Q&A Panel (All AMER speakers)
SWOOP Analytics
AMER | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Q&A session with all AMER speakers.
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As I said, we're going to go to the Q&A panel now. I think, are we spotlighted if we can get everyone on? So Lauryn, Jana, Sofia, Aaron. Great.
I've been looking at the Q&A. There are lots of questions. I don't think we're going to be able to answer them all today.
So I'm just wondering, I'm going to say it anyway, how comfortable are you people connecting with you on LinkedIn and reaching out to you afterwards? Is that okay? Yeah, that's brilliant. I just think there's just lots of questions. So I'm going to start.
It's been incredible. Thank you all so much for sharing your SharePoint stories with us today. What's coming, Mark? Just having you come up and talk about SharePoint, what you can do, building intranets is so helpful.
There's no platform like this. And I think it's the comms and IT and digital workplace community are just so friendly and helpful that it's just really nice that you all come on and share your stories. So massive thank you from us at SWOOP.
So right, I'm going to start questions. So Lauryn, I'm going to come to you first. There was a lot of things on search.
So finding information on our intranet, something we are trying to improve in our organisation. How do you measure the search success rate? And so we had a few questions about search and that one was from Tanya Watkins. Gotcha.
Thank you. So we use Caveo for our search product. We've used that for a couple of years now.
We use it for the prior platform that we use for intranet and now for SharePoint online. The success metric, and I think you guys saw me flash up the number for it, is based on the number of times someone quote unquote successfully completed that particular search. So in Caveo terms, that usually means that someone was able to click one of the top two or three articles or pieces of content that show up in search.
And a lot of times, those top two or three articles or pieces of content are ones that we have specifically featured or optimised for SEO. So that's the success metric for that particular metric itself. Amazing.
And I'm going to do a shameless plug. We also have search analytics in Suite for SharePoint at an intranet level, if anyone wants to have a look at that. I think search.
So a quick one again for you, Lauryn, from Alyssa. I love the idea of the themed homepage. I think they were amazing, the homepage takeovers.
How much of your homepage is built with custom web parts technology versus out of the box SharePoint web parts? Right. That's a great question, and I should have covered that in the beginning. So the majority of our homepage is custom.
I think as Cai or someone else on the SWOOP team mentioned, we worked closely with our vendor, RightPoint, to create a lot of those customised what you're seeing are web parts. I'm trying to think if there's anything that isn't custom built in. The Viva Engage feed isn't custom.
That's out of the box SharePoint. And then everything else is custom. So at the very top, you'll see there's like a welcome banner.
That's a custom web part. Our featured news section is custom. We have a My Resources web part.
That's custom as well. And then we have a video section web part, as well as that People Moments web part that I pulled in. So all of those are custom.
Brilliant. Then that actually leads me on to another question. This one's for you, Aaron.
You talk about custom web parts as well. So how many custom web parts are you building for Prologis, or are you utilising out of the box features as well? So we try and leverage the out of the box content types and then extend them with the metadata that is really important to comms. So for example, I saw a question about the In the News web part.
In the News web part, understanding what the publication is, where's this information coming from, what are people linking to, is really important to the comms team. So I just kind of leveraged the out of the box card view that is available in SharePoint and tried to create something that stylistically matches the site. On our homepage, I would say just over half of our web parts are custom.
So our main news part, unfortunately, the SharePoint News web part doesn't have a full width version. And having big pictures was something that was really important to the comms team. So we just kind of created something that was a wider version of the exact same SharePoint News web part.
And then in the News, we filter by content type. But I'll say selfishly, I come from a SharePoint consulting and development background. So I just like building web parts.
So I think that's also another part is as Afrologists, we really try and develop things in-house. And so my team, I have a really great React developer who helps with a lot of the front end development. But yeah, we really like to leverage SharePoint framework as a way to elevate our comms goals.
Amazing. Thank you. I'm going to come to you now, we've got a few questions.
So one of them came from Amir. So Amir is looking at using SharePoint and then Viva Engage for the social network, for the enterprise social network. Amir just wants to understand how you are using News.
