West Lothian College – Modernising a Legacy Intranet With SharePoint

After a thorough review, Bridgeall carried out the following processes for West Lothian College to modernise their SharePoint intranet: 

Rebuilt the Intranet homepage 

West Lothian College were using an intranet system built on SharePoint Classic. We migrated the team to SharePoint Modern to benefit from additional functionality. The far more up-to-date and user-friendly interfaces associated with out-of-the-box modern SharePoint are hugely superior to classic, resulting in more attractive and intuitive digital workplaces and intranets, supporting better adoption. 

Posting updates  

We set up a news site to go with the homepage which was an easier way of categorising news. This included news updates and blog posts as well as any updates coming from the college principal. 

Best practices for managing security and permissions  

There were several pages and attachments on the intranet with unique permissions. To avoid any data leakage or access from unauthorised staff or students, we provided recommendations to keep a strict access policy and created site owners to prevent any issues.  

Training sessions provided – Creating champions of the intranet  

We gave selected staff an overview of building out site pages as they were being entrusted with creating new sites. We built an individual site for each champion and provided an interactive tutorial session. We also built out mini sites and got them to grips with the fundamentals and creating content within the sites. 

Implement governance and good practice for site creation 

To tackle the issue of multiple subsites we suggested the team use a flat structure with sites associated with a ‘Hub’ site (known as SharePoint Modern). We also recommended they disable the creation of sites from the SharePoint start page and establish a process for requesting a new site. Managing the process in this way would ensure that any new sites created could be allocated an owner and be standardised for the needs of the organisation.  

Information sharing 

As there were several documents on the tenant, some of which were shared externally, we reset sharing of specific documents / libraries to remove unintended edit permissions. This was to tidy existing data and ensure West Lothian College were on the best footing when launching the new intranet system. 

Managing permissions 

To minimise the administrative burden of managing permissions, we recommended that users should be added to Azure AD Security Groups and then those security groups should be added into the permissions groups for each site.  

As a result of our review, Bridgeall was able to deliver the following benefits to the client:   

• We successfully upgraded the previous intranet platform to a new modern intranet with a much better user experience to boost employee and company-wide engagement.  
• The new SharePoint intranet system created a centralised hub of information for staff, partners and customers.
• The new and improved intranet helped with closer collaboration between staff.
• All the information is easily accessible from anywhere. From now on, company-wide notifications will be easily and quickly distributed ensuring safety and compliance across the business.