The document discusses how an organization improved employee engagement with their intranet homepage. It describes moving from multiple homepages that were rarely used to a single homepage. Key points included establishing ownership over content, gathering requirements from employees, and designing the homepage to provide location-specific news, polls, a calendar and navigation in a visually appealing layout. Usage increased from around 500 unique visitors daily, demonstrating success in centralizing content and keeping employees informed through an engaging intranet homepage.

1. Rene Modery
CREATING AN
EMPLOYEE ENGAGING
INTRANET HOMEPAGE

2. HOW WE MOVED FROM MULTIPLE, RARELY USED
HOMEPAGES…

3. …TO A SINGLE EMPLOYEE ENGAGING INTRANET
HOMEPAGE

4. IN THIS SESSION YOU WILL LEARN…
• Which issues we faced
• Which goals we set to overcome them
and improve the usage of our intranet
• How we did it!
• LOTS OF SCREENSHOTS!

5. ABOUT ME
• Working with SharePoint since 2007
• Worked on two Asia Pacific wide
SharePoint implementations
• Responsible for presentation of Rene Modery
SharePoint to management teams, www.modery.net
requirements gathering, solution
implementation, training of users,
evaluation of third-party software,
site maintenance, governance, …

6. ABOUT LANDIS+GYR
• “world's leader in smart
metering, energy
management solutions, and
related services”
• Australia/New
Zealand, China, India, South
east Asia

7. THE OLD HOMEPAGES

8. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE OLD
HOMEPAGES?
• No real ownership
• Nearly no new (dynamic) content
• No interesting content on them
• Only serve as entry point to Intranet
• Looks way too much like standard SharePoint
 low user adoption

9. GOALS
• Establish a single homepage
• Provide news to employees regularly
• Show only relevant information
(location based)
• Engage employees on the homepage
 Employees should enjoy visiting it!

10. WHERE AND HOW DID WE START
• Establish ownership
• Define “business” requirements
• Share news stories
• Engage users through polls
• Provide up-to-date information on regional events and
important dates
• Have easy to use navigation (consider existing links)
•  conduct employee surveys, get inspiration from
intranets of other companies
• We need a new branding (design + logo + URL)!

11. OWNERSHIP
• Define an overall owner of the intranet
homepage
•  Communications Manager
• Every item on the homepage should
have an owner responsible for it
•  can be from all levels in the
organisation

12. OUR REQUIREMENTS – HOMEPAGE
CONTENTS & DESIGN
Local News
Targeted
Navigation
Quick Links
Top Stories
Latest
Webcast
Company
News
Company
Poll
Company
Calendar

13. IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW DESIGN
• Started in SharePoint 2007
• “sudden” plan to upgrade to SP2010 meant
• Extra work (Master Page had to be
“upgraded” while we still worked on it)
• Some delays (SP2010 test environment was
not available early onwards)
• Created in-house  slow progress due to
other work commitments

14. NEWS STORIES
1. Define structure and individual requirements of a
news story
• Types: Top Story, News Story, Webcast
• Content Type inherits from Article Page, additional
fields added as needed (e.g. ME (=country))
2. Define design of stories
• Page Layout for each type
• SP2010 upgrade meant we also had to upgrade
these

15. NEWS STORY - DESIGN

16. NEWS STORY – AUDIENCES +
FILTERS
+ + Audiences based on
Active Directory groups
=

17. NEWS STORY – AUDIENCES +
FILTERS
• One set of web parts (title + CQWP) for
each country
 homepage shows targeted content

18. ARCHIVE
• See all published articles in the News Archive

19. GOT A NEWS STORY?

20. WEBCASTS
• Video stored in multiple locations for
different country audiences

21. TOP STORY - DYNAMIC BANNER

22. CALENDAR
• Share key dates across the region
• Public Holidays, major events,
trainings, …

23. POLLS
• Get feedback from
employees about
important topics
• Regular Polls!
• Used during Intranet
Naming Competition

24. TARGETED NAVIGATION
Goal:
• Add all relevant links from previous homepages
• Audience targeting – ANZ employees usually not
interested in links to Indian sites
 end users are not overwhelmed by choice of
options, navigation is customised for them
vs

25. THE TECHNICAL SLIDE
• 1 new Master Page + lots of new CSS
• Lots of JavaScript, especially jQuery
• Top Stories (SPServices +
AnythingSlider)
• Poll (by Alexander Bautz, heavily
modified by us)
• Video in Webcast (Flowplayer)
• Calendar Web Part from Codeplex
(some smaller changes by us)
• Paging CQWP Web Part (by Waldek
Mastykarz)

26. THE NUMBERS
• Started in May, went live on 1 August
• 2 people working on it “full-time”
• Lots of iterations (“move the news title
10px right and 5px down”)
• 1-2 communications representatives per
country
• 85 news stories, 11 top stories, 4 webcasts

27. DID WE SUCCEED?
• Regular news stories from across the
regions
• Monthly polls with 50-60%
participation
• Around 500 unique visitors daily!
(Also because we set the Intranet as default homepage….)
 good direct feedback from staff

28. SUMMARY
• Involve staff in defining requirements
• Ensure ownership of all content!
• Make users not just consumers, but
also contributors
• Make it look less like SharePoint
(at least a bit)

29. SINGAPORE SHAREPOINT USER
GROUP
Meets 2nd Thursday of Every Month
Level 22, NTUC Building
Microsoft, 1 Marina Blvd
Hosted by Steve Sofian and Milan Gross

30. Thank you to all of our Sponsors