So do you post News on SharePoint, then post it out Viva Engage or do you socialize it on Viva Engage? Is it a copy and paste of what you're doing? So we don't actually use Engage yet, but hoping to add it to our list of channels soon. But I think the line is blurry at times with Engage. To us, the intranet would host the corporate news or the company wide messaging versus the news related to the community should be part of Engage.
I do feel that they should interact. You have parts, web parts that easily incorporate Engage feeds on the intranet. So I feel you can get both of the worlds in the same place.
Yeah. Lauryn, Sofia, I know you both use Viva Engage. Anything to add? Yeah, I agree.
So we use our homepage more like Yano was just saying. It's our company speaking out to employees, where Viva Engage is more our employees are posting things and sharing their local news. We'll post on Viva Engage for those stories that I mentioned where we want to source responses to build community.
But really, it's turned into our employees platform, and we find value in that building culture. Brilliant. Anything to add, Lauryn? Same? Not in particular.
I mean, I think, again, to Sofia and Yano's point, we focus on really allowing the employees to lead the conversation there. But we do have employee communicators on our end who will lead the conversation in some ways, again, depending on the priorities for the company. But for the majority of it, we think of it as more of like a, it's really an accessory to the content that we're sharing on our intranet rather than the main movie.
Thank you. Mark, I'm going to come to you now. So there's some questions.
There were lots of questions. So do you have to be on copilot to be able to use the FAQ web part that you shared at the end? Yeah. And I saw a couple questions about copilot.
The main thing is if you have a copilot license, you have access to pretty much everything I shared and showed to create pages, to create content, to do a lot of things across the whole portfolio. If you have the pay-as-you-go model, which is intended for people who maybe aren't creating the content, but they're going to consume it, use the agents or leverage other things that the pay-as-you-go model applies to, that certainly is more consumption based. So you may not create things, but you might interact with it.
And there are ways where you can do that without a full license. And it's transactional. It really is per query when you type into the box.
With the FAQ web part, it is what it sounds like. It's intended to build out an FAQ on a page. And with copilot, you have the ability to then have the FAQ web part automated by copilot or self-automated to some extent.
But it's not required. It is just a web part like any other. So there's more information that's going to come as that starts to ship.
It's one of the things that was newly announced just a couple weeks ago. So bear in mind there is always the element that it may change over time as licensing does. But it really is intended to be, like Aaron stated, a fun web part that is meant to be very targeted.
It's using SharePoint framework the same as everybody. So it really is a web part. It's not necessarily a special thing.
It just happens to be influenced by copilot when it can be. I also just wanted to throw in one thought, putting my product manager hat on, to the question before around publishing. Obviously, you have to activate whether you use Viva Engage or SharePoint or multiple sites and wherever.
But there's a great tool called Viva Amplify. And so much of the conversation today is around communications. And the quick one-liner, and I'll pause there, is when you go to publish to multiple locations, that could be multiple sites, multiple Viva Engage communities.
That could also be email. There's been a number of mentions of the email, SharePoint news to email feature. But to do that all in one click, once you have your comm ready to go and scheduled, to publish out to all of those endpoints in one motion besides the copy-paste that you mentioned, saves a ton of time.
And it's a really nice product in terms of usability. And of course, the effect is to save you a bunch of time. But anyway, just wanted to throw that one in there.
Well, while we're on the topic of Viva Amplify, Richard, I think Richard's from Revlon. In Viva Amplify, can I create a news post with a video that is not downloadable? I've not used Viva Amplify, so I can't comment. I'll give my answer.
And if anybody who's actually used it in real life, I've used Amplify a number of times, but as a communicator internally. The value is all of your videos, mostly that you're putting onto a SharePoint page, are already in SharePoint by nature of them being a part of the SharePoint content service, which is primarily in the future going to be powered by Clipchamp just as a brand. But if you have a video that's in SharePoint, you put it into an Amplify on a SharePoint page, or whether you publish it just straight into SharePoint or Viva Amplify helps you in the publishing process.
That going out to your email is essentially a link to the person that has access to that SharePoint site. You have to kind of think through some of the permissions. But when they're viewing it in their email, it's not a copy of the video.
It's just a window into the video playing from your corporate intranet. Everything else, just to be also very clear, if you publish it in as an email, it is a part of the email because that's the intent, to have a really nice formatted email that looks nice. So some elements do carry over and it becomes a part of the email content that gives a little bit of a different answer.
