SharePoint Intranet for Effective Collaboration within International Parcel Delivery Network
Client
Located in Europe, the company is a part of a large international parcel delivery network with service depots in more than 40 countries. The network numbers more than 50,000 employees who collaborate intensively to deliver several million parcels daily all over the world.
Challenge
Since effective collaboration of employees is business-critical to the company, the Client decided to develop a fully functional intranet to make the working process more dynamic, let employees connect with their colleagues easily, provide teams with quick access to the corporate content and a variety of collaboration tools. To bring the idea to life, the Client was looking for an experienced SharePoint team to implement and customize a SharePoint Online intranet. ScienceSoft took up the challenge.
Solution
ScienceSoft’s business analysts and SharePoint consultants started with defining the general structure of the future intranet to create a clear-cut and flexible architecture that would allow managing, supporting and extending the intranet effectively.
Once the general structure of the solution was outlined, the project entered the development stage. ScienceSoft’s SharePoint development team delivered various components of the intranet to make it user-friendly and feature-rich.
News
The intranet enables users to publish two types of news:
- Corporate news created by the internal communication department and available across the entire company.
- Department news created by the head of a department who chooses either to publish news on the department site only or make it publicly available.
Applications
Custom SharePoint applications are grouped within a separate web part that includes:
- Common apps, such as topdesk, who is who, tracking, help, etc. that are essential for all intranet users.
- Optional apps, such as CRM, my timetable, my budget, etc. that users can add and remove according to their preferences.
A personalized web part is displayed on the intranet homepage. This way users have all the necessary corporate resources at their fingertips.
Department sites
Department sites contain department news, useful links to important department-specific and corporate resources, team members’ profiles, team documents, activities, as well as collaboration tools to support effective teamwork. Each site is managed by a department manager and can be customized in line with the departmental needs.
Vacancies
The intranet hosts a vacancy page dedicated to open job opportunities. The page includes:
- The Job Contact web part to enable employees to contact a responsible HR manager and learn vacancy details
- The Top Jobs web part that lists hot vacancies displayed on the main page of the intranet
- The vacancy archive
Employees
All the employees are put together on the Who is Who site. Using the site, employees can search for a particular person by name, department, office and position, read basic information about colleagues and contact them via available collaboration tools.
The SharePoint team also helped the Client to implement Google Analytics to track the overall usage of the intranet.
In the framework of SharePoint customization, the team also styled the intranet according to the corporate brand book and enabled responsive design of all intranet pages so that it be available on smartphones and tablets.
Results
The new SharePoint Online intranet helped the Client to reach several goals:
- to consolidate corporate activities within a single secure platform
- to increase employee productivity through intranet tools and services available 24/7
- to encourage departmental work through personalized department sites
- to ensure accessibility of information on the staff thanks to unified personal profiles
- to improve employees’ engagement into the corporate life owing to the user-friendly and easy-to-use solution.
Technologies and Tools
SharePoint Online, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, REST, SharePoint Designer, Photoshop.
