Q&A Panel (All APAC speakers)
SWOOP Analytics
APAC| SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Q&A session with all APAC speakers.
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Our next session, which is actually going to be a panel session, we're going to be welcoming all of our speakers back. So let me just do a quick introduction again so we can recall. I'll jump back to the slides where we're up to.
And I'll just make sure that we have all of our wonderful speakers back online. So Jillian, Michael, Elena, Courtney. We have you all ready.
I can see you all. We've got you spotlighted. So the way that we're going to run this, of course, throughout today, we've had lots of questions coming through in the chat, in the Q&A.
The SWOOP team in the background have been quickly collating the questions. We've been having a look at some of the questions that have been upvoted that people have been liking. But I think we can also maybe kick off with a bit of an overarching theme to start this discussion.
So for a bit of background, before the festival session that we're running right now, we had sent out like a pre-event survey to our registrants to really understand what's on everyone's mind when it comes to SharePoint intranets and what people wanted to get out of the day. And one of the questions that we asked our registrants was, what is the biggest barrier to making your intranet the best that it can be? And when we looked at the responses, one of the most common complaints, I'll call it, one of the most common complaints that came through was that people don't have enough people, they don't have enough budget and they don't have enough time to do things properly. And I feel like from the nodding heads from our panellists, probably something you can relate to.
So I'm thinking if we just maybe start with that barrier in itself, lack of time, lack of budget, lack of people to get things done, maybe I'll throw to Jillian and Michael to start with, how have you managed this as a barrier in your experience at Services Australia? I'm not entirely sure about managing it as a barrier, but to endorse that it is a barrier and also for us, because we hold the information, private information of just about every Australian, our cyber security rules are very strict. We also are not the SharePoint administrators, so we don't have that level of administration access to SharePoint and because of the various cyber rulings and so on in the organisation, we don't have some of the add-ons that would help us make the intranet better. So technically, we're a little hand tied by what's just available out of the box and then we also have a quite small team.
So other than Michael, there's four other people and they're managing a very big network and a lot of pages. So, yeah, it's tight, but we just do it. But I think people are curious as well about the size of the teams, right? So, Jillian, you've mentioned you've got, what is it, a team of four? Yeah, a total of six.
Total of six? Yeah, so Michael's boss and then Michael and then three others. Yeah, four others. And Elena, how does that look for NRMA? What is the team? The intranet team.
Yeah, so we've got like a, you know, myself as a digital workplace manager is kind of the overarching owner as such of our platform. And then we also run things up to Stiko, which is sort of my boss and then her boss. And we've got a tech counterpart.
So if we're making any drastic improvements, it's about, you know, selling in that, you know, putting a bit of a one-pager together to help explain what we're trying to achieve. What's a problem, you know, what's a problem we're trying to solve for? And, you know, getting endorsement from that with any kind of major changes. But, you know, it's just really for us.
It's working closely with our comms partners who are also heavily accountable for the content, especially our news component. And then our content owner community for pages. That's kind of our setup.
And then our admin in tech, a critical part for our team as well. But, yeah, it's not it's not it's not big at all. No.
And Courtney, how does this look for Australian Super? We have about five in our sort of internal comms team. And in terms of making decisions about our intranet, we pretty much have free reign to do that. But also, you know, depending on our tech teams, if we need, you know, more of that technical support.
I guess in terms of, you know, having those barriers to, I guess, improving an intranet, I think it can sometimes you kind of just have to focus on the quick wins and the little things that the team can do. Yeah. Awesome.
Okay. Thanks everyone for just kind of maybe setting the scene a little bit with what what your teams look like. That might kind of lead us into some of the more specific questions that came up through some of the presentations.
I think also some of the things that came through in our pre event survey line up quite nicely with some of the sentiment that's come through in the chat and the Q&A as well. So, in terms of some of the other barriers that came up as a part of the survey too that I'll just quickly flag. Poor governance and content management, low user awareness and adoption, technical limitations and complexity, competing priorities and lack of buy in, which I think is has probably come up quite a lot.
Now, if I refer back to some of the questions. Now, some of these might seem like quite specific because they would have popped up at certain parts throughout the presentation. So, you need to just have a bit of a think about what this might be referring to.
Please do take your time. I might just start with the Services Australia team. So we had a question come in.
What feature allows staff to add their own links? Okay, so this is, I would say, would be in reference to the My Toolkit. So, again, this is a customised feature that our technical team created to permit staff to be able to add their own favourites. So, on the current intranet homepage, there's a feature that allows staff across the agency to add their own links and they can add as many as they want.
Almost like your web browser favourites, but these essentially bolt onto the homepage of the intranet. So, for them, all they need to do is when they open the intranet and they've selected a series of links, they would have already added those. They can take them away, move them around how they prefer to see them, whether it's alphabetically.
