Context
The Army's To the Best site, built by cScape, lets members of the public post messages, images and videos for British army servicemen across the globe. The site is a platform for people wishing to show their support for, and to send rich messages to, loved ones, helping to boost morale among army personnel.
Challenge
The Army asked cScape and Publicis to build an easy-to-use, publicly accessible website for the general public and those with friends and family in the army to post text, image and video messages for servicemen.
Solution
cScape and Publicis built the To The Best site in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS). The site is content managed and authenticated for editors, ensuring top level security. It uses an internal MOSS database for storing all posts. Flash animation and poll functionality ensure the site is dynamic and engaging. The simplicity of the design makes the site straight-forward to navigate, whether you are uploading or viewing the content.
Outcome
The site is both easy to use and interactive; parts of the pages are animated and users can scroll through, start, pause and stop videos as well as vote and take questionnaires in polls. In the searchable Messages page, posts can be arranged by date or by media type. The flagged up video on this page has a pull quote, demonstrating the tone of the message. The Leave a Message page has a simple, but detailed, form and an outline of the 'house rules' to ensure certain standards. There is a limit of three images or text messages and one video per form, making it manageable for Army monitors. Once messages are posted, Army monitors view them for approval.
Users can record videos on any device (eg mobile phones, web cams or video cameras) and they can post videos and images from the internet. Army monitors convert them to flash format.
Many of those who have uploaded videos, pictures and text on the site have friends or family in the army and have sent personal notices to them. Others have sent general salutes and messages of encouragement.