Gtechniq: a SharePoint marketing resources portal that gives global distributors easier access to approved assets
Gtechniq: a SharePoint marketing resources portal that gives global distributors easier access to approved assets
Posted on 24 August 2026 by Adam Hickman
Summary
Gtechniq formulates ceramic coatings and surface care products for cars, boats and bikes, sold through a global network of distributors. Those distributors rely on Gtechniq's approved marketing assets to promote the brand, and while plenty of that content existed on SharePoint, distributors struggled to find it: the experience was a flat list of files with no visual browsing and no meaningful structure. We worked with Gtechniq to reshape that existing SharePoint foundation into a structured marketing resources portal, with thumbnail browsing, search built on tags and categories, and group-based access controls for an external audience. Approved assets are now easier to find and download, and the Gtechniq team manages the portal themselves.
The challenge
The problem Gtechniq brought to us was not a content problem. It was a findability problem.
The business already had a wide range of marketing materials: news, product images, photography and product information sheets across multiple categories. The content existed and it was on SharePoint. But distributors were regularly asking where to find things, and the most common complaint was that assets were hard to locate. What they saw was little more than a flat list of files, with no thumbnail view, no meaningful taxonomy and no easy way to browse by relevance.
That mattered for a very practical commercial reason. Gtechniq operates through a broad distributor ecosystem, and those distributors work with multiple brands. Whichever brand makes its content easiest to access gains an advantage. A distributor who can find and download the right asset in a couple of minutes is far more likely to use it than one who has to email head office and wait.
Gtechniq needed a partner that could:
- restructure the existing SharePoint environment into a purposeful, browsable portal rather than a file store
- introduce search, tagging and taxonomy so users could find assets by category and relevance rather than file name
- put appropriate permissions and access controls in place for an external user base
- create an experience intuitive enough that distributors could use it confidently without training
Does this sound familiar? If your organisation has good content that people struggle to find, talk to our team about the structure that would fix it.
The approach
We worked with Gtechniq through a structured discovery and build process, beginning with scoping and requirements gathering before moving through design, taxonomy setup, implementation and launch.
Why start with discovery and taxonomy?
Because in my experience findability problems are rarely just search problems. They are structure, metadata, permissions and presentation, and if you only fix one of those the portal still feels hard to use. The discovery work focused on understanding the different user groups involved: internal teams, distributors and external audiences across different product categories, and what each of them actually needed from the portal. That fed into recommendations on information architecture, search configuration and the visual browsing experience, all reviewed and agreed with Gtechniq before build began.
The order matters. If the taxonomy reflects how assets were historically stored rather than how distributors look for them, no amount of design polish will rescue the experience. So we settled the structure first and built to it.
After launch we stayed involved through testing and practical follow-up, including training the internal team on content tagging, keyword management and guest access, so they could manage the portal confidently without depending on us for routine updates.
What was delivered
The project delivered a structured marketing resources portal built on SharePoint, designed around the needs of a distributed external audience rather than internal employees.
- A visual, browsable portal. The portal moved away from a basic file-list model toward thumbnail views and categorised content. In practice this means a distributor can see what an asset is before opening it, and browse a category the way they would a product catalogue rather than scrolling a directory.
- Search built on tags, keywords and categories. Search works across keywords, tags and categories rather than just document titles. In practice, a distributor does not need to know what a file is called to find it; they only need to know what they are looking for.
- Navigation shaped around products and audiences. Navigation and search were built around the product categories and audience types Gtechniq works with, so distributors reach relevant material directly instead of hunting through folders that reflect internal history.
- Support for every content type distributors use. The structure supports product photography and imagery, product information sheets, news and new product launch communications, and social media assets including video. In practice that gives distributors one place to go, whatever they are producing.
- Permissions designed for an external audience. With external users involved across multiple markets, controlling who could see and download which assets required a deliberate approach to group-based access and verification. This is where much of the quiet effort in a project like this sits: an external portal is only as good as the confidence you have in who can reach what.
This is a concept design created to illustrate the finished portal, not a live screenshot of the site.
Curious how an enhanced assets portal could work in your business? Explore our SharePoint consultancy services.
In their own words
"They took our existing SharePoint, which was decidedly average, and worked their magic to create an out-of-the-box solution that gives the site a more premium feel."
Dominik Berry, Head of Marketing, Gtechniq
Why it mattered
For Gtechniq's distributors, the value is straightforward. Approved assets became easier to find and download, which removes the back-and-forth of asking internally where things live.
For Gtechniq, the value runs broader. A more structured and governed portal gives the business better control over what distributors are accessing and using. Approved, up-to-date assets are more likely to reach the market accurately, and new product launch materials can be communicated and distributed through a single, organised environment rather than through ad-hoc email or file sharing.
The cost of leaving a problem like this unaddressed is quiet but real. Distributors default to whichever brand's materials are easiest to reach, and out-of-date assets keep circulating because the current ones are too hard to find.
The work also left the internal team in a stronger position to run the portal themselves. Post-launch support covered tagging, keyword management and access administration, which means the team understands how the platform works and can keep it current without external help for routine updates. The portal launched to immediate interest, with distributor sign-up requests arriving on day one. You can see more examples of this kind of work in our SharePoint intranet designs gallery.
Want to know more about the team behind projects like this? Learn more about Content Formula.
IDH: Migrating ShareFile to SharePoint with better structure and control
IDH: Migrating ShareFile to SharePoint with better structure and control
Posted on 21 August 2026 by Joe Perry
Summary
IDH is a Netherlands-based organisation working to transform markets towards more sustainable and inclusive trade. IDH partnered with Content Formula to migrate its document estate from Citrix ShareFile into SharePoint. An earlier phase using a third-party migration tool had shown the estate was more complex than an off-the-shelf route could handle, so, working alongside IDH's IT partner, we built a custom migration tool and transferred the estate in five validated batches over a five-week period, landing content in a properly structured Microsoft 365 environment rather than replicating the old one.
The challenge
Migrations of this kind often start with an off-the-shelf tool, and this one did. An earlier phase using a third-party migration tool made one thing clear: IDH's content estate was more complex than a generic route could reliably handle. What was needed was not another tool. It was a method that could be overseen end to end, with Content Formula managing execution alongside IDH's IT partner.
The migration itself was genuinely complex. ShareFile's folder structure did not map cleanly onto how SharePoint should be organised, so the destination environment had to be properly architected before any transfer could begin. The volume of data also exceeded initial estimates, which meant the scope had to adapt while the project was in flight. Migrations rarely fail on the transfer itself. They fail on unmapped structure, unvalidated batches and unclear handoffs, and this project had to get all three right.
IDH needed a partner that could:
- design and build a custom migration tool capable of handling the complexity of IDH's content estate
- coordinate the migration across three parties (IDH, its IT partner and Content Formula) with clear handoffs and timing
- ensure migrated content landed in a well-structured SharePoint environment rather than replicating the problems of the old one
- validate each batch of data quickly and respond to issues as they emerged
If a migration is proving more complex than the tools you started with can handle, talk to our team about a properly planned approach.
Why build a custom migration tool?
The simplest route is usually an off-the-shelf migration tool. In this case, the earlier phase had already shown that the complexity of IDH's estate was beyond what a generic approach could handle reliably. Building a custom solution gave us control over the variables that decide whether a migration succeeds: where content lands, what happens to permissions and metadata, and how quickly issues can be identified and resolved.
The process was designed around IDH's specific constraints, with each party owning a clear part of the sequence. IDH's IT partner prepared the data in Azure Blob storage. IDH provided a content mapping file defining where everything should land. Our custom tool then executed the transfer into SharePoint against that mapping. Separating preparation, mapping and execution in this way is what makes a three-way migration workable: everyone knows what they own and when the handoff happens.
The migration ran as five batches of departmental data over a five-week period, with QA validation completed within 24 hours of each transfer. This included a final batch to handle surplus data.
What was delivered
The solution was a purpose-built migration that treated the move from ShareFile to SharePoint as an opportunity to improve the content environment, not just replicate it. The key components:
- A custom migration tool developed specifically for IDH's environment, supporting folder, library and site mappings defined by the IDH team while maintaining permissions and core file metadata. In practice, this means content arrived where people expect to find it, with access rights intact, rather than needing to be reorganised after the fact.
- Five batches of departmental data migrated and QA validated, with Content Formula overseeing execution across each batch. Validating within 24 hours of each transfer meant issues were caught while they were still easy to isolate and fix, not discovered weeks later across the whole estate.
- Close three-party coordination between IDH, its IT partner and Content Formula throughout, aligning on preparation, timing, handoffs and issue resolution. Migrations of this scale stall when ownership is unclear; keeping the sequence explicit kept the project moving.
If you're planning a migration of your own, explore our approach to content migration and planning.
Why it mattered
For IDH, moving away from ShareFile was never just a technical transfer. It was an opportunity to improve how content is organised and governed within Microsoft 365, which meant the destination environment mattered as much as the move itself. Staying on a platform that no longer fits carries its own cost: content becomes harder to find, govern and consolidate with every month that passes.
