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To illustrate the application of SharePoint Online, I’m going to put into words a case I’ve been working with, it’s an Intranet developed for a British company specialised in renting industrial equipment.

This company has more than 50 offices in over 10 countries. As they have many offices in many places, it was a key point of success to have all the information available for all, not only information as organisational news, but mainly, documents. Due to this special requirement, it means having the information always available and in all places, they have chosen to use SharePoint Online. In this scenario, they had to invest only in having a speedy internet link in the offices and all the content would be available rom the SharePoint Online, hosted on Microsoft’s Office365 service.

Getting back to the case, an Intranet portal, we have developed a main site with organisational news and documents, main calendar and the job opportunities to all sites. This is the landing portal and then, we have developed one site for each department.

Just as example, for the Human Resources the following features were developed:

• Document repository with control of history, versioning and workflow to approve documents. The documents were structured such a way that only the HR members could access the confidential documents, and there were other public documents accessible for everyone.
• HR agenda with the main events, meetings and payroll day.
• Newsfeed to spread HR news. It was customised to have like button and comments area in order to engage people.
• Form to ask day off and annual leave with a workflow to notify and ask approval for the manager.
• Members of the area to show who works on HR.

Theses examples were replicated, in most, for other departments. And some specific requirements were developed to attend other needs.

The audience of this project was specially the team of maintenance of the equipment, who used to use the Intranet from some shared terminals to search guides, sheets of the equipment and organisational info to get updated about what is going on.

In this project, we have used SharePoint Online with a low level of development. We have done some customisation but only in design aspects to follow the branding of the company, it was developed using composed look. We had a strong requirement in this project to avoid customisation and coding to keep it most native as possible. The key point of success of this project was to use the most of SharePoint Online can provide as native features.