SharePoint Intranet Redesign and Enhancement with Business and Social Features

Client

The Client is a US community bank that provides banking and financial services for individuals and businesses.

Challenge

The Client’s legacy SharePoint intranet became outdated in terms of design and functionality. The intranet wasn’t user-friendly and engaging and lacked features to enable effective search, convenient communication, and easy content management. Also, the intranet didn’t provide integration with social media and availability on mobile devices. So, the Client needed complete intranet redesign and additional training on a new intranet’s features.

Solution

The Client chose ScienceSoft to fulfill the project due to our ample experience in SharePoint intranet design.

ScienceSoft’s team started with analyzing the Client’s business needs and their IT infrastructure and mapped SharePoint Online capabilities to their redesign needs. To enhance the intranet’s look and feel and keep it consistent with the company’s brand, our team based the new design on SharePoint Modern UI. The team also ensured the intranet's intuitiveness and mobile-friendliness, created engaging and attractive intranet page designs and facilitated creating and updating the intranet content. Also, ScienceSoft’s team leveraged SharePoint’s search engine to enable quick and effective content search by keywords and tags across the intranet and other corporate resources.

The key components of the new intranet included a homepage, employee pages, and a policy management page.

Homepage

To make the intranet engaging and more functional, ScienceSoft’s team implemented a range of social and business features on the homepage:

• Business features: useful links (document templates, policy management, employee handbook, knowledge base, etc.), a calendar, news, announcements. ScienceSoft’s team also implemented a convenient organization chart to enable employee search.
• Social features: upcoming birthdays, employee updates, communities and discussions, classifieds, discounts. To allow displaying information from the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, our team integrated the intranet with these social networks.

Employee pages

Using Delve as a user profile system, ScienceSoft’s team created informative and easy-to-manage employee pages. Each page provided the following information about an employee: a department, a position, contact data, working experience, skills, certificates, communities in which an employee had membership, a calendar with upcoming business and social events. Also, the profile provided a workspace section with tasks, documents and training events relevant to a certain employee.

Policy management page

To facilitate tracking new policies and policy acknowledgement, ScienceSoft’s team created a separate section for this purpose. On this page, each employee could see a list of policies assigned to them, policy status (e.g., Extended, In Progress), assigners’ names, and due dates. The list of policies was divided into two parts: the first part showed a list of overdue policies and the second part – policies that would be due soon. Employees could read and confirm the policies on the page.

After implementing the solution, ScienceSoft provided the Client with a user manual that described the basic capabilities of the intranet. Our team also conducted comprehensive training on SharePoint Online features and content management for the Client’s intranet administrators and content creators.

Results

The Client has obtained a mobile-friendly, easy-to-use, engaging and more functional and intranet that fits in well with the Client’s existing IT infrastructure and meets the company’s business needs. The new branded intranet supports corporate culture and nurtures the sense of community among employees.

The redesigned intranet efficiently connects all the company’s employees and allows them to easily keep track of news and events, freely communicate, share files and information and quickly find any colleague or information they need to fulfill their working tasks. The intranet streamlines policy management, which supports the accountability of the Client’s employees. Also, the intranet content managers can quickly and easily prepare, publish, and update the intranet content, which makes it dynamic and always up-to-date.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, SPFx, TypeScript, React, Redux, .NET Core 2.0, CSS, Flex