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The Client:

Beauty Systems Group (BSG), a subsidiary of Sally Beauty Holdings Inc.
NYSE: (SBH) http://www.sallybeautyholdings.com/holdings/bsg.asp, is a network of retail stores and professional sales consultants selling professional salon brand products to licensed beauty professionals. The largest full-service beauty supplier in the world, Sally Beauty Holdings Inc. also operates 2,700 retail stores, several e-commerce sites and markets more than 6,000 product skus.

The Challenge:

The BSG Training Department’s web development team was developing a complex, all-encompassing internal corporate networking site for its professional beauty products sales and management team. When the technical team encountered web development roadblocks, they turned to Blink Reaction to solve existing challenges and make their vision a reality—before the fast-approaching President’s annual meeting.

The Solution:

Blink used Drupal’s non-proprietary, open source content management technology to develop an easy-to navigate, fast, and efficient website featuring:

• An exclusive community portal where employees can connect and share information with fellow colleagues across the globe

• One-of-a-kind search options

• Live videos

• Blogs and forums

At the company’s annual President’s Meeting, the new intranet site was introduced to several hundred employees and received a standing ovation for the new site.

Development Breakdown:

We used the following technology to develop the site:

• Organic Groups (OG)—was the most important module used as it limited access to content depending on user roles and group membership.

• Drupal Custom Module--og_access_join extended the Organic Group’s access control module with 'join group' permission. Certain User Roles cannot join groups directly but must be assigned via the administrator.

• User Relationships module manages friend relationships and requests.

• A Facebook-style Statuses module allows users to share their current status information with friends and also view their friends’ updates (using views module).

• In the Community section, we custom-built the Connect with Others feature, allowing users to search for colleagues based on geographic location, interests and professional expertise.

• Dynamic Display Block module manages the content slider on the home page and group pages.

• FAQ module out of the box offers easy-to-read, direct information.

• Users can also use the internal messaging system for private messages and messaging modules.

• User Points, Rules and User Points Top Contributors modules were used with some modification to feature the most active contributors within the site and specific groups.

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