But as far as the video, it still lives and breathes where you left it. It doesn't copy the video itself. Amazing.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you. I'm going to just move back to the Q&A section.
Jana, another question for you. This is probably actually for all of you, but let's start with Jana. What type of support do you have within your technology team for your out-of-the-box solution? Are they SharePoint experts? So yes, we're very blessed to work with our technology partners, which include SharePoint SMEs.
We do try to use as much of out-of-the-box functionality as customizations require. Security reviews, obviously, are not cheap and take time. But we do work with our development team to support any of these special requests.
Amazing. How about you, Lauryn? Do you work closely with IT and SharePoint? We have. And especially on the dev part of the work that we're doing for our intranet, we actually connect with them every day.
And then we have other meetings throughout the year with them pretty consistently. I'd say the relationship with them, I think, has continued to grow favorably. And I think the fact that we pulled them in very early for the update to intranet only made the relationship better.
So I'd say we feel really lucky because they're very sweet. And working with them is awesome. Yeah.
And I think it's so important, obviously, a testament, Sofia and Aaron, to your relationship. And it is so important to work really closely with IT. I've always been super lucky in my roles.
We're rolling out intranet. So I've been rolling out SharePoint online intranet since 2017. And everything out the box where I could, but had the most incredible IT team.
And I think that just helps you build some fantastic stuff. And also, you get to see a lot of the technology first and work with IT. I think that's the thing.
I think there was a theme earlier on with the Europe is that sometimes IT maybe don't work together. And so actually, I think if you can all be involved to work out what's right, what's working, what's new, what's coming from the roadmap, and then work out as a manager or internal comms or digital workplace, how to implement those channels. It just makes your relationship stronger.
So I'm a massive fan of working with IT. I'm just going through some more of the questions here. I'm just seeing if anything's been updated because there is honestly, there's loads.
And so I just wanted to make sure, we've got a question on the city again about the cards. Do you get analytics on your cards? Yeah. So we do.
We don't get them. We get them directly from Microsoft. They're limited.
They only pretty much give you the interaction or the engagement. So the number of clicks on each individual card. And they give it to you on a monthly basis.
So you can't really look back. So you have to really track it on your own. So ultimately, it would be great if we can bring it to Adobe and do a little bit more magic than what it offers today.
And then in terms of interactions and how much we get on some of these cards, so the most popular ones, I would say get over 10,000 clicks in a month. And based on that, we then decide where to place it. We have the dashboard cards above the fold right on the home page.
So it's below our feature banner. So as the City Hub homepage is the default browser homepage, basically, whenever people open their browsers, whether that's Edge, Chrome, they see our homepage and they see these cards, which helps tremendously with engagement, with making sure that people are using these cards. Yeah, I think there was a question earlier actually on the cards about the themes that you use.
I think someone was saying, you know, you can have so many different topics for those different cards. How do you centralise those topics and what you're going to use? I think you actually mentioned it in your talk that like lots of people obviously want a card for their internet, for your homepage. So how do you theme those different cards? I think you had like the HR one.
Did you have a training one? Yeah, right. So I think we're still at the beginning of the journey. I feel that as we evolve, we start to target these cards to specific populations.
I would say that we have three types of cards. One that provides a list of links that can be pulled from a list, Microsoft list or a fixed list of links. The second one would be pulling data from a feed from an application and showcasing or showing that information right there in the card.
And the third one would be search type of card. So it's using our elastic feed search to display the results, like looking up the names or looking up the office locations, looking up acronyms. So many different types of data.
So we try to bucket them into these types of themes. Yeah, it's probably hard work, isn't it? I've got a question for all of you. So I'm going to start, Sofia, with you.
Do you have a centralised content model? So do you have authors or intranet authors managing their own content, so decentralised model, or do you have a centralised model where it goes through the comms team or a dedicated team? So we're pretty decentralised. We have specific content owners across teams and regions and then we just let them run with it. It would be incredibly difficult on our lean and mean three person team to moderate all the content going on our intranet.
