SharePoint Redesign and Workflow Automation for Improved User Adoption

Summary

A Gulf-region law firm had a SharePoint Server 2019 intranet but was concerned about its lower-than-expected ROI: employees disliked the look and feel (hurting adoption), and the intranet was inconvenient to manage, with the admin handling many tasks manually. INNERLUXES customized the intranet — redesigning the UI, enhancing its social features, and automating management — making it easier to use and manage, more engaging, and better adopted, which contributed to a higher ROI.

About the Client

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

The Challenge

The Client had an intranet based on SharePoint Server 2019 and was concerned about its lower-than-expected ROI. Employees weren't satisfied with the intranet's look and feel, which hurt adoption, and the intranet was not convenient to manage — the admin had to perform many tasks manually, such as updating the intranet knowledge base in line with the firm's website. The Client wanted to automate intranet management and make the intranet more engaging, easy to use, and attractive to employees.

The Solution

The Client turned to INNERLUXES's SharePoint team for a consultation, and our experts suggested addressing the challenges through intranet customization — redesign, enhanced social features, and management automation.

INNERLUXES's SharePoint team improved the intranet's look and feel by changing styles, colors, and fonts, and adjusted the functionality of the intranet's web parts to the Client's requirements:

• Legal knowledge base. The firm published articles on legal news and changes in laws and regulations to its website monthly. To automate replicating this content in the intranet, our team implemented a service that pulls these publications from the firm's website to the intranet.
• Corporate news slider. Previously, adding a news item required uploading data to three sources, which was cumbersome. Our team implemented a custom solution for the Slider Details List that replaced the big/small icon fields in Edit and Display forms with custom uploaders — enabling automated uploading of images directly to the big and small news-icon folders and managing the news slider from one place.
• International news. To make this section more engaging, our team replaced the module with a video feed that pulls and plays 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 include all the main tools.

The Results

• After customization, the Client's intranet became easier to use and manage.
• Automating content updates let the firm easily keep the intranet up to date.
• Extended social features and an improved UI made the intranet more engaging and attractive, encouraging wider use by employees — improving user adoption and contributing to a higher ROI for the solution.

Technologies and Tools

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