What is an Intranet In a Box?

An Intranet in a Box is a pre-configured SharePoint Online template that includes the most common functions of SharePoint Online users. An Intranet in a box is a method of fast tracking the deployment and configuration of SharePoint Online for small, medium and large organisations. The solution includes a fully a mobile friendly responsive digital workplace.

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1. SharePoint Intranet in a Box

Microsoft SharePoint Online is our recommended platform for creating solutions that encourage people to collaborate and share knowledge, documents and data.

We can harness SharePoint Online’s powerful cloud collaboration features to encourage your staff to work more closely together, find data more quickly, and unlock vital knowledge held by your business.

We take advantage of these features in Kira, our intranet platform, which is built on SharePoint Online and turns its underlying power into an intuitive, accessible intranet.

For extranets and portals, SharePoint lets external customers and users gain secure access to your organisation’s key data.

Built-in security features protect your business’s sensitive information while letting you fine-tune what is exposed to external clients. This functionality forms a key part of our PortalPlus and TenantPlus portal accelerators.

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2. Your Office 365 SharePoint Intranet

With ‘Kira’ from CompanyNet, you have an Intranet in a box solution, that comfortably meets and indeed, exceeds your stated requirements and provides you with an Intranet platform that is perfectly aligned with the Microsoft Office 365 platform that can adapt and grow as the Office 365 platform adapts and grows.

We understand organisations need more than an out of the box solution so we wrap around the core product offer, a number of services based on your requirements, which will enhance the Intranet experience for you. 

Alongside our product offer, we bring strong and effective change management insights, that will focus on engaging extensively with your users to drive user adoption and the use of your new Intranet.

Kira’s dynamic homepage comes with an easily-configurable news section, noticeboard, events section and social media feeds as standard.

These are provided in the form of re-usable components, which can be added to the page, dragged into position and customised using Kira’s visual page editor.

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3. SharePoint Online – News Section

News articles are presented on the homepage with a thumbnail image, plus additional data showing the originating department and publication date.

News items can have a playable streaming video set in place of their thumbnail image – this can be a video from YouTube, Vimeo or Microsoft Stream.

This lets visitors play the video directly within the homepage. (Stream is Microsoft’s own video hosting service, offered as part of some Office 365 licences.)

To add the video to a page, the content creator user can simply insert a video component on that page, and Kira will pick it up automatically, or paste a video URL into the page’s metadata panel.

As well as being on the intranet homepage, each department or function’s own homepage can display the latest news created by that department.

News is fully searchable using Kira’s powerful search engine with metadata-based filtering options.

This is an example of a news article published in the HR section of the site, which had been surfaced on the main homepage (see previous screenshot).

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4. SharePoint Online Noticeboard

Kira’s homepage comes preloaded with a powerful Noticeboard component.

This feature allows users to post ‘classified’ notices – such as items for sale, items wanted, and social events – for the attention of other colleagues.

Noticeboard categories can be fully tailored to meet the needs of your organisation.

Clicking on a noticeboard item from the homepage opens up a full description, optionally with photos.

Users can add and remove their own notices, or set an expiry date so the notices remove themselves once no longer relevant.

They can also comment on noticeboard items to ask questions or share the item with other colleagues.

The noticeboard helps foster a sense of community on the intranet homepage, keeping users coming back for more.

It also provides an incentive for your staff to learn basic content creation and editing concepts, opening the door to them creating more substantial and useful content on the rest of the intranet.

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5. SharePoint Online Events Section

Events can be featured on the homepage using the Events component, which displays upcoming events, and lets you quickly add new events.

Events can have a start date/time, end date/time, Location, Link (for online events) and free-text description for event details. They can also be associated with specific people.

The images below show the Events Homepage and the section for creating a new event.

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6. SharePoint Online Social Media Feed

Out of the box, Kira provides components for embedding Twitter feeds and Yammer conversations on the homepage (or anywhere on your intranet).

Comments and Likes are also available across Kira, and can be toggled on or off in the page’s metadata panel.

These are just a few of the components available on Kira’s dynamic homepage and in its rich, visual page editing experience. 

We will be happy to demonstrate to you the broad range of capabilities of our Intranet accelerator, Kira.

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7. User Friendly Content Management

Kira has been designed from the ground up to provide a user friendly experience maximising the aesthetic of the Office 365 experience. 

Kira is built on Office 365 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft’s class-leading document and knowledge management platform.

SharePoint Document Libraries are fully supported throughout Kira.

These are essentially folders within each site on Kira – such as a department’s site – where related documents can be stored and organised.

