The two Dutch associations of General Practitioners NHG and LHV approached One Shoe Open Source Webdevelopment with an idea for a community platform, combined with a personal dashboard. The idea was to facilitate the General Practicioners with a platform that would combine the power of LinkedIn, iGoogle and intranet featurs (knowledge base, event management, resource management and collaboration), but in a safe, private environment.
After functional design, user testing with almost 300 test subjects, graphic design, development, functional testing and optimizations, the platform launched in November 2011. Since then, it's grown at an astonishing rate with over 90% of all Dutch General Practicioners registered and thousands of groups and content nodes.
What makes the project special for the developers of One Shoe is that it is much more than a website; it's a tool. An application. And fully based on Drupal, albeit for a large part also based on modules that were developed by One Shoe. For instance the dashboard; there are the Drupal modules homebox and dashboard, but these do not offer all the features this cliënt requested. Features such as a widgetstore, the use of tabs, drag & drop, integration of the dashboard with the Drupal nodes of the community platform, and so on. So One Shoe developed a new module that combined all these features.
The platform has a scalable load-balanced front-end and includes Apache SOLR based search features, Organic Groups, a custom built widget store and much more.