SharePoint Intranet with Strong Project Management Capabilities

Customer

Headquartered in the USA, the Customer is an international real estate company that holds their offices in premium districts of American and European cities. The company specializes in building, designing and selling first-class business offices, luxury residential areas, and retail spaces.

Challenge

The company implemented a SharePoint 2013 intranet to use it as the central hub of corporate life. The intranet contained corporate news, code of practice, calendar, important links to corporate resources and more. However, the adoption of the intranet was still low due to poor look and feel and the lack of features that would support employees’ daily activities. For this very reason, the Customer addressed ScienceSoft’s SharePoint consultants and developers to improve the existing solution, add new important features, create a more attractive intranet design, and, as a result, increase intranet use and adoption.

Solution

Since employees’ duties were mainly lying in the project management area, ScienceSoft offered to enable project management capabilities within the existing solution, thus supporting users’ activities through the intranet. The SharePoint team took up the challenge and developed a fully-functional project management system and a variety of task management features (My Tasks, My Schedule, Upcoming Events, etc.) that are now directly accessible from the intranet home page. This way, employees can manage their daily tasks, activities, and projects in the intranet as well as collaborate with their colleagues more effectively.

At the next stage, the SharePoint team reconsidered the main page of the intranet that initially contained a multitude of links to the third-party systems, SharePoint solutions and site collections. All the links and resources were regrouped and arranged on the main page to be easily accessible to users. A separate web part was developed to enable convenient search across all the intranet content.

As for the intranet branding, the SharePoint team chose the new metro style design for their SharePoint intranet. The selected style allowed developers to take advantage of the tile structure where each tile now leads users to different intranet resources and enterprise systems. The design is fully responsive, so employees can access the intranet with their smartphones and tablets.

Results

At the end of the project, the Customer got a customized corporate intranet with an improved look and feel and wider capabilities, including:

• A convenient project management system and a range of task management features to enable employees to manage their activities in the intranet.
• A redesigned main page of the intranet that is now well-structured and convenient to use.
• A responsive design for the intranet that is user-friendly and accessible via different devices.

The new features and enhanced UI and UX of the intranet stimulated employees to use the solution more actively, solve their daily challenges, which increased SharePoint adoption substantially.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2013, C#, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, REST, Microsoft PowerShell, SharePoint Designer 2013.