From Squiz to SharePoint Online: A Government Agency’s 5-week transformation

Our client is an Australian state government agency focused on enhancing public service delivery and operational efficiencies.

The challenge

An intranet should be the heart of the digital home with good user experience leading the way to ensure employees are never more than a few clicks away from the information they need.  

With their Squiz intranet renewal fast approaching, our client used this as an opportunity to conduct internal research to assess whether what they had in place was working for staff. The research concluded that significant updates were required, with the report highlighting user experience as the main area of concern, and the department used this as an opportunity to migrate to SharePoint Online. However, due to tight deadlines, the entire build and migration needed to be carried out within a short five-week period, otherwise threatening to leave all employees without an intranet platform and without access to critical resources.  

The potential for cost savings that could be achieved by decommissioning Squiz and migrating to SharePoint were also a driving factor for the department, given this would be an opportunity to leverage their already existing investment in Microsoft 365. By choosing SharePoint Online, it also meant that our client could benefit from the full power of Microsoft 365’s built-in security and protection features. 

Focusing on a customer-centric experience both as an end user and as a content contributor, the objectives of migrating to SharePoint Online included: 

• The design and delivery of a modern SharePoint Online intranet that would address the department’s key requirements before the expiration of the Squiz license. 

• Preferencing primarily out-of-the-box implementation over customisation, except where it was necessary to meet key requirements. 

• Accessibility testing was a non-negotiable requirement for the department’s team, and encompassed both the design and content aspects of the project. 

• Migration of live existing our client’s content from Squiz to the new SharePoint Online platform, reviewed, remediated and ready from launch day. 

Our approach

To meet the tight timeframes, our project team was flexible, highly collaborative and very hands-on from the start of this engagement. Consistent and continual communication with our client’s project team, enabled by the use of a shared Microsoft Team and other collaborative tools such as Azure DevOps and InVision for graphic designs allowed for close alignment and rapid decision-making. 

Our approach was made up of four main stages: 

Discovery  

Due to the short timeline, our digital workplace experts ran a condensed series of discovery workshops with the client’s project team across just four days. The close communication, efficient decision-making and pragmatism of the department’s project team ensured we had captured what was needed and were able to provide deliverables ready for their review after just three days. As a result of everyone’s timely inputs, the discovery phase was complete within just nine days.   

The workshops focused on: 

• Kick-off, vision and success measures 

• Requirements validation 

• Graphic design, page templates and site templates 

• Information architecture, content strategy and governance 

Build 

Based on our findings within the discovery phase, we designed an employee-centered experience that largely leveraged out-of-the-box functionality in SharePoint Online, with a few custom components to meet more complex requirements, including: 

• PnP Modern Search web parts leveraged for a Staff Directory (people search) page, a Policy and Resources Library, a News Hub, and a customised search results page with custom verticals and refiners. 

• Engage Squared’s Intranet Accelerator Alerts, Feedback and Page Tour components. 

• Plumsail’s org chart component. 

• Various custom Power Automate workflows to centralise news aggregation and promotion, enable content publishing approvals and automate content review notifications. 

Unfortunately, due to our client operating in a shared Microsoft tenant belonging to their State Government, Viva Connections was not an option for this project, as funding for premium licensing for multiple instances was not available. To overcome this limitation, we created a custom Microsoft Teams app to display the intranet within Teams on desktop and mobile devices, making it easy for staff to access their intranet at any time from any device, with the click of a button. 

Other challenges we overcame to ensure a successful outcome included accommodating stringent cyber security reviews and IT change processes for custom apps, which were only brought to light well into the project. 

Migration 

Their existing intranet contained a large volume of important content that was critical to the work of staff. For the launch of the new intranet to be successful it was essential that key content was identified and migrated without any interruption to access during the cutover from the old intranet to the new. We completed a migration planning workshop with the department to determine the scope, requirements and approach needed to ensure a successful migration and cutover. Our client took the opportunity to audit their content to ensure the new intranet would be a trusted source of relevant and up to date information, with redundant content to be migrated to an archive location. 

Due to the complexity of migrating page content between two entirely different content management platforms, off-the-shelf solutions were not an option, and so Engage Squared used a combination of previously developed custom tools and bespoke development to automate much of the migration. Our solution scraped the data and formatting from the source pages in Squiz and transformed and transposed it to equivalent SharePoint Online pages. The process also included migrating embedded and linked images and documents and transforming hyperlinks, as well as exporting associated metadata and mapping it to equivalent fields in SharePoint. All pages were then reviewed and manually touched up where required to ensure a consistently high-quality outcome. 

Our technical experts navigated a variety of challenges both within the Squiz platform and with the Microsoft Graph API to ultimately complete the successful migration and remediation of around 500 content pages (plus around 1500 archived pages) plus associated images and documents. 

Training  

To ensure the client team was empowered to confidently take ownership of the new intranet, get the most out of its features and create compelling content, our Transformation and Change team prepared and delivered a series of training sessions for content authors and intranet administrators, along with accompanying reference guides. 

Results

The new, modern intranet was successfully launched on time, ensuring no disruption to the availability of intranet content for their thousands of staff. We delivered on the core objectives of an improved user experience and information architecture, with plenty of positive feedback from the project team and staff. The intranet had around 6,000 unique visitors and 17,000 views in just the first day, and more than 250,000 visits from nearly 12,000 unique viewers within the first month of launching, with continuing high daily visit rates.​ 

By introducing a de-centralised publishing model with clearly assigned ownership of every intranet page, it has also had a huge impact on the management and integrity of the information on the site. As a result of this change, more than 60 content owners across the business are now empowered with page templates and content authoring guidelines to create and maintain useful and engaging content.