Computacenter’s Modern Intranet
WM Reply and Computacenter Migrate to a Modern Intranet Experience
Computacenter and WM Reply have worked together on numerous Modern Work projects, including previous instances of their global intranet. This particular project was driven by Computacenter’s need to adapt to the changing role their intranet played and to ensure a greater impact for news and communications by implementing a modern look and feel.
Along with successfully migrating and restructuring core content, a key goal was to provide an improved user experience while minimising customisation, achieved through out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality and WM Reply’s Accelerator catalogue of web parts.
Let’s take a closer look at one of WM’s toughest migrations to date.
Understanding the challenges
The project required a full migration away from legacy SharePoint technologies, whilst also modernising the role of the intranet at Computacenter. A detailed discovery phase ensured that the project team were able to focus on the key objective areas.
We summarised this into three primary challenges:
- Consolidating the intranet’s 3,000 SharePoint sites and 42,000 pages to be more manageable
- Architecting the intranet to serve content in multiple languages and countries
- Enabling greater engagement through audience targeting and personalisation
Head of Corporate Communications, Computacenter
Page restructuring and deduplication
Restructuring the intranet and deduplicating content was key to the migration’s success. Pages had been duplicated to provide location-specific content which, thanks to new audience targeting and multilingual functionality, could now be streamlined.
A huge timesaving gain was made by removing the need for manual migration with template mapping and automated migration scripts – converting legacy pages into newer, modern SharePoint content.
Hear from WM Reply’s Jas Surineni about the deduplication process and how it enhanced the user experience by removing content that was irrelevant.
- Migrated 3,000 sites to 135
- Consolidated 42,000 pages to 8,000
Intranet Manager, Computacenter
Creating an Intranet for All
As a global organisation Computacenter needs to provide information to all employees, no matter where they are based. With the legacy SharePoint intranet this meant creating many duplicate pages in multiple languages.
By re-structuring the intranet’s information architecture, making the most of the new translation capabilities in SharePoint Online, and utilising the audience enhancements in the Accelerator, Computacenter were able to continue to provide targeted content in every language required whilst also reducing the content management overhead of doing so.
Hear from WM Reply’s Jess Meats on how Computacenter did it.
Accelerating the migration
Computacenter’s migrated intranet used The Accelerator, a suite of bespoke web parts designed to fill the gaps in SharePoint Online, to enable rich, dynamic content to be targeted to specific audiences without costly custom development.
Hear from Ajay Patel, one our Accelerator experts, on what Computacenter’s most used web parts were and how they have saved them time in multiple ways.
A curated corporate links directory, the Launchpad was made available across the entire site to enable users to have immediate access to the tools they needed. The ability to manage and add personal links makes this as indispensable part of the intranet.
Computacenter are using the Image Map web part to provide rich informational content by combining images with labels, descriptions, and interaction to give greater impact to content pages.
The Audience Subscription web part is a vital tool in ensuring that news and organisation updates are seen all who need to. Audiences are dynamically populated by targeting colleagues based on their geographical location.
The Results
A better user experience for all
- More accurate and successful Search functionality.
- Engaging content from the modern experience.
- Content editors have more flexibility in how they populate pages.
- Greatly improved mobile view of the intranet on the SharePoint app and in-browser.
- Positive qualitative content feedback content on the new SharePoint intranet from employees.
