank you everyone for who joined us today and thank you for your patience as we navigated Zoom. We appreciate that and look forward to seeing you next time.