Designing an intranet experience that’s unique to each user
Bauer Media
EMEA | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Hear the story of how Bauer Media has built a personalised SharePoint intranet experience, getting the info that matters to users direct to their homepage. Amélie Roland-Gosselin, Head of Channels & Content Management, will show how colleagues in a complex matrixed organisation are served the right mix of news, information and tools (and their plans for taking the experience to the next level by enabling users to customise their experience).
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Yes, Amelie, you have a great story to share of designing an intranet experience that's unique to each user. Big statement there. And as with everything, it's a nonstop, never ending task, right? But please share screen and fire away with your story.
Thank you so much, Pete. And I'm really hoping the tech gremlins will be staying at bay now they've had a chance to have a five minute break. Hello, everyone.
Really great to be here. I don't think I've ever been in a virtual room with quite so many intranet enthusiasts before. So this is really quite exciting.
As you can see on the slides, my name is Amelie Rowlands-Gosselin. I head up the channels and community management team at Bauer Media Group. We're part of the broader group comms team.
They're based in Hamburg. I'm based in the UK and I work from home. Today, I'm going to tell you about how we have been busy building a personalised SharePoint intranet experience for our people over the past couple of years.
Before I delve into the how and the what, I'm going to rewind a little bit to the middle of 2021. That's when our story really started. So about four years ago, as we emerged sort of bleary eyed from the worst of the Covid pandemic, it dawned on us that obviously the world as we knew it was changing and it was changing fast.
And for us at Bauer Media Group, as I know is the case for so many other organisations across the world, Covid really exponentially accelerated a couple of trends. The first was digitisation. So we had to digitise our ways of working and we had to do it fast.
And this boost of digitisation in turn enabled a second trend, decentralisation, harmonisation and streamlining of business processes and strategy on a scale that we just hadn't seen before. And for us as a consequence, we saw a dramatic shift in our ways of working. Almost overnight, we went from a business focused on local brands with siloed operating models, office based ways of working to a much more matrixed organisation with a multinational operating model and a move towards the bulk of the collaboration was being done virtually.
Essentially, we went from very much analogue and static ways of working to much more digital and dynamic. And from a comms perspective, this posed a particular challenge because our people's information landscape, the way I like to think about it, expanded hugely. So what do I mean by information landscape? Well, imagine our media group, we have 14,000 employees.
So imagine 14,000 employees working across our three lines of business. We have a radio business, a publishing business and an outdoor advertising business across about 15 different countries. And pre-pandemic, most of our people's kind of information horizon was their brand, their department, their office.
Most of them didn't need to know or deal with anything beyond that. They had their local news and information, local leaders that they saw face to face, local tools for their various transactional processes like expense management, travel booking, etc. But very quickly, as we digitised and as we centralised and harmonised, this horizon expanded to include new layers of news, information, organisational structures and tools way beyond the local level.
So we suddenly had all of this stuff at a country level, at a regional level, business level and even at a company level. And this really hugely increased complexity, increases still to this day complexity and hugely adds to the demands on our people's attention and their bandwidth. So we'd gone from a landscape that was pretty manageable and contained to one that feels really quite vast and potentially overwhelming.
From a comms infrastructure point of view, this meant our channels were simply no longer fit for purpose. We had legacy intranets on different platforms operating in silos, no longer able to serve the needs of our people's kind of enhanced information needs. We were seeing a proliferation of solutions, people scrambling around without a strategic framework and without any guidance on how to bring everything together to create an efficient and productive digital workplace for our people.
Our people were telling us they felt overwhelmed, overloaded, they were struggling increasingly to know where to turn to to access information, to access news and the ever expanding list of tools that they were now needing to use. So what did we do? Well, took a deep breath, took a step back and we rolled up our sleeves. And we imagined a world in which our people could log on every day and see exactly what they needed.