And that's how they go ahead and add those links. We found across particularly our service delivery staff that they use it very, very heavily. They've got loads and loads of their own links already set up, and that's for them is what helps them do their job every day.
Within other more enabling teams, some use it less, others a little bit more frequently. So it is a customised feature that we created. In regards to the new My Toolkit, again, that is another new separate customised, I suppose, favourites as well, where those toolkit links are already pre-populated.
So we've gone through and spoken with all the various business areas to find out what the primary links that they use within their roles and business areas are and included them within this toolkit repository. And they're set up in a way where they're categorised and they can go through via these categories and say, OK, I believe I belong within this organisational group. These links relate to me and I can go through and very quickly and easily see, oh, these links are relevant to my role.
And they just quickly just click, click, click, click, click, select what they need and they all appear on their home page as well. And that's separate to the favourites. So the favourites allow them not only just to add to their own links within the intranet and other SharePoint sites, but also external links that they may use as part of their role too.
Awesome. Thanks for that, Michael. And maybe just something quite practical as well.
How did you go about getting a test group together and how did you go about collecting ongoing feedback? OK, again, we put a call out to our service delivery business areas. So we wanted to ensure that we cast a very broad net as far as the various cohorts of staff that we incorporated into our focus groups. So we included a group from our existing distributed publisher list, which they belong to various business areas across the agency.
But we very heavily focused on our service delivery staff, which work across all the various programs that we have, whether it's Centrelink, Medicare. And also not only just front of house, which we call staff, which are there that directly service our customers, but also our telephony staff, those that are on the phones, constantly dealing with customers on the go, using their resources on the fly. So we were able to tap in and into those business areas and create a partnership, an alliance with them to be able to identify, and they identified staff for us to feature in our focus groups.
And not only our focus groups, we also ran one-to-one testing usability sessions as well. So we ran groups and also one-to-one where we got individuals to test the features, actually get them to say, all right, use the toolkit. How are you going to use it? How well does it work for you? Did you find it easy? Is it, did it not meet your needs? You know, what are the links you use every day? Can you find them? Can we make you find what you need? So that's how we engaged.
And further to that, and finally, we also engaged staff from neurodiversity backgrounds as well and staff with disability to see how they were able to use our concepts using various accessibility and assistive technologies and tools as well. Fantastic. Thank you for that, Michael.
And I guess speaking of kind of getting people to use the tools as well, Elena, now, of course, at the NRMA, you have a very large proportion of frontline workers that you are working with and trying to get engaged with the platforms. How did you manage the challenge of getting frontline workers to access and use the internet? I know that's a big question. Good question.
How did you approach that? Yeah, look, our roadside, it's really interesting because initially there was a lot of feedback that, you know, our patrol workforce would be a little bit, you know, it would be challenging to get our patrol workforce to use this technology, but because of their demographic. But surprisingly, they're the, you know, they're the highest users of our intranet. There's a lot of stuff on, we've got a section for them called patrols at work, which is where they can see their shifts.
And so they need it to do their job. I think it's, you know, we're still working through other parts of the business as part of our creating that unified interface at the moment. There's a lot that is still creating in there, working in their own SharePoint environments.
So we are working to bring them over into the one environment and have sort of child sites and we've got the parent and the child. So there's a lot more work that needs to be done on that front. But I truly think it's awareness and just communicating and helping them understand how to access things.
And, you know, we've done videos to help them understand, you know, if you go to your, you know, with Viva Connections, I think Viva Connections has been a real game changer for us as well. Being able to push notifications, you know, if we do announcements on Viva and if we publish new stories, having that Viva Connections has really helped, I think, because people can see the activity. They can pick and choose.
Yes, I want to read that story. No, it's not relevant for me. But at least we've given them, you know, we know people are working in teams every day.
They're in that environment already. So how, you know, I think it's really, yeah, it's really benefited us to have that connections, Viva Connections set up so that people can get that instant notification while working in their team's environment. In terms of frontline, I think we still have a lot of work to do.
Like we've created QR codes for, you know, for videos from leadership, which has helped drive a little bit of adoption to the platforms where people can just scan and they can watch a video from their leader, which, you know, we're getting really good feedback on that. But at the end of the day, they just want easy access and we need to sort of meet them where they're at. So, sorry, I heard a cat or something.
Oh, maybe an extra friend on the call. No one in. So, yeah, so frontline is, you know, we're still trying to tackle that one, to be honest.
And we're, you know, it's a big, big focus for us and our team at the moment. So yeah, I think just meeting them where they're at. And there was also a question about how you use Power Automate to help with content governance.
Is that something you have had experience with as well? Yeah, so we've created workflows within Power Automate. So it's basically there's three notifications that we send content owners. We don't approve pages without a page owner.
