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