Computacenter’s Modern Intranet
Explore how WM Reply worked with Computacenter to migrate their intranet from SharePoint 2013 to a modern experience
Computacenter’s Modern Intranet
Explore how WM Reply worked with Computacenter to migrate their intranet from SharePoint 2013 to a modern experience
Computacenter is a leading independent technology partner, trusted by large corporate and public sector organisations. They help their customers source, transform, and manage their IT infrastructure to deliver digital transformation, enabling users and their business. Computacenter is a public company quoted on the London FTSE 250 (CCC.L) and employs over 18,000 people worldwide.
Computacenter is a leading independent technology partner, trusted by large corporate and public sector organisations. They help their customers source, transform, and manage their IT infrastructure to deliver digital transformation, enabling users and their business. Computacenter is a public company quoted on the London FTSE 250 (CCC.L) and employs over 18,000 people worldwide.
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
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
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
"We needed a place where our employees could come together to share information while bringing our intranet up to date with a modern look and feel."
Andrew Hale
Head of Corporate Communications, Computacenter
"We needed a place where our employees could come together to share information while bringing our intranet up to date with a modern look and feel."
Andrew Hale
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
"It was important that the content migration was automated as much as it possibly could be. We didn’t want everybody to have to manually copy across their content."
Lorna Evans
Intranet Manager, Computacenter
"It was important that the content migration was automated as much as it possibly could be. We didn’t want everybody to have to manually copy across their content."
Lorna Evans
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.
Launchpad
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
We used the Launchpad for our My Tools area, which we did have prior to the migration in a simpler form. The new one has better features and is easier to manage. Everyone gets links that are relevant to them.”
Lorna Evans
Intranet Manager, Computacenter
Image Map
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.
Image Map’s not just a picture that's flat on the page, people can click to find out more about different areas. We use it ourselves within our corporate communications content. It's proving to be popular.”
Lorna Evans
Intranet Manager, Computacenter
Audience Subscription
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 Audience Subscription web part supports audience targeting. We have 20 countries set up as audience groups that users are put into the group for their home country by default, with the added ability for users to select additional countries.”
Lorna Evans
Intranet Manager, Computacenter
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