SharePoint Redesign and Workflow Automation for Improved User Adoption

Customer

The Customer is a law firm located in the Gulf Cooperation Council. It offers companies legal consulting on insurance, arbitration, taxes, real estate, and other matters.

Challenge

The Customer had an intranet based on SharePoint Server 2019 and was concerned about lower than expected ROI of the solution. The Customer’s employees weren’t satisfied with the intranet’s look and feel, which negatively affected its adoption. The intranet was also not convenient to manage. The admin had to perform many tasks manually, for example, updating the intranet knowledge base in accordance with the Customer’s website. Therefore, the Customer wanted to automate the intranet management, make the intranet more engaging, easy-to-use, and attractive to employees.

Solution

The Customer turned to ScienceSoft’s SharePoint team for a consultation, and our experts suggested meeting the Customer’s challenges via intranet customization, which included intranet redesign, enhancement of its social features, and management automation.

ScienceSoft’s SharePoint team improved the intranet’s look and feel by changing styles, colors, and fonts. The team also changed the functionality of the intranet’s web parts according to the Customer’s requirements:

• Legal knowledge base. The company published articles on legal news, changes in laws and regulations to the company’s website on a monthly basis. To automate the replication of this content in the intranet, our SharePoint team implemented a service that enabled pulling these publications from the company’s website to the intranet.
• Corporate news slider. Before customization, adding a news item to the slider required uploading data to three sources, which was cumbersome. To simplify the process, our team implemented a custom solution for the Slider Details List. It allowed replacing the fields for big and small icons in Edit and Display forms with custom uploaders. They enabled automated uploading of images directly to the folders containing big and small news icons, which allowed managing the news slider from one place.
• International news. To make the international news section more engaging for users, our SharePoint team replaced this module with a video feed that pulled and played videos to the intranet directly from the corporate YouTube account.
• Social media. To improve employee communication, our team extended the social media web part to contain all the main tools: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Results

After the customization was finished, the Customer’s intranet became easier to use and manage. Automation of updating the intranet’s content allowed the company to easily keep the intranet up-to-date. Extending its social features by integration with social media and improving its UI made the intranet more engaging and attractive. All this encouraged its wider use by the company’s employees, which improved user adoption and contributed to increasing ROI of the solution.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2019, PowerShell, SharePoint Designer 2013, Visual Studio, .NET, JS, HTML, CSS, XSLT.