Alistar as a consultant
As Unia’s long-standing IT partner, Alistar was quickly approached to design and roll out their intranet. “It quickly became clear that SharePoint would be the platform we would be working on, since we were already using the other Microsoft 365 Solutions.” Because Unia wanted to build in-house expertise regarding the SharePoint intranet, it was decided that Alistar would primarily be responsible for defining the requirements.
Ben Vandepol, Modern Workplace Consultant at Alistar, helped them with this: “A number of sessions were organized in which Alistar clearly presented the various options. Based on these ‘persona’ workshops, Unia was able to determine what would add value and which features they definitely needed. This allowed us to outline the general structure of the intranet, with the multilingual aspect being particularly important.”
The SharePoint intranet gives new employees an immediate understanding of the organization.
Florine De Brouwer, IT Manager
Florine continues: “Alistar then created a blueprint, after which we had an in-depth session on how to get started on our own. That ranged from creating pages and categories… to gaining a deeper understanding of how everything works. After that, it was up to us to fill everything in with our own content.” Throughout this process, Unia stayed in close contact with Alistar, so they could easily ask questions and get help when needed. “For example, someone accidentally deleted all the categories, but luckily Ben was able to fix that quickly,” Florine laughs.
Overarching Communication
The result is an intranet that serves all five organizations under Unia. This gives everyone their own space for internal communication. “In the past, we often received complaints from new employees that they couldn’t find the right information—especially HR-related information. That problem had to be solved. There is now a single, overarching homepage where you can find news about the entire organization, an event calendar, and quick links to various applications such as the IT help desk, news articles, and more.”
The key to its success lies in its structure. The top navigation bar is designed from the perspective of an employee looking for something specific. As a result, it truly meets the employee’s needs and requirements.
Added Value for Colleagues
“That information used to be available, too, but people had to open dozens of Word documents in SharePoint to find specific files. Since we’re a bilingual company, there was always a column in Dutch and a column in French, which wasn’t very clear or easy to read.”
Thanks to the intranet, employees are now more motivated to look up information. They are also constantly encouraged to do so. “We consistently and deliberately direct employees to the intranet. For example, we’ve placed QR codes in all meeting rooms. When scanned, these codes automatically take users to the correct page on the intranet, where they can find all the information about that meeting room—how to reserve it, connect to the projector, and so on.”
The newsletter was also replaced by the intranet, in order to extend communication across the entire company. “If colleagues happen to miss any news, an automatic email is sent with information they might have missed—upcoming birthdays, new colleagues, internal job openings, and more. Everyone stays up to date!”
Florine definitely sees the added value, especially for new colleagues: “It gives them insight into the organization, and I get far fewer questions on all sorts of topics. So it’s a real win-win situation.”
Alistar as a Long-Term IT Partner
“From the very start of this project, the intention was—and still is—to keep it in-house. We are therefore very satisfied with the approach and our collaboration with Ben. Now we can continue building on our own. And that’s necessary, because our intranet is something that keeps growing—we’re constantly making adjustments and improvements.”
The fact that Alistar is their long-standing partner and advisor is also evident from other projects: “After implementing the intranet, we launched another project focused on digital signatures, and now we’re working with our Alistar colleagues at Net IT to automate our internal finance and logistics processes.” Earlier this year, they also had Alistar develop a security audit They carried out an assessment, and based on that, decisions were made and steps were taken to optimize their security policy. The on-site support that Alistar provided weekly has now been reduced to once a month: “We’re already doing much better on our own, but we still need some follow-up every now and then,” Florine concludes.
Want to implement a SharePoint intranet yourself?
As a company, it pays to choose tools that bring your employees together, but there’s quite a bit involved in setting up such a SharePoint environment. The technical aspect requires knowledge of the environment so that everything can be set up safely and efficiently. It’s also a good idea to draw up a plan with input from your employees, since they are the ones who will be using the tool. We’d be happy to guide you through this process to ensure that the implementation goes as smoothly as possible.
Could your organization benefit from a modern workplace? Would you like more information about the Microsoft SharePoint intranet?
