Best practices for a planning and building a modern digital intranet -- Shire customer deep dive
Published Jul 20 2017 04:11 PM 38K Views
Microsoft

On July 13th, Microsoft held a panel webinar with their customer, Shire – a recognized leader in rare diseases, along with numerous Office 365 MVPs (full panelist list below). We got to hear how they planned, built and use their beautiful and engaging digital workspace – The Hub – to help inform and engage everyone throughout the company in a consistent, sustainable way.

 

The panelists highlight the importance of governance throughout the project, describe numerous business cases, and cover the use of innovations including SharePoint communication sites, leveraging the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), multi-column page support, new web parts and page capabilities – all used to create rich and compelling sites to achieve their desired outcomes. 

 

I was fortunate enough to act as Mark of Ceremony (MC) for the webinar and hear first-hand how they achieved the rollout AND the successful use of their modern, functional intranet. Below you’ll see both the full, on-demand webinar video (a fun, informative 60 minutes), plus expanded written thoughts across some of the top-level items covered, with links provided by our MVPs to additional materials to further your learning.

 

The more we facilitate our employees to get information faster, to be more productive, the more that they can do to push therapies towards our patients."

-- Nicole Rojas - Head of Digital Communications, Shire.

 

Intranet strategy & planning

With Office 365 and SharePoint, Shire built their digital workspace with a key focus on content governance. Their goal was not to limit and secure the content, but to ensure it is curated in a consistent, compelling, discoverable way. They recently completed their largest acquisition to-date, quadrupling the size of their global workforce. Thus, they needed an intranet that worked for them during this expansion and beyond to keep everyone productive and connected.

 

Their vision is to provide a modern, secure communications and collaboration platform to their mobile workforce; this was their North Star – something they could use to guide change for how people work at Shire. They then chose to embrace the leading edge – to use the latest releases from Microsoft.

 

Here are their key approaches to strategy and planning:

  • Governance First: The core project team articulated roles and responsibilities, platform support, application development, and tools and resources. They also established an Office 365 Governance Team that would maintain, and review, items related to Office 365.
  • Strategic line of site: They align their initiatives and efforts with the strategic drivers of the company. How would the digital workspace enable and further those initiatives? Before meeting with business leaders, the team made sure to give real examples of how the digital workspace will help achieve their goals. 
  • Office 365 and supporting Vendors: Shire knew that Office 365 was a robust, plentiful productivity toolkit. They also knew and discovered areas that they wanted to do more than just the standard offering.  So, they identified early on other vendors to help them take Office 365 even further – again for the areas they and their leadership agreed upon to invest time and resources. 
  • Build a great team! This includes vendors and consultants – aka, the panelists in the webinar+++.  Shire worked hard to identify the right mix of talented resources, some of whom are in this webinar (full panelist list below). And it was not just technical IQ, it was important how everyone worked together throughout.
  • Don't underestimate the amount of time, resources, and budget needed. Things change, and things changed throughout this project. Their feedback to themselves and others going forward, “Account for the unknowns in your planning and budgeting.”
  • Change Management and Training are key enablers to success of any project. Know what’s coming from Microsoft, and prepare people for use, configuration and development. Make sure plans incorporate these pieces. Not just for the project but post project implementation.  Businesses are still going to need to manage changes/updates and provide training, after go-live. 

Below are two screenshots from Shire’s intranet:

Shire's 'The Hub' portal on SharePoint in Office 365Shire's 'The Hub' portal on SharePoint in Office 365Shire's 'Policy Center' within The Hub takes an approach to house all policies in a central location, and create search-based views across different sites.Shire's 'Policy Center' within The Hub takes an approach to house all policies in a central location, and create search-based views across different sites. 

SharePoint communication sites use within the overall Shire intranet

Alongside modern team sites for collaboration, Shire is an early adopter for the new SharePoint communication sites in Office 365 – to help tell their stories to each other, with broad reach built in. In the webinar, they describe sites that are “fit for purpose” and could easily adopt the evolving technology. Every site, and the information within, is then accessible via the SharePoint home in Office 365 and the SharePoint mobile apps. These both offer good user experiences and increase visibility and engagement.

 

Shire saw communication sites as a great solution for IT business partners, too, to present to their clients. They give various business owners something beautiful, that allows them to focus on the content in a timely fashion without worry to design or development. They noted that the consistency with web part usage across team and communication sites was important – for consistency of how people used the tools to achieve what they needed. And for the budget side of the business, a resulting high return on investment.

 

Here are two in-production communication sites at Shire – each a great use cases:

'Fueling Growth' on the left - used to highlight growth investments, 'WeLearn' on the right - used for internal career training.'Fueling Growth' on the left - used to highlight growth investments, 'WeLearn' on the right - used for internal career training.