So they don't get approved. All the approvals are filtered through the comms team. So we have a, you know, we share that approval process where we can quickly squeeze at the page, making sure it kind of meets the needs of our guardrails and our guidelines.
And then we go and we go and approve it. But Power Automate, again, has really helped with governance because, you know, once they're putting their expiration dates in, they then get their reminder notifications in the lead up to it. And then we've made it really easy so that all they need to do is basically archive, keep or delete.
So we've made that process really easy. We are going through a tighter governance process at the moment because we're leading up to a chat bot. So we actually had our chief technology officer come to our community of practice as a guest speaker.
And I think having that top down narrative has been really important. He's kind of really helped explain why it's important to have trusted content, especially as we're moving to bots and agents and people wanting to find the information easier and quicker. So I think having that endorsement set from our chief technology officer has also helped drive that message around governance.
And it's really interesting after he came along, all of a sudden I was getting lots of calls and how do I do this? And I want to make sure it's, you know, it's a really important aspect to governance. Again, you know, we can do so much bottom up, but you also need that why this is important to our organisation and what we do. Yeah, excellent.
Thank you for that, Elena. Now, Courtney, I've got a few quick fire questions to start for you. So first and foremost, is there any chance you can share your migration guideline? Is that something that is shareable? It is, you know what, it is a PowerPoint document that I'll be honest, I just formatted to A4 pages and we printed that out, but I'm happy to share that.
I'm thinking if anyone's really interested in that, maybe Courtney, if we could direct people to connect with you on LinkedIn, would that be the best way for people to get in touch? Yeah, that's fine. And then how many pages, can you remind us again, how many pages were migrated as a part of the manual migration? I think compared to many other organisations, I believe we have a relatively small intranet. So I think it was anywhere between, I want to say 220 to 240 pages.
So during that migration day, we migrated about 68 pages. It's still a huge task. And thank goodness we had Taylor Swift there to help us get through the process, right? And now into maybe some more of the practical parts of this.
So there's a comment here, teaming up for the launch and training everyone is a great tip. How do you maintain the knowledge going forward with content owners changing roles or changing companies? How is this managed ongoing? In terms of managing. Keeping everyone trained, knowledge.
Yeah. Yeah. In terms of changing the content owners at the moment, if someone needs to reassign ownership, it'll usually be an email to our team and then I can change that over.
I feel like in our experience so far with our intranet just sort of coming up to a year, when people have had to change ownership, it's naturally gone to someone in the team who was previously already an editor. So they may already be familiar with SharePoint. But if we have any new sort of content owners and editors that we need to onboard, the first place I'll generally direct them to is that dedicated resources section that we have on the intranet.
It does explain, you know, what each of those roles of content owner, delegate and editor, what each of those roles are responsible for, as well as sort of the basics of SharePoint training or how do you make changes to their pages. But at the same time, you know, our team is available if they ever need to reach out and just want to schedule, you know, a quick 15 minutes to half hour call for me to, you know, take them through the basics. I'm more than happy to do that.
But it doesn't happen as often as I would have expected. So, yes, happy to, you know, sort of offer more hands on support where needed. Some of those barriers we spoke about at the start, right, like having the time and resources to be able to continue to invest in those activities moving ahead.
But on the topic of training as well for the Services Australia team, do you train content publishers in the Australian Government style manual and is this a requirement? I suppose in regards to, well, Jo, I suppose in regards to directly publishing to the intranet itself with our distributed authors. Yeah, we take them through quite a comprehensive training process, which incorporates the Australian style manual, I suppose, as part of the requirement for them to have a knowledge and understanding of. Now, Jo can correct me if I'm wrong.
A lot of the content which is published directly to our intranet via business teams also goes through key account managers and content design individuals, which would have the Australian style manual as a focal point. It's certainly in the training and it's in the wish list. I'm not entirely sure that everybody sticks to it.
But, yeah, it's definitely there as a thing that we would like to see. And I was interested, I think it was either Courtney or Elena was talking about the, you know, tidying up ready for AI so that, you know, the co-pilot could be run over it. And I think we're going to have to embed in our training, the use of co-pilot to tidy up and simplify some of the writing that people use because it can get quite complex and wordy when they don't need to be.
That's a great point. And I know if anyone is really interested in diving into that topic of AI readiness, I will continue to spruik the latest SWOOP report as well. We have a whole dedicated section looking at AI readiness.
So some great fresh insights. I'm sure someone will pop the link in again to the chat to download that. And we also had some insights from experts in the field as well.
Other intranet managers, intranet experts have contributed to share how this is working across a range of different organizations and experiences. Now, Elena, there's a question that people are really keen to ask you. Can you share how you embedded or fed your socials, for example, a direct link with those platforms or a feed via Viva? Sure.
