Several small media agencies that work on web-related marketing or having employees spread across different cities will deploy and perhaps follow top-notch solutions for their Company Intranet.
If you are a sophisticated media/creative agency and can afford a partner to support you with a ready-to-go SharePoint Intranet Portal, that would be the perfect idea as you can integrate it fully with emails, Skype and of course, Yammer!
What would be the Intranet requirements a Media Agency will be considering?
- Enhanced SharePoint Branding
- Enhanced SharePoint Menu Options
- Customize SharePoint Lists and Libraries
- SharePoint Social Features
- Highly Responsive SharePoint Design
- Seamless Integrations
As the Media Agency team members keep travelling, it is important to have an Intranet Portal that provides employee experience 24x7 anytime, anywhere.
The below are some of the core features they consider:
- Benefits Portal
- Employee Self-Service Portal
- Employee Onboarding and Offboarding Portal
- PTO/Leave Request Portal
- Employee Handbook
- Employee Directory
- Document Management System
- Basic CRM System within SharePoint
- Wiki Sites – Knowledge Base Management
- Approval Workflows for document signature approvals
Well, that’s not all!
Other features include:
- 24x7 Access from work as well as home
- Mobile Responsive design and access from smartphones, tablets and other hand-held devices.
- Advanced search capabilities (including tags) to make document search user friendly.
Integrating ideas with transactions
The key for a successful self-service portal is to have communications embedded into transactions. For example, when an employee is in middle of enrolling benefits, they should be able to estimate the costs or compare plans during the same session. Employees can’t keep calling the HR Team and disturb them for clarifications.
The communication and content should also be personalized so employees who are looking at the benefits, policies and other work-related information should be relevant to their work nature/department and location.
Well, a SharePoint Intranet implementation can range from 2 days to a 3-month timeline. Post deployment, employees will have access to on-demand information such as 401 (k) plan, benefits coverages, time-off policies, events etc. without any hassle!
Imagine the design team working on various media collaterals such as newsletter articles, posters, flyers, videos, voicemails etc. for promoting their client’s brand. All these files are stored in a SharePoint Document Library where their team has access to it and can work on it from different locations at the same time. We are sure that the response will be great and will exceed their expectations regarding an Intranet Suite.
Post Deployment Benefits
Okay, now the best part, after three months of go-live, the employee collaboration rate will have doubled showing a great difference in the productivity levels. The HR Team members are relieved due to lesser number of support calls. Employee Rapport will also drastically increase after effect of a well-planned Intranet Portal.
User Access from Home
We all hate to work after job hours, right? However, in the case of an Intranet Portal, you can witness a significant growth in the usage during late hours (6 PM to 12 AM). This shows that intranet usage has become a mainstream. When users find their Intranet user friendly and the ability to share information is quicker, who would hesitate to start sharing information in the 11th hour of the day?
The Future
Who said SharePoint is just a document management tool? Thanks to the integration possibilities using Microsoft Flow, where SharePoint can be integrated with industry’s top-notch solutions such as Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics CRM and ERP etc. Thanks to the Modern Intranet feature that gives you lot of addon’s such as Power Apps, Power BI Dashboard, Microsoft Planner, basic charts and much more. As mentioned in the beginning, approval workflows will also enhance the Intranet Portal capabilities of bringing in approvals by the top-level managers in order to avoid paperwork.
Oh, we almost forgot to talk about the graphics/UI for the Intranet. Designing User Interface for SharePoint Online is a challenge for most of the organizations while implementing SharePoint. The hassles with custom branding and designs are common for SharePoint. Firstly, even though Microsoft SharePoint supports custom master pages, it is not a recommended practice. It comes out with continuous updates for Office 365/SharePoint Online which breaks the existing UI (Customized User Interface). Also, even if the customization stays in the Master Page, there is no guarantee that it will work seamlessly with other Office 365 applications.
There are couple of ways to work on SharePoint Online Custom UI. Custom themes are available and sites can be customized to a certain level using the SharePoint Color Palette. We can also follow alternative CSS instead of master pages, remote provisioning pattern and JavaScript injection.
Well, it completely depends on the Partner’s UI Design team to come up with a spectacular design to make your Intranet look amazing!
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