Documents can be uploaded either by clicking an “Upload” button, or by dragging and dropping them from your computer into the browser.

They can then be managed (moved, deleted, renamed) within SharePoint Online, using its very intuitive interface.

Document Libraries can then be embedded on any Kira page. Individual documents can also be embedded on a page for quick online viewing.

 SharePoint document library embedded in Kira (left); A Word document, stored in a Document Library, embedded directly in a Kira page (right)

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8. Easy to Configure User Workflows

Workflows are popular requirements, particularly within task based Intranet however, often these are delivered with complex, proprietary technologies which are hard to maintain and use.

Kira is built on and tightly integrated with Office 365, allowing Kira to take advantage of other workloads in Office 365, such as Microsoft Flow.  

Flow has been designed to deliver powerful workflow design and implementation capabilities into the hands of users who are not software developers. 

Flow is built on top of Microsoft Logic Apps which provides an easy to use interface for creating and updating user workflows.

A Flow can be added to any list within SharePoint Online and can be triggered on a creation or update of items.

Flow contains 100s of connectors that integrate with not just Office 365 but also other technology platforms (e.g. Gmail, Twitter, Dropbox).

As well as being able to create flows from scratch you are also able to create from a template, allowing the easy re-use of a workflow created by colleagues.

As well as having the ability to create custom flows, Microsoft is further developing and improving SharePoint online to also include a content page approval flow.

This flow will submit the page for approval to a named individual and once approved will update the page to being published. This is expected to be released to tenants within Autumn 2018. 

The cadence of change within Office 365 is extraordinary and if you select an Intranet in a box solution that is natively developed on the Office 365 platform, then you will be able to take advantage of these new features as soon as they are released and Kira will embrace them, typically without intervention from CompanyNet.

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9. Easy to Configure Templates & Branding

Letting users create new content from templates is an important feature.  To this end, Kira supports Site and Page templates.

Site templates are provided via a feature called Site Designs. This enables any user who has the appropriate permissions to create a site containing all the features required for a new site within Kira. These features include:

• Homepage content
• Kira navigation
• Kira columns, and
• Kira homepage components.

To create a site there is an easy-to-use interface which lets you select which type of site you’d like to create:

Selecting a site from this menu will instantly provision a site with the correct settings in a matter of seconds.

Using this feature copies the layout, metadata, and content from an existing page, quickly freeing up the content creator to update the content on the page.

This is very effective process for driving consistency across page components.

Kira’s page metadata panel also encourages your users to maintain consistency across your intranet pages.

The Page Information, Publishing, and Rollup Video sections require content editors to tag their page with important metadata.

The Page Layout section ensures that only a small number of layouts are used on new pages.

And the Features section will, by default, ensure Comments and Page Information components are included on the page.

Page metadata panel (left) and page information / author details components (right)

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10. SharePoint Online Modern Team Site Branding

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11. Easily Configure User Permissions

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12. Easy Publishing Procedures for Editors and Content Owners

Publishing content on Kira is a piece of cake. The process is intuitive, highly visual, and satisfying to use.

Importantly, it’s just as easy to set metadata that helps surface your new content across the intranet (such as in search results, or on the homepage).

To demonstrate how easy it is, here is the process for publishing a brand new page.

In this example, we’ll be creating a new page within the Communications Team’s site on Kira.

content author first clicks on the ‘New’ button, which gives the option of either starting with a blank page, or creating a copy of the current page.  We will choose “Start with a blank page”.

The new page is immediately created, and the author is prompted for a page name.

Once we’ve named the page, we can also set a header image for the page. This can either be uploaded from your computer, selected from existing images, or chosen from a web search or OneDrive.

Next, you can choose a layout for the page. We’ll use “One-third right column”. You can have multiple sections in your page with different layouts.

Now we’ll insert a new text element into the main part of this section.  Clicking the “+” symbol reveals a list of available components, ranging from text and images to embedded files, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and even interactive maps.

With a text element added, we can now start writing! Formatting options like bold, italic, underline, bullet points and a range of headings are available to make your text more interesting and easier to read.

Using the same process, you can also add any other elements that are relevant to the page. Elements can be moved around the page using a simple, visual ‘drag and drop’ process.

Once we’ve created our page, clicking ‘Publish’ will instantly publish it. The first time you publish a page, a special panel appears offering additional options to promote it on the intranet – such as adding it to the current site’s navigation, posting it as a news item, or emailing it to selected colleagues.

Throughout this process you will have seen an example of an Information Architecture (IA)

that delivers end user navigation on the Intranet.  The IA is rarely generic as every customer usually has specific requirements to build an IA that is relevant and proportionate to them.  We have built in a degree of services to help GOSH design a custom, proportionate Information Architecture.