The decision to build a custom migration tool rather than rely on a third-party solution reflected both the complexity of IDH's estate and the lessons of the earlier phase. It gave us the control needed to map content accurately, adapt to scope changes in the moment and validate results with confidence.
If you are planning a move into Microsoft 365, or one that has proved harder than expected, the route IDH took, custom tooling, batch validation and clear ownership across parties, is a workable one for most organisations.
Want to know more about the team behind projects like this? Learn more about Content Formula.
IDH: Taxonomy first, then design, then governed provisioning
IDH: Taxonomy first, then design, then governed provisioning.
Posted on 21 August 2026 by Joe Perry
Summary
IDH is a Netherlands-based organisation working to transform markets towards more sustainable and inclusive trade. IDH already had Microsoft 365 in place, but SharePoint was not yet working as a structured intranet: content was fragmented, search was unreliable, and every new site meant manual IT effort. We worked with IDH to design and implement an intranet built on native Microsoft 365 features, with the taxonomy, governance and automated site provisioning needed to make it usable day to day, together with a structured handover that left IDH able to manage and build on the platform themselves.
The challenge
The problem at IDH was not a lack of content or tooling. It was a lack of structure. SharePoint was available across the organisation, but there was no consistent model for how project, department or programme content should be organised. Without agreed taxonomy or metadata standards, search had very little to work with, and content that existed was difficult to find.
The operational side had the same issue. Creating a new site or managing access was a manual, inconsistent process that depended on IT involvement each time, and experiences like internal news and handbook-style content were underdeveloped. Left unaddressed, this kind of fragmentation compounds: every new ungoverned site makes search weaker and ownership harder to untangle later.
IDH needed a partner that could:
- design a SharePoint environment with proper information architecture and governance from the ground up
- introduce taxonomy, metadata and search improvements that would make content findable
- deliver scalable site and permissions patterns that teams could use without ongoing IT involvement
- provide training and handover that left IDH confident to manage and build on the platform themselves
If your SharePoint has grown without a taxonomy or governance model behind it, talk to our team about putting the structure in first.
Why start with taxonomy and information architecture?
The simplest route to a usable intranet is rarely the visual design. It is the structure underneath it. If the taxonomy is wrong, everything built on top of it inherits the problem: navigation stops matching how people think about their work, search filters return noise, and site templates encode the wrong assumptions. So the first step was to define that structure properly.
We ran taxonomy and information architecture workshops with IDH's internal communications and IT teams to understand how the organisation actually organises and navigates its content, whether by project, by department or by programme. The decisions made in those workshops shaped everything downstream: the navigation model, the search experience, and the templates every new site would be built from.
From there, the work moved through design, configuration, and a structured UAT and handover phase. The IDH team was involved at each stage, which matters more than it sounds: the people who validate the environment during UAT are the same people who need to run it afterwards.
What was delivered
The solution is a SharePoint intranet built using native Microsoft 365 features, deliberately practical and maintainable rather than bespoke or dependent on specialist support to manage. The key components:
- A custom homepage and search page with enhanced filters and audience-targeted navigation, informed directly by the taxonomy work. In practice, this means people find content by how IDH thinks about its work, not by knowing in advance where a document happens to live.
- Three reusable page templates for projects, departments and folder pages. Teams get a consistent, structured starting point for new sites instead of designing from a blank page, which is where inconsistency usually creeps back in.
- Automated site creation templates with the right structure and permissions already in place. New sites can be created consistently without a manual IT request each time. The governance is baked into the template rather than enforced by hand.
- A handbook site, standardised library structures and a permissions provisioning page, giving IDH cleaner access management and clear content ownership, and extending the platform well beyond basic document management.
Curious how we approach information architecture for a SharePoint? Explore our design and IA services.
Why it mattered
For IDH, the goal was never simply to have a SharePoint intranet. It was to have one that teams would actually use. That is a structural outcome, not a cosmetic one. The information architecture, the search experience and the site creation patterns all had to work together so that navigating the environment feels natural day to day.
Two things made the difference. The first was bringing IDH's communications and IT stakeholders together around a shared vision for the platform, so the structural decisions hold because both sides own them. The second was building for self-sufficiency: because the solution uses native Microsoft 365 capability with governance built into the provisioning patterns, IDH can create sites, manage permissions and grow the platform without depending on us or on specialist support.
The result is a SharePoint environment designed around how IDH works, rather than a generic deployment shaped around what SharePoint offers out of the box. If your SharePoint environment has grown without structure, the route IDH took, taxonomy first, then design, then governed provisioning, is a workable one for most organisations.
What is SharePoint? A complete guide for 2026
Most people use SharePoint because it is there. Either it was already in place when they joined the company, or it arrives with Microsoft 365 and turns up as the thing sitting behind a file tab in Teams. Just because somebody uses SharePoint, it does not necessarily mean they know why they use it or what it could be used for.
SharePoint is a highly versatile solution that can meet multiple use cases, but most organisations are running it without having properly thought about what it can and should be used for. I have spent 27 years in this industry, seven of them leading Microsoft 365 delivery at Content Formula, and the single most common conversation I have is with a business that has been paying for SharePoint for years but using perhaps a fifth of it, or not using it in the optimum way. In this article I’m going to explore some of the SharePoint basics and cover the things you should and need to know when using it.
In summary: SharePoint is Microsoft’s content and collaboration platform, included in almost every Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscription. It stores and organises files, hosts internal websites and intranets, structures information in lists, and controls who can see what. Over 200,000 organisations use it. Since 2026 it also acts as the content layer that Microsoft 365 Copilot and its agents read from, which means how well SharePoint is organised now determines how accurate an organisation’s AI answers are.
On this page
- What is SharePoint?
- What is SharePoint used for?
- What are the building blocks of SharePoint?
- What changed when Copilot started depending on SharePoint?
- SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server – which do you have?
- Can SharePoint be your intranet?
- Where does SharePoint need help?
- How should you get started with SharePoint?
- Frequently asked questions
What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is a web-based platform from Microsoft for storing, structuring, publishing and controlling access to information inside an organisation. It has been running since 2001, making it 25 years old and one of the longest-lived products Microsoft still actively develops. According to Microsoft’s own figures, over 200,000 organisations and 190 million people rely on it.
The key thing to understand is that SharePoint is not an application in the way Word or Outlook are applications. It is a platform, which means it does not arrive finished. It arrives as a set of capabilities that you configure into something useful. That is why two businesses on identical licences can have wildly different experiences of it; one could have a well-structured content estate, the other 400 orphaned sites and a search box nobody trusts.
You do not download or install it. If your organisation pays for Microsoft 365 Business Standard or above, SharePoint is already provisioned in your tenant and has been since the day you signed up.
What is SharePoint used for?
Five uses account for the overwhelming majority of what we see in practice.
Document management. This is where most organisations start, and often where they stop. Files move off local servers and personal drives into structured libraries with version history, co-authoring, and permissions that can be set precisely. The trade-off is that libraries reward structure and punish neglect, which is a theme you will notice running through this whole article.
Intranets and internal communications. SharePoint is the most widely used foundation for employee intranets in the world. Organisations use it to publish news, host HR and policy content, run department pages, and give employees a single starting point for the working day. Nearly all of this is built on communication sites, which we have covered separately in how to use SharePoint communication sites.
Team and project collaboration. Every team gets a site with its own files, lists and pages. Worth knowing: when someone creates a team in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint quietly provisions a site behind it to hold the files. A very large number of people use SharePoint daily without ever knowing they are in it.
Structured data and light business applications. SharePoint lists behave like spreadsheets with rules; they include defined data types, validation, views, and permissions. Combined with Power Automate, SharePoint lists can turn into approval workflows, asset registers, and request trackers without a developer being involved. Our beginner’s guide to SharePoint lists covers this in detail.
Content publishing and governance at scale. Larger organisations use SharePoint to manage who can create and publish content, apply retention and sensitivity labels through Microsoft Purview, and maintain consistency across hundreds of internal sites.
We see a number of common patterns across all these use cases. Firstly, SharePoint is good at holding and controlling information; that is at the root of all these use cases. Secondly, SharePoint does not decide how your information should be organised. That decision is yours, and it is the one that more or less determines whether the platform works for you.
Thirdly, SharePoint is decentralised by design. Any site owner can create content, grant access and shape their own corner of the estate without asking anyone. That is deliberate, and it is a large part of why adoption spreads so quickly. It is also why central functions – IT, internal communications, compliance – routinely find they have less say over how SharePoint is used than they expected. The security controls are there if you want them. The governance controls largely are not.
What are the building blocks of SharePoint?
