Michelmersh Brick Holdings PLC Group (MBH)

SharePoint Online Rebuild, Document Management System and Security Update

Michelmersh Brick Holdings PLC Group (MBH) – established in 1997, the Company has grown through acquisition and organic growth into a profitable and asset rich business, producing over 100 million clay units annually. MBH PLC Group owns six of the UK’s most recognised premium brands, Blockleys, Carlton, Charnwood, Freshfield Lane, Michelmersh and Hathern Terra Cotta. These divisions operate within a fully integrated business, combining the production of premium, precision made bricks, pavers, special shaped bricks and bespoke Terra Cotta products. The Group also includes a landfill operator, New Acres Limited, and seeks to develop future landfill and development opportunities on ancillary land assets. Michelmersh, remains at the forefront of industry innovation being the first UK clay product manufacturer to offer intuitive Building Information Modelling files, hosted on its dedicated platform bimbricks.com.

MBH already had a full Microsoft 365 subscription and a company SharePoint Online site. However, they wanted to upgrade their intranet, and more specifically, redesign their landing page site, reconstruct their document management system, and add additional security to their intranet sites and the content within them. User permissions were also required to allow certain users to control documents, such as the company’s GDPR Policies in their document management system.

The Solution

Dolphin IT Solutions started this project off revising MBH’s existing SharePoint intranet. After reviewing the business’ requirements and expectations, our consultants came up with some concept designs for the new home page. Following this, to choose the final solution design, a meeting with MBH was held, in which the client specified which parts of the concepts they did and did not like.

To develop the new home page, our experts took full advantage of SharePoint’s functionality, allowing the site to be customised fully according to the client’s needs. As a result, some of the new web included a company news feed, a map showing company office locations, a Twitter feed, and a policy list.

The layout of the intranet solution was also changed. The original home page used an uneven grid layout filled with stock cartoons and an overpowering orange colour palette. We wanted to simplify the design and give a more friendly user experience. To achieve this, our SharePoint developers created a less overwhelming colour palette that still fitted the company branding. Our team then took full advantage of custom HTML and JavaScript, JSOM (JavaScript SharePoint object model), and HighMaps (a JavaScript maps API) to design the new, bespoke, SharePoint site web parts.

Dolphin IT Solutions then moved onto reconfiguring MBH’s document management system. Our developers added search tags to all documents on the system, which made searching for documents via the search bar much easier. We then reviewed the document organisation structure, and made recommendations & changes that would improve the user experience.