At this point, you can also set metadata for the page, using Kira’s dedicated metadata panel.

Clicking a button on the page reveals this panel, and lets the author set useful information such as the page type, whether to promote it as news, the content-owning author, team and department, and whether to include features like page information and comments.

Your page is now published. The whole process is simple and intuitive, meaning content authors can publish things quickly, without annoyances and with minimal training.

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13. Search Engine with Taxonomy, Featured Links, Best Bets and “did you mean” Function

Kira exploits the powerful search capabilities across the Office 365 platform.

Kira features an aggregator that allows you to specify a fixed SharePoint query for all users.

As such Kira’s aggregator component is used for both the Kira News Centre (shown below) and Kira Policy Centre:

The aggregator features highly-visual search results (with images and video) and the ability to filter the results based on page metadata set by content authors.

It updates live as the search query is entered, narrowing the search results as you type.

This means users can quickly find the page they’re looking for – such as a news item, or a policy or procedure – by searching and then refining by clicking the metadata filters.

Kira’s content search is driven by Microsoft Graph.

Kira uses a hub site at its root, connecting all the other sites to it enables a seamless searching experience across all the Kira content;

The search results support file previews for over 270 file types and it is constantly improving with support coming shortly for further custom entities within search.

The ‘did you mean’ feature, delivers results via, either the “others are searching for” capability or that search also returns ‘best-guess’ results when a user misspells a name, for example.

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14. Fully Configurable Without the Need for Downtime

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15. Intranet People Directory

Kira comes with a built-in People Directory which is powered by your existing Active Directory.

The directory is fully integrated with Kira’s intranet search. So when you want to find someone, you can simply type their name into a standard search box, and they will appear at the top of the results.

This search is based on the powerful Microsoft Graph API that underlies all of Office 365. It also returns best-guess results when a user misspells a name.

Clicking a person’s name here in the search results, or anywhere in Kira, reveals a People Card. The People Card reveals a complete profile of that person, their skills and interests, and their professional relationships.

Search can also find people based on fields like job title and skillset, so you don’t necessarily have to know the name of the person you are searching for:

The People Card is deeply integrated with Office 365, and will soon have additional functionality such as integration with LinkedIn.

The initial view of the People Card shows basic information such as contact details and job title.

The About tab provides additional self-completed information about the person, including skills and interests.

The People Card also shows an org chart based on the currently-selected person, showing their direct reports and people with whom they work most closely:

The People Card also has a tab showing files the colleague has recently worked on.

Note that this feature respects user permissions, so only files the viewer has access to will be visible here.

Documents private to the person whose card you are viewing will not be shown.

In addition to this, wherever a person’s information appears in Kira, hovering over it will pop up a summary with information about that person. Clicking ‘Show More’ will then reveal the full People Card.

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16. Ongoing Improvements

We keep Kira aligned exceptionally closely with Microsoft’s roadmaps for SharePoint Online and Office 365 – more closely, we believe, than any other “intranet-in-a-box” product.

This means that Kira always reflects current thinking and best practices in intranet and digital workplace technology.

Kira’s closely Microsoft-aligned development roadmap also means Kira is kept at the cutting edge of technology.

This meant we could successfully integrate new SharePoint features – such as Modern Publishing, Communication Sites and Hub Sites – into Kira.

Continuous improvement

Where Kira already has a feature that is superseded by a similar feature released by Microsoft, and so long as the Microsoft one has the same or better functionality, we retire our custom component.

This means we can focus on developing new functionality for Kira without having to maintain outdated legacy components.

Where a customer has additional requirements beyond the current capabilities of Kira, which cannot be met with a simple reconfiguration, we work with them to develop new components or functionality to meet their needs.

If the new feature would be useful to other customers, we roll it back into Kira and make it available to others.

We also take into account suggestions from customers, and general trends in the sector to create and add new features, and to refine existing ones.

Kira’s modular nature means we can roll out new features to existing customers as soon as they are stable.

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17. Integrating Social Media with SharePoint

Kira integrates with social media in a number of ways.

Firstly, it allows embedding of elements such as Twitter streams, Facebook pages and Yammer conversations directly in any page (including the homepage).

In addition Kira offers the ability to comment, rate and ‘like’ news articles and pages, depending on your needs.

Kira comes ready to integrate with Yammer, Microsoft’s enterprise social network (ESN), and a part of the Office 365 suite.

Content authors can enable a comments section, which appears at the bottom of their page.

