SharePoint Intranet Customization to Drive User Adoption and Engagement
Customer
The Customer is an international corporate group headquartered in Europe. The group delivers pharmaceutical products as well as provides technical solutions for food, pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries.
Challenge
The Customer had an intranet based on SharePoint Server 2019. The intranet had a non-intuitive interface and thus was not convenient to use. For example, there were three different pages for the news on the intranet: Global News, Local News and Notices. Also, it was inconvenient to navigate to popular corporate resources like IT help desk or search for recently opened documents. So, the Customer wanted to enhance the portal usability by keeping all the news at one place and enabling easy access to the required resources and documents.
Solution
After studying the Customer’s needs, ScienceSoft’s team of experienced SharePoint intranet developers suggested meeting these needs through customization. Then, the team planned and developed 4 new web parts for the Customer’s intranet:
- News Tiles. To make viewing news more convenient, our team combined all the three news types into one web part and placed it on the same page. In this web part, global news is represented by a blog, local news – by document libraries and notices – by an announcement list.
- Events. For the Customer’s employees never to miss an interesting event, our team introduced the Events web part. This web part shows dates and the time of 4 upcoming events, for example, meetings and training sessions.
- Documents. This web part allows employees to always have the latest documents they’ve been working on at their fingertips.
- Quick Links. Our team implemented this web part to provide easy access to the company’s resources, such as the website, employee directory, IT help desk, and more.
Results
After customization, the Customer’s intranet offered easy tracking of the company’s news and events, which allowed the employees not to miss important updates. Due to Quick Links and Documents web parts, employees could quickly find a required document or a person or submit a ticket to the IT help desk. All this increased the intranet’s convenience for users and helped improve user adoption and engagement.
Technologies and Tools
SharePoint 2019, SPFx, JavaScript, TypeScript, SASS/CSS