Our vision was to create a hub that could help them cut through the noise, a platform through which our people could access the specific tools relevant to their unique needs. News and quick links that were specifically curated for them based on their individual role within the organisation. So based on where they sat in terms of country, in terms of line of business, in terms of function.
And we wanted this all in one place. In fact, we wanted all of this on a single homepage. So just imagine that company wide platform, but a homepage that is unique to you.
And the other thing that we were really keen on was that the hub would be seamlessly integrated with Office 365 apps for a seamless digital workplace experience, because this question of who owns the Internet? Actually, I don't believe in thinking about the Internet as a standalone entity. For me, it needs to be part of the broader ecosystem, kind of digital ecosystem for our people. As I'm sure you're well aware, this isn't a small undertaking.
It takes significant time, money and resources to build. So we spent quite a lot of time upfront putting together a robust business case because the big challenge for us as communicators, we knew the benefits and the value that this could bring to the business. But the challenge was actually quantifying the return on investment because these benefits are intangible.
It's really hard to put a number on increased efficiency, on engagement, on productivity. One thing we did do was estimate what it would. I hear someone.
Sounds like someone's off mute. Shall I just carry on? I'll just carry on. So what we did do is estimate what it would represent if each employee said just one minute per day looking for what they needed.
So we worked out that this would amount to potentially 900,000 euros per year. You heard me right. And that's based on 8000 active users per day and the average German salary for office based workers.
It's a really rough guesstimate back of a pack of a five packet sort of figure, but it's the sort of number that will make executive boards really sit up and listen. We had clear principles for the platform. It needed to be aligned with business strategy and represent the needs of every part of our business.
We wanted it to be user centric, so built with in-depth knowledge of the wide variety of user requirements. It should be seamlessly integrated with Office 365 and we plan to build it in stages, so evolving it iteratively as business needs changed. So what did our solution look like? Well, we explored a number of options.
We looked at a fully internal build. We looked at licensed out of the box Internet products, the extension of our current suboptimal suite of legacy Internet and building from scratch in Office 365, so SharePoint with add-ons. We weighed each option up based on the initial investment cost, ongoing running costs, the internal resources required, scalability, speed of delivery and how easy it would be to iterate and evolve.
And we actually very quickly settled on option four, so a SharePoint build with functionality add-ons that came out loud and clear as the right option for us. In terms of the design principle, it's really simple, SharePoint core with extras, only where we felt the out of the box product wasn't quite up to scratch. We assessed lots of different vendors, some really great companies out there, and we chose Silicon Reef, a UK-based firm, as our build partners because out of all the vendors we looked at, their approach, their products and their ethos felt like it was the best fit for us.
And what they did was, what they do is provide SharePoint accelerators and web parts that are then added to SharePoint to make the full experience much better than the standard out of the box. And this includes look and feel, personalisation of news and quick links and a customisable tool app. So in terms of its structure, nothing revolutionary.
It looks like your standard intranet, global navigation at the top. Let me see if I can do a little pointer. So we have the global navigation here at the top, like any standard intranet through which people can access all company sites and content.
Everything is open, nothing is restricted. And then we have a news section at the very top, as you saw in the video. Let's see if I can, I'm hoping the little pointer does work.
This news section at the very top for updates that are relevant to everybody across the business. So, so far, so standard. Then we get to the clever bit.
So pulling information from each user's Active Directory profile, we then surface the parts of the business that are relevant to them. So whether they work for radio or publishing or outdoor, whether they sit in finance, HR, IT, any other function, what country they're based in. And the combination of this, these data automatically populates a list of sites in their My Sites web part right here.
And this gives them quick access to the content that is most relevant to them. So rather than having to go through the global navigation, they can quickly access the parts of MyBauer that's relevant for them. Each of these sites have their own news web part.
So there's a news web part for audio, there's one for audio UK, there's one for HR, there's one for finance, you get the picture. And the combined news from these relevant sites is then pulled through into a personal news feed called My News. So for tools, we have a neat little app built by Silicon Reef into which we upload links to the dozens of tools used across the company and users can pick and choose the ones that they want to pin to their homepage.