This comments section is driven by Yammer, where the comments also appear. In our customers’ experience, this is a great way of starting conversations about news items and other pages, and leads to greater take-up of Yammer.

An example of page ratings and Yammer comments below a news post on a Kira intranet

Finally, Kira offers integration with Microsoft Teams. Teams from Office 365 enables real-time instant messaging, file sharing and even virtual meetings to take place on a team-by-team basis.

Kira can, for example, display a calendar component which can launch live webchats organised on Teams.

We expect to provide more integrations for Kira with Teams as this technology develops.

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18. Delivery & Implementation

We have developed an array of flexible licensing models for customers and as such we can happily provide you with your proposed model, where you only pay a product licence fee when the product has been moved into a production (go live) environment.

It is our expectation that the implementation of your intranet will require both services and product from CompanyNet. 

18a)Typical Turnaround

We can typically deploy Kira on your working, Office 365 test environment within 3 weeks.  In some cases this can be earlier however this is dependant on your O365 Environment.

This is possible, because the product is always in a deployable state and we can very quickly configure an agreed minimum viable product (MVP) and install it quickly on your test environment for you. 

This is a practice that we regularly deliver for Intranet customers – where requirements are well enough understood and an Office 365 tenant has been setup correctly, an MVP Kira solution can be very quickly configured and installed for users to experience, test and refine.

Where requirements are less clear or need to be better understood by users, we still typically install a base, MVP build of Kira, but then conduct a structured, agile, user engagement process, where real experience of the solution is used to refine 1 or 2 iterations of the solution until a go live ready version is signed off. 

This user engagement experience can typically be delivered in a few weeks and we consider it an essential component of every Intranet project – in driving the high levels of end user adoption that would be the basis of your Intranet project success.

Your requirements have to date only been described in relatively simple terms but they can easily be delivered by our Kira product. 

It may transpire, once we get the opportunity to engage with your users, that your Intranet requirements are more sophisticated. 

Its possible, Kira already has this advanced functionality because Kira reflects the Intranet / Digital Workplace requirements of dozens of customers. 

If you have new, unique Intranet requirements, we will be able to advise how best to deliver them, when and at what cost.

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19. Migrating Content into SharePoint Online

CompanyNet would be happy to assist you with the migration of audited content to your new Intranet. 

Content migration is a core component of our delivery responsibilities, albeit working hand in glove with the customer.

In most cases our clients require us to “audit” content before migration. In addition to auditing contentwe also help with the prioritisation of legacy content and new taxonomy to ensure any content migrated is easy to find.

We have tried and tested methods for working with customers on migration activities including:

• development of content strategies
• content audit practices
• information architectures
• programmatic and manual migration of content
• content origination
• re-writes and content style guides for future content publishing standards

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20. Intranet in a Box Analytic Reporting Structure

We provide standard Intranet analytics and a full range of bespoke analytics depending on your requirements.

Analytics is at the heart of a successful content team’s operation – you can’t improve your content if you can’t measure it.

Our previous customers have been very successful with their Intranet projects when they invest in time and understanding of what content is being consumed and how it is being consumed.

We have therefore developed not only the technology but also the supporting methodology, to drive effective Intranet analytics and reporting.

From a functional perspective, Kira features bespoke analytics built using PowerBI and presented within Kira itself via a clean user interface.

We will work with you to tailor your dashboards to present the most relevant actionable metrics.

These include: Top sites, most read and liked news, most read authors, consumption by user role and location, access by browser and device, top commenters, and even sentiment analysis.

These analytics are integrated not only with your digital workplace but the entire Office 365 suite.

This will give GOSH a full picture of how users are working with Office, Yammer, email, files, and more.

The goal is to give you a complete picture of end user system interaction.

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21. Creating Workflow Approval Systems

SharePoint Online is integrated with Microsoft Flow which includes a powerful and easy to use Approval function.

Approvals steps within Flows can be combined with other actions (such as sending emails, updating values in SharePoint, calling web services etc.) to implement complex processes:

Each run of a Flow is recorded for reporting and troubleshooting. The Flow security model allows multiple levels of sharing:

• Personal flows owned by a single user
• Team flows shared between several owners
• Read Only sharing allows Flows to be shared with users who can run the flow but cannot edit the Flow

Flows can be triggered directly by users within SharePoint or can run automatically when a relevant event occurs (such as adding a document to SharePoint) or periodically on a schedule.

Flow designs can also be upgraded to Logic Apps – which are the Azure infrastructure equivalent to Flows providing greater power (e.g. Logic Apps can run for longer periods of times than Flows – which is relevant if a process needs to run over many months).