From an implementation point of view, SharePoint is assembled from seven core components.
| Component | What it is | What it is actually for |
|---|---|---|
| Sites | The container. A mini website with its own pages, files, navigation and permissions. | One site per team, department, project or audience. Communication sites publish outwards; team sites support collaboration. |
| Document libraries | Structured file storage with metadata, version history and check-in/check-out. | Anywhere files need to be found by more than the person who created or saved them. |
| Lists | Tables of structured information with defined data types and validation. | Registers, trackers, directories, request logs and inventories; anything that would otherwise be a shared spreadsheet. |
| Pages | The web pages employees read, built from web parts in a block editor. | News, landing pages, guidance, department homepages. No code required for standard authoring. |
| Permissions | Access control at site, library, folder and item level, driven by Entra ID groups. | Deciding who sees what. The most frequently misconfigured part of the platform. |
| Search | Microsoft Search, indexing content across SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams via Microsoft Graph. | Finding things. Only as good as the structure and metadata underneath it. |
| Web parts | The individual blocks and components that make up a page with different features, content and some limited integrations. Each web part is configurable. | Putting together different pages to cover various content types and use cases. |
Diagram showing the seven core SharePoint components – sites, document libraries, lists, pages, permissions, search and web parts – as a foundation layer, with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Viva Connections, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 Copilot shown above as services that read from and write to that layer.
It’s worth bearing in mind that SharePoint sits underneath a lot of Microsoft 365 that does not look like SharePoint. Files shared in Teams live in a SharePoint library. Viva Connections surfaces SharePoint content inside Teams. Power Automate triggers on SharePoint lists. And as of this year, Copilot reads from all of it.
One thing about how those sites fit together is worth flagging, because it reverses advice we used to give. The traditional approach was a hierarchical site structure: a top-level site with subsites nested underneath it, sometimes several levels deep. We built plenty of those. We no longer recommend it. Modern SharePoint uses a hub and spoke model instead: sites sit in a flat structure, each one independent, connected to one or more hub sites that supply shared navigation, branding and a common search scope. The practical difference is that a flat estate can be reorganised as the business changes. A deep hierarchy cannot, not without some kind of migration. If you have inherited an estate built the old way, that is worth knowing before you plan anything else.
What changed when Copilot started depending on SharePoint?
Three things have happened to SharePoint in the last twelve months which digital workplace teams need to know.
- Copilot in SharePoint is now on by default. Microsoft confirmed that from 16 June 2026, Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out as on by default for everyone holding a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. It is still an opt-out preview rather than a finished release, which is worth knowing before you plan around it. Employees can ask questions in natural language and get answers assembled from pages, policies and documents they have permission to see. One naming note, because it causes real confusion: this is the same product that shipped as the SharePoint Knowledge Agent in September 2025 and was renamed AI in SharePoint in April 2026. One product, three names, and older guidance still uses all three.
- The same tool now builds SharePoint, it does not just answer questions about it. Teams can now describe a site, library, page or list in plain language and have it built. It also extracts and applies metadata automatically, and adapts libraries as content changes. The practical consequence is that Copilot is no longer read-only. It can create pages and change list items, so “we are only letting people ask it questions” is no longer an accurate description of the risk.
- Agents have arrived. Site owners can build scoped assistants anchored to specific SharePoint content – an HR agent answering from the HR knowledge base, an IT agent grounded in support documentation. Agents can also draw on SharePoint lists as structured data sources, though the limits are tighter than most people expect: one list per agent, a maximum of 20,000 items and 50 MB of text, beyond which the agent truncates the list and says so in its answer.
Taken together, these three developments change what SharePoint is. It has gone from being the place content is stored to being the layer that an organisation’s AI surfaces and draws responses from. This has consequences that most businesses have not absorbed yet.
One practical note for administrators. What changed in June was the default, not the capability. Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope still controls which sites Copilot in SharePoint runs on, and tenant-level and site-level opt-outs set before the rollout were honoured. If nobody in your organisation has looked at that setting, it is now set to all sites.
Copilot does not improve bad content. It finds it faster and states it with confidence.
Consider what that means in practice. An employee asks Copilot what the parental leave policy is. Copilot searches, finds a document, and answers. If there are three versions of that policy in three libraries and the most accessible one was last updated in 2021, Copilot will answer from it confidently, and without flagging any doubts about the accuracy of the content. Before Copilot, a stale document buried four folders deep was a nuisance. Now it is an authoritative-sounding wrong answer delivered at scale, with all the risk of the potential consequences that may follow.
The permissions dimension is sharper still. Copilot respects existing permissions exactly. It does not grant anyone new access. What it does is surface documents that were never properly restricted in the first place – and years of quietly accumulated oversharing becomes visible in a single afternoon.
“The day Copilot goes live is the day every permissions shortcut you’ve ever taken becomes searchable. We have seen salary spreadsheets, redundancy plans, and board documents surface simply because someone incorrectly shared a folder with ‘Everyone’ five years ago and forgot. Copilot doesn’t breach anything. It just answers questions using content people never realised they could already see.”
Joe Perry, technical director, Content Formula
So, the practical advice, if you take nothing else from this section: turning on Copilot before you have reviewed permissions is the fastest available method for discovering what your employees can already see. Content audits, tightening sharing defaults, retiring stale pages and enforcing metadata standards are now prerequisites.
Not sure how ready your content estate is?
| Area | What we look for | Why it matters for Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Content quality | Duplication, superseded versions, unowned content, material nobody has reviewed in years | Copilot cannot tell current from obsolete. Whatever it reads, it will repeat |
| Permissions | Oversharing, inherited access nobody intended, sites open to everyone by accident | Copilot respects permissions precisely, which exposes exactly what should not have been shared |
| Structure and metadata | Information architecture, taxonomy, tagging, whether documents carry any usable context | Determines whether Copilot can distinguish a policy from a draft from a meeting note |
| Use cases and licensing fit | Who would genuinely benefit, what they would use it for, and how many seats that actually needs | Deciding this after buying licences is how organisations end up paying for shelfware |
The output is a prioritised list of what to fix, what to accept, and what to fix later – not a report saying you are not ready. Everybody is partly not ready.
If you are planning a Copilot rollout and need an opinion on whether your SharePoint content and permissions are ready for it, book a discovery conversation with our consultancy team.
SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server – which do you have?
Most confusion about SharePoint comes from people comparing notes across two products that share a name.
| SharePoint Online | SharePoint Server Subscription Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Microsoft’s cloud, as part of Microsoft 365. | Your own servers and infrastructure. |
| Licensing | Included in Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans. | Separate subscription licence plus infrastructure and operational cost. |
| Updates | Continuous and automatic. | Twice-yearly feature updates you choose when to install. |
| AI and Copilot | Full access – Copilot in SharePoint, AI in SharePoint, agents. | Not available. The AI layer is cloud-only. A preview Graph connector can index on-premises documents and site pages so Copilot can find them, but the AI itself still runs in the cloud. |
| Best suited to | Almost every organisation. | Genuine data residency or regulatory constraints that rule out cloud. |
The Copilot factor is an important consideration, as Microsoft Copilot runs on SharePoint Online only. Therefore, if you run SharePoint on-premises, you are effectively opting out of the AI layer that represents the bulk of Microsoft’s current investment in the platform. There is a partial route back. The SharePoint Server Microsoft 365 Copilot connector, a Graph connector supported on 2016, 2019 and Subscription Edition, indexes on-premises content so that Copilot Chat and Copilot Search can find it. Three caveats matter. It is still in preview. It crawls documents and site pages only, so lists and structured content stay invisible. And it needs the Graph connector agent installed on-premises, plus Entra Connect Sync, or security trimming will not work and people will see results they should not. It makes on-premises content findable. It does not give you Copilot in SharePoint, AI-assisted building or agents, none of which run anywhere but the cloud.
There is also a deadline that has already passed. Extended support for SharePoint Server 2019 ended on 14 July 2026, and SharePoint Server 2016 reached the same date. Mainstream support for 2019 had already ended in January 2024, so feature updates stopped some time ago; what ended in July was the final phase of security patching. Microsoft did not extend either date, and unlike Windows Server and SQL Server there is no paid extended security update programme to fall back on. That leaves exactly two supported paths: move to SharePoint Online, or upgrade to Subscription Edition, which is the only remaining on-premises version under support.
If you are still on 2019 or 2016, the decision has been made for you. As of last month, you are running a platform that will receive no further security updates, which is a different category of problem from running an old version. Newly discovered vulnerabilities in those builds will not be patched.
Can SharePoint be your intranet?
Technically, SharePoint is a strong foundation for an intranet. SharePoint gives you communication sites, hub sites, news publishing, audience targeting, search and Teams integration without buying anything additional.
However, native SharePoint alone is simply not enough for most organisations. While out-of-the-box SharePoint Online can support an intranet for small organisations with 100 people or fewer with straightforward needs, it won’t cut it for anyone larger, more complex or with more advanced needs. Businesses with a diverse workforce, geographic spread or an active internal communications function will want more from news targeting, personalisation, content governance, analytics and branding support than ships out of the box.
This whole question deserves more room than it can get here, and my colleague John Scott, UX director at Lightspeed365, has explored it more fully. Start with his guide to what an intranet is as well as his complete guide to SharePoint intranets which covers different build options, the Copilot licensing implications, and where native SharePoint runs out of road.
Where does SharePoint need help?
SharePoint is a genuinely strong platform and it improves with every release cycle. It is also asked to do a great deal, which means some things it does adequately rather than brilliantly.
