How 340 editors stopped asking each other for the name of an icon

A municipal administration with fourteen sites, one installation and no shared vocabulary. What changed, what it cost, and the two departments it did not work for.

The starting point

The shape of the deployment before any of the story, so a reader can stop here if it is nothing like theirs. Everything in the table is a fact somebody at Kastrup can dispute.

What	This deployment
Sector	Municipal administration
People affected	340 editors across 22 departments
Sites	1 installation, 14 sites, 3 languages
Release	TYPO3 13.4, upgraded from 11.5
Agency	Nordlys Digital, Aarhus
Ran from	January to July 2026
What it replaced	A wiki and two shared spreadsheets

Before

Twenty-two departments had each grown their own names for the same things. A page-tree icon meant “unpublished” in one and “scheduled” in another, and both were right within their own department.

The cost was not the confusion — it was the asking. Every new editor spent their first month finding out who to ask, and every experienced one spent a slice of every week answering.

Two departments' folder structures side by side, with the same icons used for different states

The objection that nearly stopped it

The security office had one question, and it was the right one: a tool that reads the whole installation is a tool that can leak the whole installation.

We assumed we would spend the pilot arguing about what it sends. We spent twenty minutes reading the source and the rest of the month on whether the answers were any good.

Mette Sørensen · Head of information security, Kastrup

The change, and its measure

Four figures, each with its measure and over how long. The fourth is the one that did not go our way, and it is here for the same reason the first three are.

4 h

to answer a naming question

Down from two days. The time from a question in the team channel to a linked answer, over 61 questions between March and June.

71 %

of questions answered without a person

The remaining 29% were about this installation’s own conventions, which the tool does not index.

0

changes written by the tool

It reads. The audit at the end of the pilot found no write path. That is what the security office needed before the rollout.

1 of 3

departments still on the old way

Stated because it is true: the two with their own conventions found the answers less useful, and nobody pushed them.

The effort

Seven months, of which the first three went not on the tool at all but on the question of which department’s names win. That is the work this makes visible rather than the work it saves.

It does not index your own conventions

The two departments it did not help were the two with the most local vocabulary. Reading a site package for its own naming is on the roadmap — it was not available here, and this page is not going to pretend it was.

The tool was the easy part. Getting twenty-two departments to agree on one word for one thing is the project — everything after that is installation.

Jonas Riis · Lead integrator, Nordlys Digital

Other deployments

Two more, both smaller and neither in public administration. A single reference proves a single thing.