SharePoint Intranet with Strong Project Management Capabilities

Summary

A real estate company's SharePoint 2013 intranet was meant to be the central hub of corporate life, but low adoption — caused by a poor look and feel and a lack of features supporting daily work — held it back. INNERLUXES added a full project- and task-management system, restructured the main page with unified search, and applied a responsive metro-style tile design, substantially boosting intranet use and adoption.

About the Client

Headquartered in the US, the Client is an international real estate company with offices in premium districts of American and European cities. It specializes in building, designing, and selling first-class business offices, luxury residential areas, and retail spaces.

The Challenge

The company had implemented a SharePoint 2013 intranet to use as the central hub of corporate life. It contained corporate news, code of practice, a calendar, important links to corporate resources, and more. However, adoption remained low due to a poor look and feel and a lack of features to support employees' daily activities. The Client engaged INNERLUXES to improve the existing solution, add important new features, create a more attractive design, and ultimately increase intranet use and adoption.

The Solution

Since employees' duties lay mainly in project management, INNERLUXES proposed enabling project management capabilities within the existing solution to support users' activities through the intranet. The team developed a fully functional project management system and a variety of task management features (My Tasks, My Schedule, Upcoming Events, and more) accessible directly from the intranet home page, so employees can manage their daily tasks, activities, and projects in the intranet and collaborate more effectively.

Next, INNERLUXES reconsidered the main page, which initially contained a multitude of links to third-party systems, SharePoint solutions, and site collections. All the links and resources were regrouped and arranged on the main page for easy access, and a separate web part was developed to enable convenient search across all intranet content.

For branding, the team chose a metro-style design that takes advantage of a tile structure, where each tile leads users to different intranet resources and enterprise systems. The design is fully responsive, so employees can access the intranet from smartphones and tablets.

The Results

The Client received 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 that let employees manage their activities in the intranet.
• A redesigned main page that is now well-structured and convenient to use.
• A responsive design that is user-friendly and accessible across different devices.

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

Technologies and Tools

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