Branded intranet for SharePoint Online

“Thanks to JFDI, we fell in love with SharePoint again. Before the redesign, our portal was clunky with a fundamental out-of-the-box design. Now, things are more streamlined and easier to find, and the portal seems more ‘alive’ with communications thanks to the prominent position of Yammer posts. It is also great to see our brand incorporated – excellent work, JFDI.”Elizabeth Spencer-Phillips, Founding Director & MD

Modernisation of Sharepoint Online to improve attractiveness and engagement

Caburn Hope was not happy with their SharePoint Online instance look and feel. They observed every employee used the platform only when they had to and were not impressed with how it worked. JFDI was engaged to initially consult on how their previous supplier positioned the portal and then redesign, modernising it to reach its full potential.

Consultancy and communications planning portal

After the initial investigation, JFDI immediately recognised the incorrect templates used for the root site collection. Replacing these with the Communications Site template from Microsoft provided a far more relevant landing page for Caburn Hope, thus falling into line with Microsoft’s latest design philosophy.

In addition, custom-developed legacy applications were found to reside in the tenancy. These were provided by a previous incumbent but are no longer required due to the changes JFDI implemented. Decommissioning them improved loading times and resulted in significant SharePoint resource savings. JFDI implemented carefully chosen SharePoint Web parts, improving the engagement rate and navigation across the Caburn Hope SharePoint portal.

Convenient Navigation

To achieve a branded intranet for SharePoint Online, JFDI simplified menus to make reaching crucial departments intuitive, providing direct access to a user’s most recent documents and Yammer feed, removing unnecessary elements that improve the overall experience.

Once the functionality was re-aligned, JFDI focused on making the portal familiar by bringing the company brand, any reference media, and their logo.

A review was conducted on how Caburn Hope stored client and user data will scale for the next 3+ years, ensuring enough capacity to cope with demand and sufficient indexing measures to retrieve such amounts of data in a performant manner. Lastly, JFDI explored ways to archive data through data retention policies.

The correct solution

JFDI has a wide range of SharePoint Online Web parts available to our clients. Although this time, no bespoke work was necessary for Caburn Hope. We focused on restructuring the portal and choosing the most appropriate SharePoint navigational features, such as a Big Menu and graphical tiles utilising Caburn Hope’s familiar home-made graphics.

Pixel perfect

JFDI redesigned every element using the company colour palette, including all functional aspects of the theme, to ensure that the portal will be instantaneously recognisable. Initial feedback indicated their user experience was also subtly improved via the delicate pink as a background, resulting in lessening the load on user eye strain.

Client overview

Company:
Caburn Hope

Country or Region:
United Kingdom

Industries:
Full-service strategic communications

Company Profile:
Caburn Hope is a group of intelligent and performance-driven communication experts based in Lewes. Their employee communication campaigns drive success of various companies both locally and globally.

JFDI services provided

Services used:

SharePoint Consulting
SharePoint Infrastructure Planning
SharePoint Build and Maintenance
SharePoint Custom Development
SharePoint Support
Information Architecture
Design and Branding

Software involved:

Microsoft 365
SharePoint Online
Microsoft SharePoint Server
SharePoint Framework (SPFx)

SharePoint Online redesign for Caburn Hope