Data Techniques

SharePoint Online Intranet

Data Techniques is a leading network infrastructure architect company who operate across the UK and are based in Hampshire, United Kingdom. They have delivered networking solutions to a vast number of sectors including retail, banking, and even central government.

Data Techniques needed a new SharePoint Intranet to aid communication and collaboration within the business due to the rise in people working remotely, not just at home, but also at client sites. Data Techniques divided the business up by department, and each business department provided us with a specification of what they needed on their part of the SharePoint Intranet.

The Solution

Following the client's specific department requirements, the experts SharePoint developers at Dolphin IT Solutions started by creating a separate SharePoint site collection for each department. Then, each site collections were grouped together using SharePoint Hub Site functionality, making the navigation between each site collection seamless, thus easing team collaboration and connectivity.

Dolphin IT Solutions assisted each department with creating their Team Sites (which are a good option for collaboration – whereas Communication Sites are more suitable when their flexibility with how you can present content is needed) and the functionality within them. For some intranet sites, the developers at Dolphin IT Solutions set up automation using Microsoft Power Automate (née Microsoft Flow) to automatically create new folders when a new project commences within the business.

An important part of the delivered intranet solution was also the main landing page. According to the requirements, the page had to roll up internal employee news to keep everyone in the team up to date. Thanks to the SharePoint News web part this was achieved easily. The staff were also required to see a collection of Tweets from approved accounts such as BBC News. Normally you can do this using a Twitter List, but SharePoint does not provide any native support for this. As a solution, our SharePoint developers built Data Techniques a Twitter List web part using SPFx (SharePoint Framework).

We then set up a clear, structured hierarchy within Azure Active Directory to easily setup the desired permissions on each area within the SharePoint Intranet.