In the interests of transparency: Content Formula is a Microsoft 365 consultancy, and we are paid to solve most of the problems listed below, but we also know you may be in a position to solve these issues internally:
- Content governance is largely manual. There is no native way to track content freshness at scale, flag pages overdue for review, or enforce ownership. Content sprawl is the most common reason a SharePoint estate degrades over time, and very little in the platform stops it happening.
- Findability depends entirely on what you built and what you put into it. Microsoft Search is a capable engine sitting on top of Microsoft Graph. It is also only as good as your information architecture and metadata. The most common complaint we hear about SharePoint is a search complaint, and the underlying cause is almost never search.
- Permissions are powerful and unforgiving. Granular control at four levels is a real strength. It also means inherited permissions, broken inheritance and over-sharing accumulate quietly for years, and nobody notices until something surfaces that should not have, perhaps through Microsoft Copilot.
- It expects expertise most teams do not have. Building something good needs information architecture, content strategy, and an understanding of site provisioning and hub structures. The people who usually use SharePoint internally are communicators and generalists, not platform specialists. The gap between having a licence and having something that works is more often a knowledge gap than a technology one.
- The default experience looks like the default experience. Out of the box, pages look like SharePoint pages. For an intranet that employees are meant to choose to visit, that matters more than it sounds.
How should you get started with SharePoint?
The most common mistake is opening a blank site and starting to build. Work through these four questions first.
- What problems are you solving? Document management, intranet, team collaboration and business process automation are four different projects with four different structures. Pick one and do it properly. Trying to do all four at once is the reliable route to a SharePoint estate that nobody can navigate. One pro-tip: undertake user research to ensure you fully understand the problem you need to solve. Never build on assumptions.
- Who owns it? Not who administers it, but who is accountable for whether the content is any good. Estates without a named owner deteriorate. Every single time. Another pro-tip: use a RACI matrix to capture the complexity of roles and responsibilities.
- What is your structure? Sites, hubs, navigation, metadata. This is the decision that is expensive to reverse later, so it is worth more thought than it usually gets. Our SharePoint design articles cover the practical approaches.
- Are your permissions defensible? If you cannot answer “who can see this?” for a given document, you are not ready to switch on AI over it.
If you already have SharePoint and it is not working, resist the urge to rebuild. In most cases the platform is fine and the structure underneath it is the problem. Diagnosing which of the two you have is a considerably cheaper first step than a migration.
Do nothing, though, and the position gets worse rather than staying still. Content volume grows, permissions drift further from intent, and Copilot makes both of those visible to every employee with a licence. The cost of inaction used to be a slightly annoying search experience. It is now the credibility of your organisation’s AI.
Frequently asked questions
Is SharePoint free?
No, but you may already be paying for it. SharePoint Online is included in most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions at no additional cost. There is no free standalone version, and the on-premises Subscription Edition requires its own licence plus infrastructure.
What is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive?
OneDrive is personal storage for your own working files. SharePoint is shared storage for content that belongs to a team or the organisation. The simplest test: if a colleague needs to find it after you leave, it belongs in SharePoint. They are built on the same underlying technology, which is why they behave so similarly.
What is the difference between SharePoint and Microsoft Teams?
Teams is where conversation happens. SharePoint is where content lives. They are not alternatives: every team created in Teams automatically gets a SharePoint site behind it to store its files. When you share a document in a Teams channel, you are putting it in SharePoint.
Do I need a Copilot licence to use the AI features in SharePoint?
For most of them, yes. Copilot in SharePoint and AI-assisted content creation require a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence in addition to your base plan. Agents work differently, with usage billed separately rather than requiring a full licence for everyone who interacts with them. Check Microsoft’s current licensing pages before budgeting, as both the packaging and the pricing changed during 2026.
Is SharePoint difficult to use?
For everyday tasks – reading pages, finding files, working in a team site – no. The modern page editor is genuinely straightforward, and content authors do not need technical skills. The difficulty sits in configuration and structure: information architecture, permissions models and metadata design are where organisations struggle, and those are decisions made once and lived with for years.
Can SharePoint be used as a public website?
It can technically publish externally, but it is not designed for it and you should use a proper content management system instead. SharePoint’s strengths – permissions, integration with Microsoft 365, internal search – are all built around known, authenticated users. For anonymous public audiences, those strengths stop being relevant.
About the author
Adam Hickman is Microsoft 365 consultant lead at Content Formula and leads the technical design and delivery of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint projects. With 27 years in the industry – spanning full-stack development, enterprise architecture and client consultancy across international blue-chip organisations – Adam is the person who makes sure what gets designed actually gets built properly. He has been at Content Formula for over seven years. A consultant with a passion for technology by day, Adam spends his weekends exploring new horizons on two wheels.
Where next?
If you want a straight answer on whether your SharePoint estate is set up to do what you need, that is the kind of question we answer every week.
AI Search on your intranet – See It, Prep It, Launch It
Webinar
AI Search on your intranet
See It, Prep It, Launch It
About
AI searching has rapidly become the new norm in everyday life, so it makes sense to add it to your intranet, right? We’ll show you our new AI search functionality and just how easily this can be added to your SharePoint intranet. But we’ll also consider what you should do first to make sure your intranet content is AI ready.
- 14 July 2026, Tuesday
-
10:00 EDT
15:00 BST
16:00 CET - Online webinar
Presenters
Join Joe and Jeremy to find out everything you need to know about AI searching in SharePoint intranets in 25 minutes.
Joe Perry
Technical Director
Jeremy Stewart
Digital Workplace Consultant
Digital workplace trends for 2025
It’s hard to believe that it’s already that time of year that I make my digital workplace predictions for the forthcoming year. 2024 was an exciting but also topsy turvy year. We saw AI continue to develop and embed within products like Microsoft Copilot. Here at Content Formula, we worked with some fantastic client teams and delivered successful projects, while also continuing to evolve our Lightspeed365 and Xoralia products. But across the wider intranet and digital workplace industry, market conditions were at times a little challenging for both tech vendors and consultancies.
2025 looks set to be an equally exciting year, but with the potential to be unpredictable. The global geo-political situation feels very fluid, and that might impact the global economy. Developments in AI are also impossible to predict – who knows where we will end up?
Given this, making predictions for the coming year comes with a warning and caveat; they might not happen! You can see what I predicted for 2024 and it is fair to say some of those didn’t quite materialise as expected.
Anyway, here goes! Hera are some of the headline digital trends I think we’ll see in 2025.
1. AI tools will surprise us
Every digital workplace trend or prediction article for 2025 will be filled with forecasts about what will happen with generative AI. Of course, AI will be the dominant theme in the digital workplace space and teams will be focusing on AI-readiness, getting value from Microsoft Copilot, de-risking through governance, evaluating products, supporting employees and trying to keep up with a technology that is moving with unbelievable speed.
It’s hard to know exactly where AI is going to take us, but I think it will surprise us, potentially on different levels:
- The latest incredible development which is pushing the boundaries of the possible.
- Personal tips and tricks which can transform your own productivity and save so much time.
- The adoption and value it will deliver within organisations.
- Amazing products with eyebrow-raising features
- And in many other ways!
There are still obvious risks and uncertainties, but it is exciting and those organisations that embrace the possibilities but also prepare the foundational work, will be able to take the most advantage.
2. Microsoft Copilot finds its feet
So far Microsoft Copilot has perhaps had a bit of a mixed reaction in the market with some justifiable criticisms – for example the pricing is highly complex – and both positive and underwhelming results in terms of the business benefits. Market reaction is also more than a little muddied by the fact that there are actually multiple versions of Copilot.
We think in 2025 Copilot is likely to find its feet and the narrative around its use will start to change to something more positive. Microsoft often releases applications that first don’t quite deliver, but then get substantially better over time. Here at Content Formula when we first tried Teams in 2018, we initially got excited but overall felt pretty underwhelmed, and of course the rest is history.
In some respects, Copilot still feels a little like a beta product that has a few issues to iron out; but we think that will change and prove to be a critical tool for the digital workplace. There are also some genuinely exciting developments on the way, for example with the release of Copilot Agents, announced at the recent Microsoft Ignite conference.
3. Tool proliferation continues to negatively impact employee experience
One of the biggest issues in the world of digital employee experience continues to be the proliferation of apps (often cloud-based) within the enterprise. According to research from Salesforce, the average enterprise has over 1,061 work-based apps in being used, a growth of 26% within just two years. This complex landscape leads to overwhelm, inefficiency and time-wasting caused by context switching between apps, frustrating and fragmented user journeys, issues with findability and more. A complex digital landscape is also harder to manage and monitor.
We don’t see tool and app proliferation getting any easier during 2025. Having said this, there are many teams who want to tackle the issue and are using their intranet (either via browser or Teams) as the place to for employees to complete a wide variety of tasks and transactions without having to enter the back-end systems. In this way the “everything intranet” as we’ve called it, is driving efficiency and supporting a better employee experience.
4. The Return to the office vs Hybrid Working debate rumbles on
Last year I predicted that debates about the value of hybrid working would start to fizzle out, but that hasn’t been the case. In 2024 there is still focus on the “Return to the Office” versus remote and hybrid working. Some major companies like Amazon have called their office-based employees back to being in five days a week and notably in a recent survey by KMPG, 83% of CEOs said they expected a full return to the office within three years.