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22. Data Security and Quality Procedures

Having chosen Microsoft Office 365, the choice of which data centre geography your O365 tenant operates from, is yours.  Almost certainly, it will be UK if you switched your tenant on in 2018 but unquestionably, it will otherwise be set to Europe.

Your O365 Tenant administrator will be able to confirm the geographic region your tenant is operating from.  CompanyNet will not be holding any of your data in our data centre.

Microsoft opened their UK based datacentre’s in November 2016 and now have 3 Datacentre regions within the UK – UK – East (London), West (Cardiff) and North (Durham)

https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-gb/articles/industries/public-sector/microsoft-uk-data-centres-continue-to-build-momentum/

This shows a map of the UK regional centres

https://products.office.com/en-GB/where-is-your-data-located?ms.officeurl=datamaps&geo=UnitedKingdom#UnitedKingdom

and the O365 services operating from various locations for the UK

You should be reassured that Microsoft / Office 365 provides in-Geo data residency, business continuity, and disaster recovery for your data.

To maintain reliability and high availability, Microsoft replicate your customer data in at least two geographically distributed data centre locations.

Core customer data will only be replicated in data centre locations in your Geo, ie UK.

At any given time, your core customer data* may be stored at rest in any of the data centre locations assigned to your Geo.

*Core customer data is customer data committed to be stored at rest only in your Geo according to the Microsoft Online Services Terms

Please Note: No customer data is held within our Kira product.  As a measure of how tightly integrated Kira is with Office 365, all your Intranet data is held within Office 365 and the UK datacentres discussed above.

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23. GDPR Compatibility

With roughly 160 GDPR requirements ranging from how you collect, store and use personal information, to mandating a 72-hour notification for personal data breaches, it’s clear that using cloud technology can help accelerate the path to compliance for most organisations.

GDPR compliance however cannot be associated simply with a technology product or platform.

Sensitive personal data can be contained in email messages, documents, an Intranet, spreadsheets, notes, and local databases for example and saved in individual cloud storage accounts.

Restricting access to that data is an important element in protecting the privacy of individuals.

Office 365 incorporates privacy by design, and Microsoft has robust policies, controls, and systems built into Office 365 to help keep personal data private and keep your organisation GDPR compliant.

Our Kira product stores zero personal data directly, instead it relies on the features and controls within the wider Office 365 platform to assist organisations to manage data and data processes properly and secure GDPR compliance as a result.

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24. Training & Support

Our support services have been refined over the years, on the back of working with many ITIL certificated ‘enterprise’ scale customers.

We will manage a second and third line support service.  Our clients typically want to deliver the first line service, where local support ‘tickets’ are captured, triaged, resolved internally or escalated to our support team. 

We will help your support team with specific training and knowledge transfer activities, to get up to speed quickly.

We will make available to your IT personnel, our 24/7 service desk solution, a web solution where your support requests (and indeed any enhancement requests) can be directed.

Your service requests will be carefully tracked internally at CompanyNet. 

Tickets are assigned to relevant support engineers, progress is tracked and reported until satisfactorily resolved. 

We build a close working relationship with your team, built on effective and timely communications and this relationship is underpinned by highly transparent reporting services to customers.

We have a daily ‘stand up’ where we discuss openly across the company all projects, support services and customer issues. 

1 day per week is dedicated to reporting and discussing the support service metrics and KPI’s.

Whist our service desk solution is available 24 x 7, our telephone support services are available 8am – 6pm weekdays. 

We do not currently have any customer asking for this service to be available 24 hours a day. 

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25. Level Agreements for SharePoint Online

At CompanyNet, no two clients are the sames and we are happy to agree with you, what an appropriate SLA will look like for the support and enhancements of your Intranet. 

Response with 2 hours is standard practice and we are happy to agree with you, best practice prioritisation, escalation an resolution KPI’s. 

We are confident we will deliver an effective support service toyou and deliver a trusted support escalation service.  We deliver support services to almost all of our customers at one point or another and we’re confident the complexity of your needs will present no difficulties to us.

We have been developing and configuring software solutions for over 20 years and in all of that time have always offered customers, a professional, ITIL aligned, cost effective support service, backed by SLA’s.

We have evolved our support services over time to be able to offer customers a number of tailored services – from the traditional purchase of time/effort to be consumed as a ‘solution maintenance’ service over an agreed period, through to ‘support and enhancement’ contracts, where with simple change control processes in place, both on-going maintenance and managed enhancements can be delivered, to the more innovative ‘continuous improvement’ support service, where CompanyNet and the customer agree the value to be delivered from a proportionate use of a ‘full service’, continuous improvement contract.