SharePoint Intranet Customization to Drive User Adoption and Engagement

Summary

A multibusiness corporation's SharePoint Server 2019 intranet had a non-intuitive interface — with news scattered across three separate pages and inconvenient access to popular resources and recent documents — that held back adoption. INNERLUXES customized the intranet by planning and developing four new SPFx web parts that consolidate the news in one place and give employees one-click access to key resources and the documents they need, improving usability, adoption, and engagement.

About the Client

The Client is an international corporate group headquartered in Europe. The group delivers pharmaceutical products and provides technical solutions for the food, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing industries.

The Challenge

The Client had an intranet based on SharePoint Server 2019. The intranet had a non-intuitive interface and was not convenient to use. For example, there were three different pages for news — Global News, Local News, and Notices. It was also inconvenient to navigate to popular corporate resources like the IT help desk or to search for recently opened documents. The Client wanted to enhance the portal's usability by keeping all the news in one place and enabling easy access to the required resources and documents.

The Solution

After studying the Client's needs, INNERLUXES suggested meeting them through customization. The team planned and developed four new web parts for the Client's intranet:

• News Tiles. To make viewing news more convenient, INNERLUXES combined all three news types into one web part placed 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. So the Client's employees never miss an interesting event, INNERLUXES introduced the Events web part, which shows the dates and times of four upcoming events, such as 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. This web part provides easy access to the company's resources, such as the website, employee directory, IT help desk, and more.

The Results

• After customization, the Client's intranet offered easy tracking of company news and events, allowing employees not to miss important updates.
• Through the Quick Links and Documents web parts, employees could quickly find a required document or 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.