Counter to this, many observers (and employees at the companies concerned) have argued that this view is short-sighted and is not supported by the data when it comes to productivity. Meanwhile more businesses are exploring flexible work and even experimenting with the four-day week.
While it’s safe to say that there is quite often a disconnect in some organisations between what leadership and employee want on this issue, the way the RTO debate pans out tends to be very black and white. Of course, in reality there is no right or wrong answer. Different employees and generations want different things, individuals have circumstances that dictate their preferences, and different modes of work lend themselves better to in-person work, but not always. Meanwhile millions of employees who are hybrid working have found a compromise that just about works.
Unfortunately, I think the debate will go on in 2025, but it would be more helpful to recognise this is a complex issue, that one size doesn’t’ fit all, and we should be focused on the work itself, what we’re trying to achieve and what the data actually tell us.
5. Internal comms goes omnichannel
Internal communicators have long worked in multi-channel environments, but in our conversations with clients about the use of SharePoint intranets and the rest of the Microsoft 365 toolset, more and more IC teams seemed focused on going omnichannel.
One of the reasons for this is the work Microsoft has done in the background to support a more coordinated approach to omnichannel publishing. For example, Viva Engage has undoubtedly ramped up support for leadership communications while features such as Campaigns help IC teams to take more of a multi-channel approach. The recent addition of Storylines into Teams will also support more consistent leadership communications across channels.
Meanwhile Viva Amplify specifically allows IC teams to orchestrate and measure communications and campaigns across Viva Engage, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and a mobile app. In 2025 I expect more IC professionals will take advantage of these features to go truly omnichannel.
6. Cybersecurity will remain a key concern and compliance area
If cybersecurity was a major concern in 2024 it may even be a bigger concern in 2025. In our governance and policy management predictions over on the Xoralia blog we predict that this will be a major area for compliance. Indeed, research from Thomson Reuters shows that 82% of risk professionals identify “data and cybersecurity risk” as their biggest concern.
As AI ramps up it will bring new cybersecurity threats including disturbing deep fake social engineering attacks and sophisticated phishing scams. This will necessitate the need for stricter policy management around AI and cyber risks, renewed vigour in cybersecurity awareness and training, and also advanced monitoring for threats. There will also potentially be more focus on compliance around data privacy which can in turn minimise the threat, impact and fall out from a cybersecurity attack.
7. We may see more consolidation in the intranet software market
If you’ve read the ClearBox guide to intranet software (which features our Lightspeed365 product) you’ll be aware that there are many intranet products out there. Overall, it’s been a pretty vibrant market over the past few years, with significant levels of investment, new entrants and the expansion of products. However, there are quite a few vendors merging and being acquired; the most notable event in 2024 was Omnia’s acquisition of LiveTiles.
In 2025 we think it is very likely that we’ll see more consolidation in the industry. There is likely to be two types of acquisition. The first will be strategic mergers involving bigger players like the Omnia deal. The second will be larger providers acquiring niche players to expand the features within their platform; for example, similar to Flip’s recent acquisition of AI and chatbot specialist The Bot Company. Overall, we think the in-a-box market is still healthy, but it is highly competitive – including from Microsoft and SharePoint itself – and not every in-a-boxer will succeed.
8. Microsoft ramps up the App Store supporting the integrated digital workplace
One of the megatrends of the last few years has been the growth of the Microsoft 365-powered digital workplace, providing a series of integrated and interlocking tools that provide a more coherent and consistent digital employee experience. Much of this has centred around the toolset within 365 itself. However, there are an increasing number of solutions built by Microsoft partners that sit seamlessly within the 365 ecosystem; these include Learn365 from Zensai as well as our own Xoralia policy management solution.
The advantage of these tools being built completely for 365 is not only the seamless integration for employees, but also for IT departments, where the product will tend to tick existing security, compliance and governance boxes and meet existing policies. Solutions like Xoralia and Learn365 are also easy and straightforward to roll-out, and most vendors will ensure their product stays up to date with the M365 roadmap.
Currently Microsoft has been investing in the app store and we’ve seen it start to evolve to support this expansion of partner-produced tools that deeply integrate with Microsoft 365. Thie model is a little more like Salesforce whose app exchange and marketplace has multiple platform-ready tools. Having an effective and popular Microsoft App Store will also help incentivise Microsoft partners to continue to innovate with their products.
9. The usual intranet and digital workplace challenges remain
Saying that some things aren’t going to change is perhaps not the most exciting trend to observe, but our experiences over decades in the SharePoint, intranet and digital workplace space see the same issues coming up again and again. Search and findability. Out of date content. Lack of governance. Not enough measurement. Solutions built on assumptions rather than user research. Not quite enough change management. These are perennial problems that keep on appearing, albeit with a slightly different context.
The contrast between the constant change we see with new technologies and products and the reappearance of the same issues year after year is one of the great paradoxes of working in this space. Many of these issues are not technology-related and are often due to not carrying out enough foundational work to build requirements and establish governance. Even with the mind-bending possibilities of generative AI we need to prepare for it properly and put the hard yards in. We expect the situation won’t change in 2025 with the same challenges persisting.
Happy new year from the Content Formula team!
Whatever happens, 2025 is going to be another fascinating year for the digital workplace. Have a very happy, healthy and successful new year from all of us at Content Formula!
The story behind Content Formula
Content Formula is a leading digital workplace consultancy specializing in Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, and beyond. We design and build innovative solutions that transform the way organizations work, including custom intranets, knowledge management systems, LMS integrations, process automation, and more. With clients like Pfizer, Accenture, and Philips, our expertise spans multiple industries and business needs.
3 benefits you can expect from Content Formula
Transform your digital workplace
We create tailored solutions using SharePoint and Teams, from intranet design and architecture to knowledge management and custom applications, all aimed at improving communication, collaboration, and employee engagement.
Automate business processes
Our expertise in process automation helps organizations streamline operations through workflow automation, approvals, and integrations with Microsoft Power Platform.
Comprehensive support and strategy
From intranet strategy and migration to managed services and ongoing support, we provide end-to-end services ensuring seamless implementation and ongoing optimization.
What our clients say
A big thank you to the Content Formula team for their outstanding work on our project! We are thrilled with the Lightspeed365 intranet and the iOS-style navigation they designed and developed for us. It has been a game-changer for our associates. Their expertise in SharePoint design and digital workplace solutions, including PowerApps, were invaluable to us. The team at Content Formula are highly recommended!
Paul Marabella, VP & CIO
★★★★★
Our experience with Xoralia so far has been very positive. It not only simplifies our policy management, but also enhances our overall compliance posture and has proven to be a significant time-saver for our organization. This allows our team to focus on more strategic tasks, contributing to organizational success. Xoralia is a valuable investment for any company seeking a reliable and efficient solution to navigate the complex world of corporate policies.
Nadja Friedrichs Boyum, VP Marketing & HR
★★★★★
Lightspeed365 has given us the tools to provide our users with a more intuitive intranet experience that has resulted in better adoption and more active engagement with our intranet and our internal communication. It was a quick, easy install that gave us richer, more flexible display options, enabling us to share content in more engaging ways for our users. Would definitely recommend - we haven't looked back.
Glenda Lamb, SharePoint Architect
★★★★★
How to get started with Content Formula
Step 1: Book a free consultation
Discuss your digital workplace challenges and opportunities with our experts.
Step 2: Receive a tailored plan
Get a customized roadmap to transform your digital workplace with clear, actionable steps.
Step 3: Deploy and optimize
We support you through implementation and beyond, with a focus on change management and user adoption.
We support you through implementation and beyond, with a focus on change management and user adoption.
What you'll get with Content Formula
List the various solutions and services:
-
SharePoint intranet strategy and design
-
Knowledge management systems
-
LMS365 integrations with Teams
-
Custom app development and integrations
-
Process automation solutions with Power Platform
-
Intranet migration and planning services
-
Adoption and change management (ACM)
-
Managed services and ongoing support
Ready to transform your workplace?
Valo intranet end of life? Lightspeed365 is your alternative
As Valo intranet support is set to end mid-next year, many organizations are grappling with the challenge of transitioning to a new platform. Finding a reliable alternative is essential, not only to ensure continuity but also to seize the opportunity to enhance your organization’s digital workplace. Lightspeed365 stands out as a seamless, future-proof solution, offering minimal disruption during intranet migration while introducing advanced features that elevate employee experience, engagement, and productivity. Here’s why Lightspeed365 is the smart choice for Valo users.
Addressing Valo’s impending challenges
Valo intranet has served as a dependable solution for many organizations, but with the announcement of its discontinuation, businesses face several challenges that must be addressed. Here are the key risks of staying on an unsupported platform:
- Lack of updates and technical support: as Valo stops receiving updates, the platform becomes increasingly vulnerable to technical issues, bugs, and compatibility problems. Without active support, organizations may find themselves unable to resolve critical issues, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased downtime.
