The Challenge
A Leading Australian professional body was seeking to upgrade their SharePoint Classic intranet to SharePoint Modern Sites.
In contrast to SharePoint Classic, SharePoint Modern allows for a:
- Better user experience for both end users and power users
- Bore adaptive design
- Greater degree of flexibility, with each site becoming part of a hub that shares navigation, branding and other elements
Since there is no direct method to convert SharePoint Classic to SharePoint Modern, the organisation required the development of a brand-new intranet.
To fast-track this process, Antares suggested leveraging our Modern Sites intranet accelerator: #Space. The accelerator eliminates the need for a custom-built solution by providing prevalent intranet requirements out-of-the-box.
The Solution
#Space integrates with other Microsoft workloads and delivers (as standard) the key features organisations look for in an intranet platform. Using #Space significantly increases the speed of delivery, at a fraction of the cost of a custom Modern Sites intranet build.
The accelerator was developed by employing our user-friendly design approach, which has been refined across more than 200 SharePoint intranet implementations. The approach has included interviews, workshops, and simulated tests with real users to make iterative improvements – resulting in a solution that drives productivity, user satisfaction and business confidence (key factors for intranet success).
With #Space, user friendly design helps to ensure:
- relevant content and functionality for users
- reduced barriers to intranet use through straightforward design.
- enhanced user experience and ease
For example, #Space incorporates features that feedback has told us are vital to a user-centric intranet, such as global alerts. With #Space, these are displayed as a rotating banner at the top of all intranet pages so all users can see the message no matter what part of the intranet they are using.
Combined with other valuable elements, #Space inspires adoption and decreases the risk of requiring a costly and time-consuming re-design in the future.
The Results
In implementing #Space for this leading Australian professional body, we took a three-phased approach:
- Planning – with a series of workshops to review the current state, map existing intranet content to SharePoint Modern Sites features, and lock down the scope and information architecture.
- Deployment – of our #Space framework, configured to meet an estimated 80% of requirements.
- Go Live – where we launch the new intranet to the business with a focus on user adoption and training which are central to success.
Through a minimum viable product strategy, the organisation was able to leverage #Space as their foundation and customise it as specific communication and collaboration needs were identified.
Following the implementation, the organisation has been able to achieve all of the following:
- A baseline information architecture for their new intranet, based on best practice and industry experience.
- An established content type and metadata model for efficient search, archiving, and retrieval of information.
- A scalable intranet solution that leverages Microsoft SharePoint Modern Sites functionality.
- A simple security model for managing groups to ensure content is as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ as it needs to be.
- A single location for important documents, news, and announcements (one source of truth).
- The ability to easily search, find, and view information and people across the organisation.
To find out how we can achieve similar results for your organisation, see #Space or contact us.
