Client Sticks “The Landing” During SharePoint Intranet Creation

Overview

A not-for-profit financial cooperative that has more than 30 branches in its area needed a new intranet portal that its employees could use for news, calendar and event postings, announcements and document storage.

This was a “greenfield” intranet project, since the client’s legacy portal had become obsolete and the firm opted not to migrate existing content. Rather, it wanted a brand-new user experience offering a wide range of modern features.

Solution

To begin, we met with the client to gather the requirements of what they wanted to see comprise their new intranet.

We worked with the client’s HR and IT departments closely to gather the initial requirements and again during implementation. We talked through issues with the client’s team from an end-user standpoint. We discussed common annoyances on other web pages, such as how users typically never wait for all images to scroll through a carousel; we then created design ideas to avoid these problems.
From there, we finalized this set of requirements and specifications and moved to the build phase, including customized features such as:

• A personalization feature where end users can select their own apps and links to appear, and what order, when The Landing is opened.
• Categorized documents that expand and collapse with pertinent information related to different processes.
• The ability to “favorite” items on the home page that are starred and pinned in a different section, resembling an accordion that can be made hidden or visible with the click of an icon for quick reference.
• An employee recognition section on the home page that highlights accomplishments for those who go above and beyond and outstanding work.
• A news carousel that does not automatically advance, but rather requires action to advance between the slides. This feature adds another of customization in that none of the images are hidden from the “advance” thumbnails/toggles.
• Enlarged news items that feature one large image at the beginning, followed by smaller images with links. Clicking one of these smaller thumbnails swaps out the original large image instead with the one that is clicked.

Throughout the build process, Concurrency’s project team—consisting of a SharePoint architect, business analyst, project manager and user experience engineer—coordinated closely with the client’s internal IT team.

The client’s human resources and marketing departments also were highly engaged, helping ensure The Landing had the right look and feel. Their work on branding, preparation and training helped facilitate smooth user adoption across more than 2,000 employees.

Upon the new portal’s launch, the company even celebrated the new portal’s launch by providing employees with T-shirts touting they “stuck the landing.”