- Incompatibility with Microsoft 365 advancements: Microsoft 365 is constantly evolving, introducing new tools and features like AI-powered intranet capabilities and workflow automation. An unsupported platform like Valo may lag behind, creating friction in workflows and preventing teams from fully leveraging Microsoft’s ecosystem.
- Security and compliance risks: outdated software can expose organizations to significant security threats. Unsupported platforms are more susceptible to cyberattacks, while compliance requirements may become harder to meet, especially for organizations operating in regulated industries.
These challenges highlight the urgency of transitioning to a cloud-based intranet solution that ensures continuity, security, and adaptability in an increasingly hybrid workplace.
Lightspeed365: a superior alternative
Lightspeed365 is more than just a replacement for Valo, it’s an upgrade that transforms your digital workplace into a dynamic, efficient, and future-ready environment. Here’s how Lightspeed365 addresses Valo users’ needs:
- Seamless integration: Lightspeed365 is designed to integrate effortlessly with SharePoint and Microsoft 365, ensuring that your existing workflows and data remain intact. By preserving what works, the platform minimizes disruptions during the migration process.
- Enhanced features: while Valo provided a solid foundation, Lightspeed365 introduces advanced capabilities such as workflow automation, enterprise social networking tools, and personalized dashboards. These features not only streamline internal communications but also improve knowledge management and team collaboration.
- Future-proofing: Lightspeed365 evolves alongside your organization. With regular updates, scalability options, and cutting-edge tools like AI integration through Microsoft’s Copilot products, the platform ensures that your intranet remains relevant and effective as technology advances.
Making the transition: seamless and efficient
The idea of switching platforms can feel overwhelming, but Lightspeed365 is built with flexibility and adaptability at its core, making the migration process straightforward and efficient. Here’s what you can expect during the transition:
- Pre-migration planning: before the migration process begins, Lightspeed365’s team works closely with your organization to assess your existing intranet setup, data, and workflows. This ensures that the transition is tailored to your unique needs and minimizes any potential disruptions.
- Data migration: Lightspeed365 prioritizes preserving your existing data, workflows, and governance structures. Advanced tools and structured processes are used to ensure that everything is transferred accurately and efficiently, eliminating the risk of data loss or misalignment.
- User onboarding: a seamless transition isn’t just about technical migration, it’s also about ensuring your employees can adapt to the new platform quickly and confidently. Lightspeed365 retains familiar elements from Valo’s interface, reducing the learning curve. Comprehensive training and resources are also provided to help employees embrace new productivity tools and features like mobile intranet access and analytics dashboards.
- Dedicated support: the Lightspeed365 team is with you every step of the way, providing dedicated support to address any challenges that arise during the transition. This hands-on approach ensures that the migration process is smooth, stress-free, and completed on schedule.
By simplifying the migration process and prioritizing user experience, Lightspeed365 ensures that your organization can move forward without missing a beat.
Driving engagement, communication, and collaboration
Once your organization is fully transitioned to Lightspeed365, you’ll experience the benefits of its enhanced features firsthand. Here’s how the platform elevates engagement, communication, and collaboration:
- Engagement: Lightspeed365 includes personalized dashboards and enterprise social networking features that allow employees to tailor their digital workspace experience. By delivering relevant and timely content, these dashboards help employees stay connected and motivated. The platform’s social intranet capabilities also create opportunities for employees to interact with each other, fostering a sense of community and belonging.
- Communication: effective communication is the backbone of any successful organization. Lightspeed365 streamlines internal communications with enhanced integrations for Microsoft Teams, real-time messaging tools, and targeted notifications. These features ensure that employees stay informed and engaged, whether they’re working remotely or in the office.
- Collaboration: collaboration is at the heart of Lightspeed365. Advanced task management tools, document-sharing capabilities, and co-authoring features enable teams to work together seamlessly. Whether your employees are located in the same office or spread across the globe, Lightspeed365 makes teamwork more efficient and transparent than ever before.
- Knowledge management: Lightspeed365 simplifies the management and accessibility of company knowledge. Its centralized hub ensures that critical information, resources, and policies are easy to find, improving employee efficiency and reducing time spent searching for information.
Conclusion
The end of Valo support is not just a challenge, it’s an opportunity to embrace a more robust, secure, and feature-rich intranet solution. With its seamless integration, advanced tools for workflow automation and internal communications, and commitment to continuous improvement, Lightspeed365 ensures your digital workplace remains efficient, adaptable, and future-ready.
Ready to make the switch? Explore Lightspeed365 today and experience how it can elevate your digital workplace. Schedule a demo to see the difference firsthand.
The story behind Content Formula
Content Formula is a leading digital workplace consultancy specializing in Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, and beyond. We design and build innovative solutions that transform the way organizations work, including custom intranets, knowledge management systems, LMS integrations, process automation, and more. With clients like Pfizer, Accenture, and Philips, our expertise spans multiple industries and business needs.
3 benefits you can expect from Content Formula
Transform your digital workplace
We create tailored solutions using SharePoint and Teams, from intranet design and architecture to knowledge management and custom applications, all aimed at improving communication, collaboration, and employee engagement.
Automate business processes
Our expertise in process automation helps organizations streamline operations through workflow automation, approvals, and integrations with Microsoft Power Platform.
Comprehensive support and strategy
From intranet strategy and migration to managed services and ongoing support, we provide end-to-end services ensuring seamless implementation and ongoing optimization.
What our clients say
A big thank you to the Content Formula team for their outstanding work on our project! We are thrilled with the Lightspeed365 intranet and the iOS-style navigation they designed and developed for us. It has been a game-changer for our associates. Their expertise in SharePoint design and digital workplace solutions, including PowerApps, were invaluable to us. The team at Content Formula are highly recommended!
Paul Marabella, VP & CIO
★★★★★
Our experience with Xoralia so far has been very positive. It not only simplifies our policy management, but also enhances our overall compliance posture and has proven to be a significant time-saver for our organization. This allows our team to focus on more strategic tasks, contributing to organizational success. Xoralia is a valuable investment for any company seeking a reliable and efficient solution to navigate the complex world of corporate policies.
Nadja Friedrichs Boyum, VP Marketing & HR
★★★★★
Lightspeed365 has given us the tools to provide our users with a more intuitive intranet experience that has resulted in better adoption and more active engagement with our intranet and our internal communication. It was a quick, easy install that gave us richer, more flexible display options, enabling us to share content in more engaging ways for our users. Would definitely recommend - we haven't looked back.
Glenda Lamb, SharePoint Architect
★★★★★
How to get started with Content Formula
Step 1: Book a free consultation
Discuss your digital workplace challenges and opportunities with our experts.
Step 2: Receive a tailored plan
Get a customized roadmap to transform your digital workplace with clear, actionable steps.
Step 3: Deploy and optimize
We support you through implementation and beyond, with a focus on change management and user adoption.
We support you through implementation and beyond, with a focus on change management and user adoption.
What you'll get with Content Formula
List the various solutions and services:
-
SharePoint intranet strategy and design
-
Knowledge management systems
-
LMS365 integrations with Teams
-
Custom app development and integrations
-
Process automation solutions with Power Platform
-
Intranet migration and planning services
-
Adoption and change management (ACM)
-
Managed services and ongoing support
Ready to transform your workplace?
Ten knowledge management best practices for 2024
Knowledge management (KM) is as relevant today as it was when it emerged in the mid-nineties as a management discipline. While there is sometimes a perception that KM has faded and is no longer being practiced, actually KM is very much alive and kicking, particularly in industry sectors such as professional services, pharmaceuticals and engineering. Within some organisations KM has never really gone away.
KM spans a number of different activities and touches multiple areas including capturing knowledge, improving search, managing communities of practice, providing access to experts and even laying the foundations for generative AI. There is quite a lot of overlap in terms of the remit of KM teams and digital workplace teams and in practice, someone managing the digital workplace might be carrying out KM and vice versa.
KM is extremely mature with a global professional community, a network of academics, a huge body of work with methodologies, frameworks and tools, and also a well-developed set of KM technologies and tools There is much to draw from in terms of looking at inspirational examples, proven approaches and best practices.
In this post we’re going to explore some high-level knowledge management best practices that are relevant for KM in 2024. On the way we also look at what KM is, why it is important, some examples of KM, and why KM can fail. We also cover what you need to do to implement some our suggested best practices.
Because KM is such a vast topic we’re only really scratching the surface here of what KM teams can do to be effective. It’s also a topic with a passionate professional community, so not everyone will agree with our KM best practices!
What is knowledge management?
There is no absolute standard definition of Knowledge management (KM). However, it’s generally recognised to be the way an organisation manages its knowledge in terms of creating, capturing, storing, sharing and exploiting knowledge.
KM will generally encompass the people, processes, technology and content involved; it is as much about change management, culture and influencing behaviour, as it is about tools and technology.
What is knowledge management important?
Knowledge management is important for a variety of different reasons which can vary between different organisations. Below are just some of the ways KM is important.
- Underpins client delivery and customer service
- Knowledge management can help support the delivery of services to clients and support customer service in different ways – for example by establishing best practices for service delivery, allowing assets from projects to be re-used, helping people find experts to help solve issues and answer questions, providing one source of truth for product knowledge and more.