Lauryn, how about you? Centralised, decentralised? I'd say we have a pretty decentralised system and again it's because we just are accounting for so many different team members across different divisions and regions. I will say though we do have an enterprise communications team that manages a lot of the communications that are going out to each of the individual divisions, regions and or business units. So they kind of manage a lot of the here's the enterprise-wide content that you guys are going to see no matter what and this is from that you can take whatever you want and make it applicable to whatever team you're sharing with.
They're probably a team of about five right now. So with our my team's about four people. So with the group of us I think we're doing as best we can but it's the amount of content doesn't stop.
What about Microsoft, Mark? You have decentralised, it's huge. Yeah it's a big company like a lot of others. It's definitely a mixture of both.
So there is a corporate communications team both that you know messages out to the world, there's an internal team that messages all the inbound you know things that employees across the world need to know. There's the the bottom up which is at the team and the individual level and I think the biggest word that I would advocate for but certainly is to answer your question there's a huge self-service model with inside Microsoft and that's not just news but it certainly is one element where most anybody at Microsoft I would say even long-term guests that we have that are within our global address list can create what they need to do their work. So create a site and of course within that site you're creating news you're sharing it maybe that site's a part of a hub site and maybe sometimes every once in a while something gets boosted because you've got big news that's important to the company and so the model that's in place is a lot of top down a lot of bottoms up and the ability for people to create that and to one of the questions I saw behind all of that there's a pretty broad and very well established governance model so that if I go and create a site or 10 sites or whatever I am going to go through having to answer and address do I still need it do I still need it is it relevant so you know beyond the permissions and access controls the longevity of news might be more campaign related so three months four months and then I should you know have it park away and some of the things that come externally to I think I heard Aaron and Sofia talk about is the constant of news coming from exterior so that might be your own news but it's posted publicly and having that be able to flow in and not be blocked as far as an external content source pretty significant in terms of it's really easy to do news via a news link don't shortchange how to make it easier for everybody but also to not block external content you know when it's relevant and of course you have control over that so don't mean to be long-winded about it but it's I think very easy to implement when I say easy meaning from an IT perspective to do the things that you want to do to enable top down bottom up and then of course your layer of governance across it.
Absolutely and actually so Susan actually asked that question and Susan if you download our benchmarking report we actually have done the whole section on setting up so if you want to go for that decentralized model the governance as Mark said is so important and you need to get that right when it comes to decentralize and the training as well because a lot of people you know naturally won't be you know writing for the web and things like that so we've done a whole section in our benchmarking report on supporting your intranet authors but then on the other side one of our customers Leica Studios they actually have a centralized model which is really nice so they're a team of two but they're a smaller outfit smaller company they're a studio in Portland in Oregon and they actually look help the intranet authors decide the content and then they will work with them to publish it so you know if you the benchmarking report is amazing and there's tons of information in there it is a long read so you probably want to take a few days to read it but there is tons of information on there but yeah I think the governance is so important especially if we're looking at AI intranets can become out of date very quickly and you lose trust and I think it's so important and as Cai and Laurie mentioned you know the amount of time so 93% of people are visiting intranet incredible number but they're only spending about six minutes so it's a again making sure that content is concise straight to the point so you you are supporting your colleagues for going into that intranet finding what they need and coming out again I think we've got about five minutes I don't know Cai there was a question about the benchmarking report I don't know if you want to come off from you and just ask it I think it came from Chris about the number the companies that were benchmark the sizes of them I think that they were yeah I was actually it was funny I was actually just looking up the data in the background for that so the the average was 9 000 people and it's really average from I'm just looking at the data here from maybe around 1000 people from the smallest up to about you know I think we are more than 70 000 people for for the last participant so and they covered many different industries we had a good mix of people that had frontline you know desk workers so it's a really quite uh it's quite uh yeah it's a really good mix of organizations amazing thank you and I think with that I'm going to finish the Q&A.
Meet the speaker:
Jana Temu
Global Communications - Senior Intranet Lead
Sofia Espinosa
Internal Communications Manager, Operations
Mark Kashman
Senior Product Manager (SharePoint)
Lauryn Edmondson
Digital Tools & Channels Manager, Internal Digital Communications
Aaron Delong
SharePoint Architect and Developer