Mobility, too, was a key portion of what they wanted for their internal communications - to broadly reach their users across devices without a ton of work to make pages and web parts responsive, it just all works and reflows on mobile out-of-the-box so users remain productive and up to date on the go; you can install the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

 

You can read more about Sue Hanley’s thoughts and guidance on communication sites in her two related articles:

Design and development considerations

In the middle of the webinar, we turned to discuss their approach on design and development. And per their governance practices, Shire first looks to see if the desired functionality is provided by Microsoft out-of-the-box AND is it worth spending time and budget with clear ties to a key business outcome. Once decided, they aim to align with user interface patterns found throughout Office 365, to facilitate a consistent end user experience.

 

It, too, was important for them to be able to create highly reusable components. This not only made it easier to scale and futureproof, it also allowed them to thoughtfully include legacy applications, on-premises development and even considerations for hybrid – mapping to the what’s possible in the cloud, or for future app migration.

 

Shire's custom 'Featured Content' web part showing the edit pane.Shire's custom 'Featured Content' web part showing the edit pane.

Hope and dreams for what comes next…

Shire approaches the now and the what’s coming with an evolutionary mindset. They evolve not only with what tech is rolling out, they assess and reassess business priorities on a consistent basis. This helps ensure good adoption and alignment across the teams. Knowing what’s coming next from Microsoft and what’s needed next by the business guides the internal solution delivery list.

 

With their future in mind then, toward the end of the webinar, we focused on what each panelist saw as a personal hope and dream– aka, their asks to Microsoft to further round out The Hub through continued value and use of SharePoint and Office 365; I can tell you the engineering ears back in Redmond perked up at this section :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

 

Here’s a quick summary of their asks:

  • Improve ‘how to’ developer & design documentation, plus examples. They have had fun reverse engineering off of some of the first-party Microsoft web parts, but more of the how would help speed development via supported patterns and practices.
  • Bracket, bracket link'bility “[[pageName… ]]” - the ability to link to a page to tell a story by using better connections, ala wiki-like gestures.
  • Provide the ability to aggregate content from across sites, news items, sites and pages – they like the capabilities within the site, and as they grow, they see the benefit and value of being able to rollup information across sites.
  • Company news– team news is great, and in use at Shire, but to further support broader news and announcements, they asked that Microsoft expand the news service to be able to more centrally manage and curate news out to specific groups or all company – a top-down approach with audience targeting.

Panelists extraordinaire

A huge thank you to our panelists, for their time, expertise and willingness to share. Each brought a specific talent, each complimenting each other to the benefit of the project and their working environment. If you ask me, all are worth following, to learn more from people who know what they know (and have taken some bumps and bruises so you don’t have to), and are good at sharing:

  • Nicole Rojas (Head of Digital Communications, Shire) [@LucyinBoston]
  • Carlos Pelayo (Lead IT Business Partner, Shire) [@CarlosPelayoMA]
  • Sue Hanley (SharePoint Consultant (MVP)) [@susanhanley]
  • Dave Feldman (Architect (Shire & MVP)) [@bostonmusicdave]
  • D'Arce Hess (SharePoint Developer (MVP)) [@DarceHess]
  • Mike Tolly (SharePoint Developer, Blue Metal) [@mptolly]
  • Scot Hillier (Independent consultant (MVP)) [@ScotHillier]
  • Mark Kashman (Senior Product Manager, Microsoft [host]) [@mkashman]

Cheers,
Mark

Related resources

#SharePoint <3 Shire = #SPShire#SharePoint <3 Shire = #SPShire

25 Comments

Great article Mark!!!

Former Employee

@Mark Kashman The URL to slides is somehow corrupted - it contains full article URL and causes 404. Correct URL is https://www.slideshare.net/markkashman/shire-intranet-planning-and-building-the-hub-on-sharepoint-an...

Deleted
Not applicable

So uhhh.... how did they get global nav on a communication site? Guessing they have preview Spfx features pushed to their tenant to use the header that we don't have?........

I wish Chris!  In our case we have the header and footer HTML/CSS/JS sitting in a azure cdn.  We do have an extension waiting when those get real but currently just use a spfx webpart to inject it in.  Means it needs to be added (manually or in code) to pages but it took little effort to do and was out only real option until extensions get real 

Deleted
Not applicable

Interesting, thanks for replying! I was wondering if you could do that with a webpart. Any examples you know off the top of your head where you got that idea from or you guys just came up with it? Really would like it ahead of time to make my nav much better on our new Intranet Homepage. So you just stick some css overrides in the webpart and it renders up there? I do something similar today with my SharePoint homepage with a bunch of CSS overwrites to make the top menu look much nicer via Content editor webpart, so guessing it's the same but instead of that webpart just a custom webpart on the page to accomplish it? 