- Enable R&D
- Many organisations including pharmaceuticals, engineering, manufacturing and consumer goods have Research & Development functions that research, invent, test and improve new products. This may result in the registration of new patents. These functions are heavily reliant on knowledge management approaches and processes to provide access to and manage the internal and external knowledge that facilitates this work.
- Drives innovation
- KM can also help drive innovation within a company, by providing access to research and resources that drive innovation process, supporting collaboration on new products and services, and also enabling structured approaches to managing ideas.
- Drives efficiency
- Knowledge management helps drive efficiency and productivity in different ways. For example, KM helps employees find the information and assets they need more quickly saving time in the process. KM improves specific processes by streamlining the flow of data and knowledge. KM also saves time by providing access to different assets so that employees don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Supports compliance and reduces risk
- KM will usually build in processes that take into account compliance in areas such as data privacy, GDPR and the protection of customer data, particularly around resuing content.
- Prevents knowledge escaping from the company
- Often when a subject matter expert or someone highly experienced leaves a company, all their knowledge and expertise walks straight out of the door, and is effectively lost. Knowledge management captures some of what people know so it can be shared and accessed by others, before it “escapes” from your company.
- Supports learning and professional development
- KM is often closely associated with learning and professional development by helping employees find and use knowledge which they can learn from. KM can also provide structured access to subject matter experts that can transfer their knowledge to others, as well as nurture professional communities of practice that also drive learning and specialisms.
- Increases findability
- KM helps to increase findability by enabling search and establishing user-focused approaches to information architecture. This means employees can find essential information, content and knowledge successfully and effectively. KN involves several different activities that improves findability including developing taxonomies, applying metadata and fine-tuning search.
- Helps prepare for the future with AI
- KM helps establish the foundations so that an organisation is more ready to get the best out of generative AI – this might include establishing the right data management approach, a unified approach to metadata, a methodology to train bots, effective governance to mitigate risks and more.
What are some examples of knowledge management?
There are many examples of knowledge management, and these will depend from organisation to organisation. Typical real-world examples include:
- Reusing assets from a project in such a way that they can send with other clients in a professional services firm
- Managing a knowledge base of product and services content so that it can help contact centre staff resolve customer issues.
- Support a professional community of practice relating to an industry sector specialism.
- Providing the ability to locate subject matter experts throughout a global organisation, using a common agreed list of areas.
- Using automation to create model documents to reduce the time it takes to produce contracts for an in-house legal team.
- Improving enterprise search through fine tuning a solution and making changes to an organisation-wide taxonomy.
- Preparing for the introduction of Microsoft Copilot with an agreed population of documents.
What are knowledge management best practices?
KM best practices might be considered to be practices and approaches that support KM and have been built up through a huge body of knowledge and also proven to work. Our view of some of KM best practices has been shaped on what we’ve seen on numerous KM and intranet projects, frequently within KM-critical sectors such as professional services and pharmaceuticals.
How do you implement management best practices?
Implementing best practices and approaches will help KM to succeed in your organisation, but there are some tactics that are particularly important to help with the implementation.
- Have a KM strategy
- Having a KM strategy is key to ensure you have the focus, clarity and co-ordination to implement KM and its related best practices. It ensures everyone is working on the same page, and also establishes the intentionality and prioritisation behind your KM program.
- Have absolute clarity of roles and responsibilities
- KM is fiddly to implement and requires clarity behind the different structures, roles and responsibilities to avoid overlap and ensure everyone know what they are doing.
- Have access to the right skills and specialisms
- Successful knowledge management and implementing KM best practices relies on having access to the right skills and specialisms. Make sure you provide the right training and have additional resourcing if you can’t get access to the right skills in-house. Where possible, encourage people to develop expertise and specialisms to support the evolution of your KM progamme.
- Learn from others and as you go
- KM is a journey and frequently a learning curve. Looking at what works and doesn’t, following examples from peers in other organisations, and adapting your practices and priorities accordingly, will help drive a more successful KM programme.
What are knowledge management best practices?
KM best practices might be considered to be practices and approaches that support KM and have been built up through a huge body of knowledge and also proven to work. Our view of some of KM best practices has been shaped on what we’ve seen on numerous KM and intranet projects, frequently within KM-critical sectors such as professional services and pharmaceuticals.
Why does KM fail?
You’re never guaranteed success with knowledge management, and many attribute a high failure rate to KM projects. There are a huge number of reasons why a KM project might fail, ranging from a lack of resourcing to too much focus on the technology side.
Knowledge management could fail because:
- There is a lack of clarity about the aims of the initiative and people are uncertain about their role or what is involved.
- Not enough attention is given to the people and change management aspects of KM, so there is no change in behaviour or culture to encourage knowledge-sharing and adoption. This often happens because there is too much emphasis on the technology side of KM.
- The enabling foundations for KM haven’t been built, for example having the right governance, taxonomy, data standards and more in place.
- There is no one responsible for KM so it lacks the stewardship to drive success over time.
- The KM initiative or project is not adequately resourced.
- The technology choices to enable KM are not fit for purpose.
- There are unrealistic expectations around the impact of KM or the time it will take for it have impact, so it will be viewed as a failure when actually it may need more time or see the impact.
- There is a lack of in-house skills or access to the right expertise to deliver the KM initiative.
Ten KM best practices for 2024
Here’s our view of ten high-level KM best practices for 2024.
1. Focus on people and culture not always technology
Technology is an important enabler for KM. However, fundamentally KM is more about encouraging people to share knowledge and driving a knowledge-sharing culture. A KM best practice is ensure there is enough focus on the people and culture side of KM. Never view KM as another technology project. Knowledge guru Dave Snowden once said that knowledge can only be volunteered rather than conscripted; focusing on people is key.
2. Leverage frameworks and models
There is a huge body of work around KM that has been produced over the past thirty years or so. This includes a significant number of frameworks, model and methodologies that are available to adapt and use within your organisation. By leveraging what has gone before it means you can execute successful KM for the future. You also don’t need to necessarily follow a model or methodology religiously – pick and choose what works for your organisation’s needs and circumstances.
3. Have a consistent taxonomy and metadata strategy
Taxonomy and ontology management with an accompanying metadata strategy provides a consistent and meaningful way to describe and tag content throughout the enterprise so that is uniform across different systems and applications. A best practice for KM teams is to focus on this area as it can deliver value in multiple ways:
- Delivers improved search experiences for example through filtering.
- Brings together data together from disparate sources for example through dashboards.
- Helps enable smoother processes and automation.
- Provides a common way to describe expertise throughout an organisation.
- Underpins getting value out of generative AI
- And more.
Focusing on taxonomy and ontology management involves both active stewardship and getting input from subject matter experts.
4. Leverage automation where you can
A significant level of knowledge management activity can be supported by automation. For example, you might want to make sure information updated in one system is also automatically updated in another. Automated solutions around particular KM scenarios such as model documents can also improve efficiency. Where possible use automation in KM – it is consistently surprising what can be achieved.
5. Optimise content to make it reusable
The reuse of high-quality content so that it can be reused for other purposes is a recurring concept in KM. For example, a presentation or spreadsheet created for one client could potentially be partly reused with another. To help make this happen KM teams can spend time optimising content to make it more reusable – for example setting up a process to automatically remove client names from documents.
6. Focus on enablement and facilitation
For knowledge management to succeed at scale, it needs to be an approach and set of behaviours that everyone – or at least a substantial group of employees – can adopt. KM teams need to focus on enabling and facilitating knowledge management and knowledge sharing across the workforce, rather than just being a team that just carries out all the knowledge management activity themselves. If KM is only carried out by the KM team, it is very difficult to derive value from KM at scale.
7. Always work in partnership with your users
Often KM works best when it is carried out in partnership with your users – founded on robust user research and then evolved and improved with their feedback and input. This helps ensure your KM initiative is user-centric and people-focused, and also drives legitimacy to support adoption.
8. Drive continuous improvement with feedback and analytics
KM is never done and there are always improvements to make. Committing to a process of continuous improvement can help you to evolve and advance KM over time. Feedback gained from working with users (already mentioned above) will be an important ongoing data input for continuous improvement. Equally important is using analytics to measure the effectiveness of KM , and making changes based on these, ultimately taking a data-driven approach.
9. Derive community management processesalytics
Professional communities of practice can have real value in helping foster expertise and knowledge on particular topics. Wider than this, communities such as employee resource groups can also really help support diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). In our view a KM best practice is to use community management approaches and processes to ensure communities of practice are active and continue to grow. To support this, define the roles of community managers and provides accompanying resources.
10. Always ensure KM has strategic alignment
KM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A best practice is to make sure KM activities are fully aligned with your organisational strategy as well as those of key stakeholders such as IT, HR and in-house legal teams.
Need help with KM? Get in touch!
Knowledge management has real value and we hope this view of some KM best practices has helped you to think about KM in your organisation. If you need help with KM or want to discuss a KM project, then get in touch!