Again, really simple, but a super effective time saver. And then probably our biggest headache was finding a practical and pragmatic solution to support the seven different languages that our people work in. So what we settled on was a combination, a mix of kind of human translated content, AI translated content and browser based translations.
So where it is important for content to be in the local language, it's produced locally and users will see their local language by default. Where it's less critical, we use AI translations or we don't translate at all and ask our people to rely on browser based translations. So what's next? This is kind of where we're at.
We're very much considering it our MVP and we've been busy working with Silicon Reef on the next functionality enhancements and the next iteration of our internet. We're seeing it, as I think one of the other presenters said on the call earlier, as really something that needs to evolve. Every year it'll look different and we need to keep building on the platform in order to stay relevant.
A couple of the things we're looking at are to take personalisation to the next level. So as well as offering a default level of personalisation based on people's AD, we want our people to be able to customise the news and the quick links that they see. So they can subscribe to additional sites and topics that will appear in their My Sites and appear in their My News.
We're looking to introduce automated news alerts via Teams and Outlook and also enable users to customise how and when they receive these notifications. So do they want, depending on which site they follow, do they want to get the news as soon as it's published on a daily basis, on a weekly basis? We really hope this will drive traffic to the internet, which I know is a big bugbear that many of us share. And also it'll mean that we can definitively ban the plethora of newsletters that seem to keep popping up across the business.
Because one thing our people do tell us is they hate the newsletters. I know as comms people, we love them, but they are always ranked, at least for our audiences, as the least preferred way of getting their news and updates. So when you have automated news alerts, no need for newsletters.
And what we'll do is we'll have a single personalised roundup that will go out every week based on people's unique My News curated news. We also have, just a couple of weeks ago, introduced Viva Engage, formerly known as Yammer, and we've embedded it into our homepage and across all our various sites. And that's really giving more people to, more opportunities for people to engage in real time around relevant content and topics.
And we're seeing that also drive traffic. And finally, the cherry on the cake is the imminent introduction of Spoop Analytics, which we are super excited about, because then we will be able to also test what content works best for our people. To wrap up, just thought it might be useful to share a few learnings from our journey so far.
Build a detailed business case and bring leadership with you. This is really important, especially when it's a big investment of resources. I cannot stress that enough.
Take the time to identify all user and business requirements, however granular they might be, because this will always pay off. It doesn't mean you can cover them all off, but at least acknowledge that they're there. And then if you need to prioritise, you can, but at least knowing what users requirements are will help you build something that stands the test of time.
If you're using external providers, thoroughly vet them against these requirements and be really clear what are must-haves and what are nice-to-haves. Top tip, become besties with your tech colleagues. You will be seeing an awful lot of them.
And as presenters said previously on the call, actually having a really good partnership with tech or DEX is critical to make these sorts of digital workplaces really work. Be realistic about build and implementation timescales. It took a lot longer than we had anticipated, but it's important to take the time to do things right.
Be as specific as possible in your user journey, so never make assumptions about anything really. Really work through what the user journeys for every use case might be. Have a clear vision, but build in increments and iterations.
And then test, test and retest. You'll be amazed how even standard stuff doesn't quite do what it's expected to do, standard out-of-the-box stuff. So testing is really critical.
And one of our learnings was also keeping an eye on the Microsoft roadmap and be aware of the curveballs along the way. So you might be developing and building something and then a Microsoft functionality change comes along and suddenly, you know, you've got something new to contend with. And then my final point is change and adoption are key and they take much, again, much longer than we expected.
So we launched our Internet exactly two years ago, and I feel like it's only just now that people have really got their heads around it and are using it in the way that we intended. And that's all for me.
Meet the speaker:
Amelie Roland
Head of Group Channels and Content