Thank you for a great article. It was such a pleasure to help promote the next chapter of communication sites and how they can provide a positive future for so many

Iron Contributor

@Mark Kashmanand the team, thanks for putting this together. I have a learned a lot from the Shire Intranet casestudy that I can implement with my projects.

 

Please do similar sessions for ECM, Records Management, Business Applications use cases too.

 

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the insights! This was a really great case!

 

However, what are the average load times when accessing Shire - The Hub? I have seen that you use Publishing Portal sites and that you have done a lot of customizations.

Hi Biserka. The load times are actually very fast. There are very few customizations that are happening. Styling and webparts are deployed through best practices, apps and SPFX webparts with CDN backing. A lot of what we have is actually out of the box with a consistent governance and branding consideration for implementation.

Brass Contributor

Congratulations Shire team!

 

@Darce Hess , @David Feldman

Just wondering about the url for The Hub. I guess the Hub is portal home page or landing page or logical starting point for end user. Is the Hub located at  top level url https://companyName.sharepoint.com or at /sites? I noticed we cannot create communication sites from Office 365 SharePoint new site collection page. Communication sites are created only at /sites/

If The Hub is at /sites/hub, did you put redirection script from https://companyName.sharepoint.com to the hub or did you train your users to go to /sites/hub

Thanks a lot.

Bronze Contributor

Chris -- can you write more about getting navigation onto the Communication site?  We want to use a Communication Site as our Intranet home page.

 

Is there any description of how your home page was built (I have not watched the full video yet), is it just a page with what webparts?

 

Rob.

Copper Contributor

Interesting case study. The issue I'm having is with the video. Every time I get to 34:45 it freezes and won't let me proceed...

Deleted
Not applicable

Ditto for me on the video getting stuck at 34:45

Microsoft

Hi @Brian Williams & @Deleted - I've been able to repro and have sent a fix request to our hosting team. Appreaicte you both catching the "freeze" and we hope to thaw it quickly! 

 

Thx, Mark.

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the insights!  Could you please share a little more info on how the policy center has been implemented? Are the category, policy type etc attrributes on the policy document content type? Did you use Microsoft Flow or a Sharepoint Designer workflow to approve and publish the policies?

 

we would love to be able to use the communication site for our intranet and modernize our custom policy portal.

 

 

Microsoft

Hi @Mamta Shah - I'm looping in @Susan Hanley who can best reply how they went about building the Policy Center at Shire. Sue, anything you can add to Mamta's question?

There is a single Policy Document content type. There are multiple libraries in the Policy Center. We have one library called Corporate Policies that is managed globally. There are only 50 or so corporate policies. Then we have a library for each functional area that is secured so that only the "policy owners" for that function can update policies. All of the libraries use the same Policy Document content type. The Policy Center is not where policies are created, reviewed, approved, etc. so we do not have any workflows for approval. It basically provides a user-friendly way to search "convenience copies" of policies as they were being consolidated, updated, and revised. One of the reasons the Policy Center was created was that not all policies were in any one system - so it was created as a way to make sure that all critical policies could be found. We will likely re-visit the Policy Center in 2018 to assess the ongoing value.

Brass Contributor

@Susan Hanley Do they work on the policies in their own department's team site and then post a convenience copy to the policy center? So essentially they could be uploading a policy twice? (Once to create one in their team site and then twice to upload it to the policy center library?) 

 

PS: Thanks for the governance slides you put together!

Typically, policies are authored on private team sites for the department and reviewed by legal. When they are published, they are MOVED to the Policy Center, not copied. So there is only one copy of the policy. If the owner chooses to publish the Policy in .pdf format, the source file would live on their team site and the .pdf version lives in the Policy Center.

Copper Contributor

Hi @Susan Hanley,

Is the policy center a customized search page  or does it query from the individual document libraries or do you move the published files to a policy center library? we want to implement the same thing to in our intranet. 

Yes, the Policy Center experience is essentially a custom "classic" search experience.

Brass Contributor

Hi, how did you manage multilingual needs for contents (such as documents and pages), as Communication sites only support MUI?

Thanks,

Barbara

The official language for Shire is English so all globally-facing sites are in English. However, there is quite a bit of content that is translated - both videos and documents. In those instances, the documents are stored on a site that is primarily in English. For country-specific sites, the site owner chooses the language for the site in site settings and the content in labels are created by the owner in local languages.

Brass Contributor

Hi @Susan Hanley, for country-specific sites, do you mean:

  • site with Variations feature enabled
  • modern site (team or communication sites) where site owners just manage MUI translations for alternate languages available?

Thanks,

B.

Modern site where site owner sets the available language and posts all the content in that language. This is for sites where most users speak that language so we don’t worry about translation because the content is in the language. 

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