7 ways to use SharePoint to support employee onboarding
An important use case for any digital workplace or employee experience platform is employee onboarding. When a new hire first joins a company, there are multiple forms to complete, team members to meet and information to absorb. Behind the scenes too there are multiple processes taking place involving different support departments getting everything ready for an employee’s first day.
A successful onboarding initiative helps make that process for new joiners more efficient, less overwhelming and as welcoming as possible, and ensures everything is ready for a person’s first day at work.
The rise of hybrid and remote working means more attention is being paid to how the digital workplace supports employee onboarding. Using SharePoint with some additional integrations from across Microsoft 365 can support a great employee onboarding experience that helps new hires and drives efficiency.
In this post we’re going to explore what employee onboarding is, why it is important and seven ways you can use ShareePoint to support your employee onboarding programme.
What is employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding can be defined as the process which takes place when a person is recruited to join a company to help ensure an efficient, smooth and welcoming experience for the new starter. Successful onboarding helps enable the transition for a new hire and integrate them into a company’s processes and culture, covering areas such as contracts and paperwork, compliance, learning, meeting the team, and more.
Typically, an onboarding programme might continue from when a person is actually hired and then through their first 90 days or so, However, it can last longer, even sometimes extending up to a year. Onboarding is usually managed by the HR function, but in practice will also involve other teams including IT.
Why is employee onboarding important?
Employee onboarding is an important element of employee experience. The period just after a person joins a business is a critical time. There is a plethora of statistics that show a successful onboarding programme can significantly reduce employee turnover and support talent retention. Some studies have even suggested a person who has participated in a structured onboarding programme is 58% more likely to still be at an organisation after three years compared to someone who hasn’t been through a programme.
A successful employee onboarding programme will also:
- Support efficiency by ensuring all admin tasks are completed, both by the new hire and also behind the scenes, such as arranging IT equipment.
- Minimise risk by ensuring everything from a contractual and compliance angle is done and dusted.
- Support productivity by helping employees get up to speed as soon as possible by providing relevant knowledge and learning.
- Standardise onboarding across all parts of an organisation so all new hires get at least the same high-quality experience, but still allowing for differences across roles, divisions and loations.
- Help employees get to know their new colleague to start building connections and working relationships.
Seven ways that SharePoint and Microsoft 365 support employee onboarding
There are a number of ways that SharePoint – often through a SharePoint intranet – and other Microsoft 365 tools – can help deliver and support a great onboarding experience for employees.
1. Provide a secure SharePoint pre-hire site
When a person first confirms that they are accepting a position, there is often a lot of paperwork they must complete before their first day, as well as information to provide and reading to do. Completing this before their first day is usually essential because it helps get everything prepared, including setting them up on different systems, ordering IT equipment and so on. It can also allow them to learn about the company and even meet their new colleagues.
Often “pre-hire” activities are carried out by email with documents that need to be digitally signed, huge PDFs of the employee handbook to read, and links to anonymous forms. The process is inefficient, and the experience is impersonal and unengaging.
Creating a secure SharePoint site with external access that new hires can access before their first day is a great way to provide all the necessary information and documents new starters need in a clearer and more efficient way. Forms can also be created for any information that needs to be submitted; here digital workplace teams can use embedded Microsoft Forms with workflows from Power Automate to help IT and HR functions get all the information they need to complete any pre-first day tasks. A pre-hire site could even include embedded learning, present content in a more engaging way, and even have a welcome video.
It’s possible to create a SharePoint site with guest access, but also use the Microsoft Power Pages on the Power Platform. Some organisations can also choose to provide full Microsoft 365 access early, although there is always a small risk of a person not joining before the first day.
Overall, a pre-hire site can prove to be far more efficient than using email and helps a new hire make a flying start when they join, rather than spending their first day filling out forms and reading documentation.
2. Create a personalised hub for your new hires on your SharePoint intranet
A SharePoint intranet often contains valuable information that new hires need to know regarding the company and its processes, its strategy and values, tools and apps, how to get things done and so on. A personalised hub and resource site for new hires is a common use case for a SharePoint intranet that delivers real value.
A new hire hub might highlight all the content spread throughout an intranet that is valuable for a new starter, such as information on company strategy. A site will also add specific resources for the new starter community. This might include checklists of things employees need to do, a welcome video from the CEO or presentations which feature in onboarding and induction sessions. It might also display a calendar of all the milestones an employee needs to be aware of in their first 30 days.
Here the variety of web parts available in SharePoint Online comes into its own with the ability to add all of the above plus task lists, a new hire community from Viva Engage (see below for more of this), policies and learning sources.
However, there can still be a few gaps with out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts. For example our with our Lightspeed365 intranet product we’ve added an employee handbook web part that is perfect for presenting collections of content to new starters, as well as a page tour for new starters to get used to the intranet itself.
For maximum value, a new hire hub should have web parts that are targeted and personalised to ensure resources and links are relevant to each new starter’s location, department and role.
3. Build a custom set of personalised tasks with automation and workflow
When new starters join a company, there are a lot of tasks to complete, including forms to fill out, policies to read, learning to complete and courses to attend. Aggregating all these tasks into a targeted list can be extremely helpful in making sure the new starter keeps on top of what they need to do.
There are different ways to create a set of personalised tasks that appears in your SharePoint intranet. For example, this could be done through PowerApps and Power Automate to deliver the right workflows. Building a personalised list of task into your intranet homepage can also ensure they are front of mind for the new starter.
4. Get mandatory reads on your policies and procedures
When a person joins a company, there is often a lot of reading to get through, some of which might be mandatory. They may need to read a professional conduct policy, an IT policy, a social media usage policy, health and safety procedures and so on. As part of the onboarding process, an HR function or individual line managers may need to monitor new starters to ensure they have read and understood any mandatory policies and procedures. There may even need to be external reporting on this for compliance reasons.
It’s possible to use SharePoint and Microsoft tools to enable personalised mandatory reads and accompanying employee attestation functions where a new starter can:
- View and access the policies they need to read.
- Complete a checkbox or form to then also confirm that they have read and understood the policy.
- Receive notifications if this hasn’t been done by a certain date.
- Produce reporting to track overall completions.
Creating this functionality will require custom development, for example involving PowerApps in conjunction with SharePoint document libraries, Power Automate workflows, Power BI reporting and potentially Microsoft Forms. However, you can also potentially use a SharePoint-based product like Xoralia policy management software where mandatory reads and employee attestation is pre-built and integrates seamlessly with your SharePoint intranet. Xoralia also comes with multiple other features that you can use to support the employee onboarding process.
5. Create learning for employee onboarding
Learning is usually a huge part of the onboarding experience. As part of the induction process, a new starter may need to take a series of courses or training programmes so they can settle into life at their new company and carry out their role. Some of this learning is likely to be mandatory. Typically, it may include:
- An introduction to the company, its strategy, culture, values and core processes.
- Health and safety procedures.
- How to use technology platforms
- Specific role-based training, often technical or specialist in nature, for example on sales or about products and services.
- Mandatory compliance training across different areas.
The best way to incorporate learning directly into your SharePoint environment is to use a learning platform like Learn365 from Zensai that integrates seamlessly with SharePoint and Microsoft 365 because it’s based on SharePoint itself. Many teams have established a whole onboarding programme within Learn365.
6. Create a new hire community
Meeting people and networking helps new employees settle quickly. Creating a community for new starters is a strong element for any onboarding programme. New hires can support and network with each other, as well as connect with HR and other support functions to ask questions.
With SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365, a Viva Engage community with an embedded feed in your new hire area on the intranet can work very well, although some organisations might prefer to use Teams for community interaction.
7. Get feedback on your employee onboarding programme
An important method of improving your employee onboarding programme is to make sure you ask for feedback from the new hires who have just gone through it. Getting specific feedback and input can help identify issues that need fixing, highlight elements that are working well and elicit ideas for improvements.
There are multiple ways to get feedback using SharePoint. You could embed a Microsoft Form to ask specific questions or seek more detailed feedback or use a Viva Engage new hires community embedded in a SharePoint page to generate a discussion. You can also use SharePoint commenting to generate comments and ideas. However you choose to do it, getting feedback can make all the difference, and sends a positive message that feedback from users is valued.
Other ways to improve employee onboarding using Microsoft 365 tools
Microsoft 365 provides interlocking tools that can be used in creative ways and combinations to support and improve employee onboarding including:
- Using Microsoft Viva Connections to ensure that any SharePoint-based new hire hub can also be accessed via Microsoft Teams
- Using PowerApps to deliver a custom new hire app that can be accessed on Teams, browser or mobile
- Using the Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard to create a dashboard that contains onboarding tasks, for example for new frontline workers
- Using Microsoft Co-pilot Studio in conjunction with a collection of relevant documents to create a dedicated onboarding chatbot to answer questions.
- And more!
Designing employee onboarding using SharePoint
Employee onboarding is a key process in employee experience, and can make a tangible contribution to talent retention. SharePoint and the wider Microsoft 365 toolset is a strong and flexible foundational technology to design onboarding experiences and deliver related content and features. If you’d like to discuss using SharePoint for your employee onboarding programme, then get in touch!
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