This was one I kind of thought would be a really easy thing to embed on our intranet. Turns out it took a good six to eight months, which kind of blew my mind a bit. But we actually we, you know, we explored web parts and other parts to do that.
We weren't successful finding anything within that suite. So we use a company called Flockler. And we did a bit of a free trial period with them to see if it's something that it would work in our environment.
So they give you a period where you can just sort of test and learn and see if it works. It was actually really intuitive, really successful. There is like an annual fee for it.
It's not much at all. But it basically enables you to connect all the different feeds because we've got so many different parts of the business. We had to engage with the admin for our cruise business and the admin for the social part of our six business and our parks business.
So because we wanted to present, because our employees told us in the poll they didn't just want to see NRMA stuff. They wanted to see feeds from across our businesses. So then we had to work with all the social media admins for those accounts.
They basically went into Flockler, connected their feed. And it's an automated process, but we do need to keep an eye on it because there's some times where our LinkedIn would, you know, would present the same information as our Instagram. Or our Instagram will present the same content as our Facebook.
So we keep an eye on it. You can very easily hide stuff from the feed. If there's duplication of content, we don't want to, you know, present the same thing too many times.
So there is a little bit of sort of manual moderation that's needed for it. But once you get the initial setup done, it's a pretty smooth process through Flockler. So yeah, that's what we've used.
Awesome. Thanks for that. And Courtney, there was a question as well about, so it was, how did you approach the improved search functionality? Ooh, this is probably something that Laura would have been more familiar with, if I'm being honest.
I think we basically just kind of, we did work with an external consultancy, but also with our tech teams to have those search verticals set up. We basically, you know, where previously we didn't have any way to filter down search. We kind of just wanted there to be an accessible way for colleagues to get down to exactly what they were after.
And also because it searches, you know, right across your sort of Microsoft 365 suite and what you have access to. There is the advantage of it being personalized, but then you can then filter it down from there. But I'll have to be honest, I'm not super close with the technical sort of background behind how we set that up.
Okay, I think I saw Laura popping up in the chat too. Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Laura.
I appreciate you jumping with those insights. Now, I think we have maybe time for a few more quick questions before we start to wrap up. Just referring back to maybe the last question that we have.
Oh, there was a few quick questions actually I think I missed for the Services Australia team. Looks to be a hub and spoke model. Is that correct? Yes.
And are you targeting using role-based groups or conditional formatting? Role-based groups. Yeah, role. Audience.
It's basically what we can get out of our intro ID system. Got it. And then I'll just make sure for NRMA, for Elena, have you integrated your dashboard cards with other systems? And if so, which ones? Yeah, so we've only at the moment, we've got three out of four just going to a static page, which is our policies, our careers page, and our employee discounts, because we knew they were the top three pages.
So they kind of just are a static link. The only one dynamic one we've got is our member count. So it's connected to our sort of kind of like the hub where we house our membership information and we basically pull that member number.
So that's dynamic and that's updated every month. But we would like to explore more around dashboard cards. I don't believe, you know, we would love to be able to integrate with our HR and payroll system to be able to show people how much, you know, leave they've got left or even our reward and recognition program, you know, how much dollars they've got in their account they can spend.
So we'd love to do more of that integration. So that's on the pipeline. But at the moment, we've just got the one dynamic.
And just another quick one too, were banners custom created or using images from the 365 photo gallery or both? Our banners are custom created within Canva. So it gives us more flexibility to kind of pick and choose. Sometimes we use GIFs to make them move a little bit nicely, just to make them a little bit more engaging.
And it sort of gives us the ability to choose the imagery and create what we want. But we always do link a banner to either a news story or a page. They've always got a call to action.
So, yeah, we create them ourselves within Canva. Excellent. Thank you.
That was my question. Oh, there we go. And Michael, you can't have Canva.
I've noticed that as we've been talking as well and as the panel has rolled along, there's been a few additional questions popping up in the Q&A as well. So for our speakers, if you do have just like an extra five minutes to stay on and maybe just pop a few extra insights, like Elena, I can see there's a bit of interest in the chat bot journey so far. So we might be able to link up a few people.
But the last question I have to ask to you, Courtney, what was your favorite restaurant in Melbourne that shut down? You know what? It's called Henrietta. I know that there's one in Surrey Hills in Sydney. So it's, you know, like charcoal chicken.
And I found out the day right before I was about to make a booking there. So Sydney, I'll have to come visit very soon. We'll have to get you to Sydney, Courtney.
We'll have to go out to Henrietta. For sure. Wonderful.
So at this stage, I'll say a massive thank you again to our panelists for sharing all of those great insights.
Meet the speaker:
Jillian Harding
Director, Executive and Internal Communication
Elena Sergis
Digital Workplace Manager
Michael Papacharalambous
Assistant Director,
Intranet Project
Courtney Nuyad
Internal Communications Adviser
