Our client is a leading international property and infrastructure organisation with approximately 13,000 employees across Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Client
Withheld
Service
SharePoint Online, Viva Amplify
Organisation size
Large
Industry
Construction
Context
Following a period of global operational streamlining, our client identified the need to modernise its ageing intranet to better support a connected and growing workforce of approximately 13,000 employees.
Their existing intranet had evolved organically over time, resulting in fragmented content, inconsistent governance, and a user experience that no longer reflected the organisation’s structure or digital ambitions. Employees reported difficulty locating reliable information, and content ownership was unclear. As governance and compliance requirements matured across the business, the platform struggled to keep pace.
By 2025, our client recognised the need to transform its intranet into a modern, scalable and well-governed digital workplace hub one that would improve findability, strengthen content accountability, and integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 collaboration tools.
Engage Squared was engaged to lead the end-to-end intranet transformation, delivering a user-centred, future-ready solution built on SharePoint Online and Microsoft Viva Amplify, designed to enhance employee experience while establishing a sustainable governance foundation for long-term success.
Challenge
Our client recognised that its intranet was no longer meeting the needs of a modern, globally connected workforce. While the existing platform had served the organisation for many years, it had gradually become fragmented, difficult to navigate, and challenging to govern at scale.
Content had grown organically across business units, resulting in inconsistent structures, unclear ownership, and duplication of information. Employees often struggled to locate reliable, up-to-date content, which reduced trust in the intranet as a source of truth. At the same time, governance expectations had matured across the organisation, with stronger requirements around compliance, lifecycle management, and information accountability.
User feedback highlighted frustration with clunky navigation and an outdated interface that did not reflect the organisations brand or digital ambition. As collaboration increasingly shifted into Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, the intranet lacked the integration and flexibility required to support a seamless employee experience.
Despite these challenges, our client saw a significant opportunity. Rather than simply refreshing the design, the organisation committed to reimagining the intranet as a governed, scalable, and future-ready platform that would underpin its broader digital workplace strategy.
Clear objectives were established to guide the transformation:
- Bring their dispersed workforce together across locations, projects, and regions.
- Create a modern digital front door built for organisational growth.
- Establish a unified information architecture that improved findability and reduced duplication.
- Define clear content ownership and governance standards to restore trust in the platform.
- Deliver a modern, intuitive user experience aligned to the organisations global brand.
- Integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 to support communication, collaboration, and future AI initiatives.
These goals reflected our client’s commitment to strengthening employee experience while embedding sustainable governance practices. The intranet transformation was not positioned as a cosmetic upgrade, but as a foundational shift creating a connected digital workplace that would evolve with the organisation and support long-term growth.
Solution
Engage Squared partnered with our client to modernise its ageing intranet and establish a scalable, governed foundation for its digital workplace. The engagement focused on simplifying the user experience, strengthening content governance, and aligning the platform with Microsoft 365 collaboration tools. Through structured discovery, co-design workshops and phased implementation, the initiative repositioned the intranet as a trusted, enterprise-wide source of truth.
The project was delivered in two major phases: discovery & design, followed by implementation – using an agile, phased delivery model.
Key activities and strategies included:
- Discovery workshops with business and communications leaders to understand pain points, navigation challenges and governance gaps
- Information architecture design sessions to rationalise sites, hubs and taxonomy, improving findability and consistency
- Content audit and migration planning to reduce duplication and define clear ownership and lifecycle accountability
- Governance framework development to embed standards for publishing, review cycles and permission management
- Modern platform configuration using SharePoint Online and Microsoft Viva Amplify to deliver an integrated, future-ready intranet experience
Results
Engage Squared was delighted to launch our clients new modern intranet, branded internally as “Pulse.” The impact of Pulse was immediate and significant. Their modernised intranet has fundamentally transformed how employees’ access, manage, and engage with organisational knowledge and news.
Key outcomes include:
- Streamlined user experience: Pulse features a clean, intuitive navigation and modern design, making it easy for our clients staff to find information and tools. The new global menu and hub structure were informed by user testing, with employees now navigating across departments and regions quicker than ever. Important resources (like policies, People Portal, and project sites) are now centrally accessible, reducing time spent searching for information.
- Improved content governance: A governance model is in place to keep content relevant and reliable. Every section of the intranet has clear ownership. Thanks to content lifecycle workflows, pages are reviewed and updated or archived on schedule. This eliminated the issue of stale and duplicative content that plagued the old system. Employees now trust the intranet as a source of truth, since information is consistently vetted and up to date.
- Compliance and consistency: Pulse is aligned with our client’s enterprise governance and compliance frameworks. Permission structures and data retention policies from Microsoft 365 are applied to intranet content, ensuring that sensitive information is protected and regulatory requirements (like document retention rules) are met. The consistent information architecture also enforces a common taxonomy and design across all business units.
- Higher employee engagement: With a clean, design-led interface and better content, Pulse has seen a strong uptake in usage and engagement. It has become the go-to hub for company news and updates, replacing mass emails and disparate newsletters. Our client’s communications team can also publish news articles and updates that reach all employees through SharePoint and Teams (via Viva Connections). Integration with Viva Amplify has also enabled comms to draft and distribute announcements broadly with ease. As a result, corporate news dissemination is faster and more consistent, and metrics (such as page views and employee feedback) indicate that staff are more actively engaging with announcements and content than before.
- Future-ready digital workplace: Importantly, Pulse has set the foundation for future digital initiatives. Its architecture was designed to adapt to organisational changes including restructures or new business units without a complete overhaul. The project also cleaned up and centralised key knowledge repositories, which is a critical step towards leveraging AI and advanced search in the future.
Final thoughts
This project represents a key milestone in our client’s digital transformation journey, strengthening employee experience, reinforcing governance maturity, and delivering a scalable platform that will continue to evolve alongside the business.
