Project Description
TowneBank utilized RePoint Technologies to create a brand-new Intranet using the Modern SharePoint platform. TowneBank was utilizing SharePoint in Office365 with customized, classic templates. After analyzing the usage of their Intranet platform, TowneBank decided to start over with the new Intranet and migrate content/documents as needed to a newly designed Intranet.
RePoint Technologies gathered requirements from this large bank and designed a hub based, modern Intranet with different hubs for the Bank, Mortgage, and Insurance Division. RePoint created designs for the homepage, division home pages and department pages. RePoint worked with 50+ Content Owners from over 25 various departments and divisions utilizing 15+ training sessions to gather content and populate the various department and division sites.
Our team focused on graphic design with out-of-the-box modern Web Parts, while incorporating custom developed SPFx components when necessary to create a maintainable, and unique site that can grow with Towne from years to come.
The result of this effort culminated in the creation of TowneConnect. The home page of TowneConnect, as illustrated in the image below, utilizes custom themes, hubs, hero tiles for communication, quick links (i.e.: Discover section), news rollups, and more. The intent of the home page is to shift the communication paradigm from an email centric organization to an organization that can use imagery and more to capture the attention of their users on the home page.
RePoint worked with the business to understand the Towne family of products to connect them together in a single home page. We empowered the marketing and communications team to manage the content of the home page, while rolling-up information such as news and events from the various departments to ensure content was updated regularly from a controlled and semi-controlled, with approvals, point of view. This leads to more accurate and more timely information for the end users of Towne.
In addition to the communication aspects of TowneConnect, RePoint focused on providing value through customization. Towne felt that Weather and Traffic is an important aspect of the home page of an Intranet to engage end users and provide more value as a platform. However, the Towne family is dispersed over multiple locations and the out-of-the-box weather component of SharePoint is for a fixed location. In addition, there is no out-of-the-box traffic component for SharePoint. Thus, RePoint developed custom SharePoint Framework (SFPx) Web Parts that read the end users location from Active Directory and build interactive weather and traffic directly on the home page.
In addition, RePoint built a custom component that interacts with Townes Information Technology ticketing system (ServiceNow) so end users can see progress of their service tickets directly on the home page of TowneConnect. This component uses authenticated Azure Services that act as a middle layer to ServiceNow for secure access of personal ticket information for the logged in user.
In addition to the home page of TowneConnect, RePoint designed and rolled out the Division and Departmental pages where trained Content Owners can manage their own content such as Documents, News, Events and more.
Each Division/Department page uses a consistent template to ensure users can intuitively find information throughout TowneConnect. In addition, each Division/Department has a specific “Library” for that Division/Department. Each document in the Library has multiple meta-data tags including Department, Division, Category, Keyword, etc. Our rollout strategy included setting the Department and Division metadata automatically on each sites Library while training end users how to tag a “Category”.
The result of our careful attention to document libraries, tagging, and meta-data resulted in a custom search component RePoint built called “The Library”. The Library allows users to search on key documents and filter the results down by the specific meta-data defined during our requirements gathering process.
In the end, TowneConnect is a truly unique, intuitive Intranet that combines strategies of SharePoint modern with the Governance of templates and consistency to ensure users can find what they are looking for while Content Owners can easily control all aspects of their respective areas of the site.
