SharePoint Intranet for a Large Design Firm

18 May 2021

The Client

The client-based out of the east coast in the US and provides leading design services for construction companies across the country

The Need

The client was using SharePoint for their file shares and had recently migrated from their file server to SharePoint Online. Now, the client wanted to define experiences for their user groups and set up a modern-looking intranet that would assist them in managing onboarding, automate repetitive actions, provide structured content delivery and announcements for the user groups across the organization.

The Challenge

The client had a current SharePoint Online intranet that although functional lacked organization and modern touch leading to larger user adoptions and eventually failed implementation. The client wanted to bring in the learning from the last implementation and identify the challenges and design a system that changes the outlook towards a SharePoint-based intranet and increases adoption along with Teams and related M365 services.

Strategy

The organization was increasingly looking to use Microsoft Teams for their daily collaboration and conversations and had several 3rd party applications integrated inside of Teams that managed their Projects, Utilization, custom applications, etc. For successful adoption of the intranet, the key underlying point was to define the entire user experience around Microsoft Teams and link up the Teams structure with SharePoint Online.

SharePoint modern Communication sites were the chosen medium for setting up the intranet. There was an Org-wide intranet that was designed with a modern touch including a few custom web parts to enhance the look and feel, custom web part to search people in the organization as a directory, setup Yammer community, and integrations, social media setup with custom branding that elevated the end-user experience on using SharePoint. The existing Site content structure was rewired and organized to ensure the optimal layout of the content that was easy to find. This site also targeted content delivery based on the targeted audience and the entire organization.

The other sites were created specifically for the purpose of onboarding new employees, HR process management site, and training the new joiners. Training sites were created specifically to the nature of the role to get the employee up to speed quickly even when working remotely. The training site comprised mostly of videos. Furthermore, department-wise sites were created for each division, and all the sites were linked directly inside their respective Teams sites for a unified Teams experience.

Additionally, we extended the solution further with a few basic workflow automation to increase accountability and tracking with the development of a Vacation App, HR onboarding App, IT Support App, Asset Tracking, and Expense Tracking App on PowerApps and Power Automate approvals.

Results

• Effective application usage with increased adoption due to creation and structuring of the deployment around Office 365 groups that saw the adoption increase by nearly 40% in month 1.
• SharePoint deployment, customization, and branding for effective collaboration amongst different stakeholders while ensuring proper security measures
• Custom workflow for HR policy approval management. Leave and Expense Management for quicker approval process
• The client was able to focus on the content and not too much on Technology
• Structured security that offered need to know basic rights.

Technology Stack

• Office 365
• SharePoint Online
• Power Automate and PowerApps
• Teams

Planning for a similar solution to be built at your end? Contact us, with expert consultants we provide the best intranet solution that is tailor-made for the requirements.