Intranet Migration to SharePoint to Reduce Maintenance Costs

Client

The Client is a law firm located in the Gulf that works with international and multinational companies. The firm specializes in dispute resolution, mergers and acquisitions, bank finance and restructuring, and other legal services.

Challenge

The Client wanted to replace their legacy costly-to-maintain intranet built on a third-party platform with a more cost-effective solution based on SharePoint Online, which should be bilingual to cater both to Arabic-speaking and English-speaking employees. For streamlined intranet adoption by the employees, the Client required retaining the look and feel of a new intranet in line with the legacy one.

Solution

The Client commissioned ScienceSoft, an experienced SharePoint intranet provider, to implement a new intranet. Having analyzed the Client’s business needs, our team implemented a bilingual SharePoint Online intranet, which helped the Client reduce intranet costs due to lower subscription costs, high scalability, out-of-the-box integration with Office 365, and more.

The intranet offered nine department sites for each of the company’s departments (e.g., Litigation, Compliance, Administration and Finance). Our team also implemented custom branding in line with the Client’s brand book and design requirements in terms of color, fonts, text alignment, including, for example, a custom header with search, navigation, and a language switcher. What’s more, ScienceSoft team equipped the intranet with a range of web parts.

Out-of-the-box web parts:

• People Picker – to find and add people to groups, for example, members of a team or employees of a certain department.
• Quick Links – for quick access to the company’s tools and resources, including various applications, user guides, a service desk, and more.
• Highlighted Content – to display the same content from the common storage on different site collections and enable quick access to recently viewed documents.
• Company Directory – to show a list of the company’s employees. The list can be automatically updated due to Azure WebJob, a feature of Azure App Service. The web part also offered an employee search using search filters.

Custom web parts:

• Slider and News – display news from different websites and display three news categories: World News, Company News, and My Updates.
• Events – integrated with Exchange Online, so that events from the intranet’s calendar can be shown in Outlook.

Results

Switching to the SharePoint platform allowed the Client to reduce the intranet maintenance costs and leverage diverse business and social features. With the new intranet, employees can quickly access useful tools and resources right from it, easily find a colleague or information and keep up with the company news and events.

The Client was satisfied with the project results and decided to continue our cooperation on the intranet. The Client commissioned ScienceSoft’s team to create a separate news page with search filters as well as integrate the intranet with the Client’s HR system to enable displaying vacations from the HR system right there.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, Azure, Graph API, C#, PowerShell, Typescript, React, HTML, CSS, KQL, REST API, Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio Code, JavaScript.