Q&A Panel (All EMEA speakers)
SWOOP Analytics
EMEA | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Q&A session with all EMEA speakers.
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I think there's maybe a few people who have dipped in and out of a couple of the sessions, so I did want to just recap who we have on the call here today. And I will stop sharing the screen actually because I want to see faces, so let me stop sharing. And we have our panel on screen here now, as you would have seen from the chat and the Q&A, there's like a billion questions flying around left, right and centre, and of course this is the point when my dog Monty wants to come and say hello and ask a question.
So what I've done is I've actually had the help of the SWOOP team in the background there collating things and I've pulled together a few kind of key themes and with time in mind what I want to do rather than picking individual questions one by one, I just want to kick things off by asking an overarching question. So before the event we did a pre-event survey and we had a number of questions that came through in that survey too, so I've basically gone through a number of different sources of questions and thematicised them, themed them I guess. What I want to do is I want to start with a question, I'll start with the VELUX team as the first presenters of the day, I will put the first question to you but then I'd love to get Amelie and Melinda your take on this as well.
There's a lot of people asking questions about how you push intranet content out there or how you direct people into the intranet in this omni-channel world and all of you have touched on this in bits during your talk, so can I start with Christian and Signe on your perspective of just to share a little bit more detail on this, I think you mentioned in your talk that you don't use mass emails, so if you could just expand a bit on how do you actually reach people and pull them into the intranet content? Sure, just let me know if you can hear me, excellent, yeah so I tried to touch upon it a little bit in the channel overview, so what we do is obviously every time we have a news and this is my main area of expertise is the global corporate news, that's what I do, we will share a link to that specific page or site in our Viva Engage channel, we have one that is called all companies, so it encompasses all 12 000 employees technically, bear in mind of course that half of them are production workers, so not necessarily frequent users, but they do have a license to that channel, so they have the opportunity to follow along there, so that's the first thing that we always do, then if we also have a lot of other communities on Viva Engage that might be more specific in terms of it can be functional area, can also be related to AI for instance, so we will also share content in those relevant communities to make sure that we grab the attention of people who are especially interested, if this is something that is relevant for everyone, if this is a corporate news that everyone needs to know, we obviously also need to use the managers and ask them to cascade, then we have a separate set of channels that we activate for this to make sure that we reach everyone, also the 6000 people that are not on the SharePoint site, so for most of the global news that we do publish, it's not a must-know for everyone, so we do what we can to highlight and engage also on info screens and offline comms, but we also know that we will never get to 100% reach on this, and I'll just add one thing, which is we have as an offset, we expect all our desk-based workers to familiarize themselves with VELUX One, but also to keep up to date, so there is actually a spoken, sorry, I forget the word right now, expectation, sorry, for everyone who joins VELUX One, they join, they're introduced to this and we expect them to keep up to date, so there is always, there's something on you as well to not just sit and wait things to be pushed out, but you need to go actively and also search. Yeah, so it's part of onboarding. Also, we use a lot of QR codes, it could be on the info screens, it could be on physical handouts or post or whatever, to do that kind of cross-channel profilination or whatever it's called, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Amelie, I think, correct me if I remember wrongly, but you mentioned it was you that was saying you're really anti-e-newsletter, is that right? Well, we've seen proliferation of them across the business, so we've had a little crackdown on them since we've launched the internet, just because we know that people's inboxes get flooded and the more they get flooded, the less your content will be seen and valued, so, but they still exist and they still happen, so the way we, and our real challenge is, in the past, so going back 10, 15 years, if you made the internet the default landing page for browsers, everybody saw it once a day, right, because you would physically log out of your machine every night and log back in in the morning when you were office-based. What we're finding is people don't shut their browsers down, navigate away from the internet, so actually relying on the fact it's the default landing page doesn't work anymore, so we need to find other ways to drive traffic to the internet.
We do use mass emails currently, so for really important stuff, and we have clear criteria of what's, what kind of qualifies as really critically important, and we do send traffic drivers, but they are literally just one line saying, please read X, and then we direct people to the internet. We are starting to use BeaverEngage, as Xenia said, that's something we are actively doing right now, and then we do have a weekly news roundup that we, as group comms send out, that does a roundup of all the kind of group-wide news that people have, should have read that week, but that's, again, a holding pattern until we introduce these automated notifications, which we're hoping will come really soon, and then we will ban newsletters. And so I'm seeing a trend here of this sort of partnership of the SharePoint intranet with BeaverEngage as like the engagement driver, and I know that's replicated in many ways at Syngenta, right, Melinda, having that kind of partnership between BeaverEngage and the intranet.
Are there other things on top of that, or could you explain a little about how you drive things to those important intranet areas? BeaverEngage is definitely one that works really good when you're focusing content into particular communities, but actually newsletters, to go against everything you've said, Emily, we do use newsletters a lot, and it is because there's just so much information out there on a lot of different channels, and different teams, different countries have a preference for different channels. So in some countries, they love everything on Teams. In others, they're very much into BeaverEngage, like offices in India, and then in global, it's very email-based, but the one thing that is always constant, the one way to get to everyone and get their attention on something is newsletters, but if they're done in the right way and they're really targeted to particular communities, then they can actually be very effective, and you can actually use AI to create newsletters very, very quickly by really going into SWOOP, go find the articles that aren't really well read or that are underperforming, click on those, get a summary, chuck it into a little text box on a draft newsletter template, which you can get out of SharePoint and send it on directly from SharePoint.
This whole process can take about 30 minutes, and I think newsletters in the past were something that there was external tools, people would agonize about what content to put in there, you have to reformat all the pictures, all that kind of effort that it would go through, it'd be probably an eight-hour day and at least two people having to go through that content. AI has turned this into 30 minutes, so if that's the way to reach our stakeholders when we need to get information across, yes, it's a newsletter, it's another email, but it can be done in 30 minutes, so even if someone is annoyed by it and they delete it, haven't lost too much time on it. Awesome.
Touching on, you mentioned then, Melinda, the sort of different people want different things, right? They have their different preferences in different regions, different groups, different communities. There were quite a number of questions that have come through our different channels that touch on this sort of segmentation and personalization piece, so I guess the segmentation of your audience is kind of the practical side of delivering that personal experience. How do you make sure your employee data is accurate? How successful is that for you? How complex would you say it is to genuinely personalize things? Can I come to Amelie? You talked, obviously, your talk was primarily about personalization, so this question of how complex it is and some of the practicalities around that personalization, what would your perspective on that be? It is really quite complex and you do rely on AD, so the Active Directory, and how clean the data is in there, and what we discovered is it's not perfect.
It never is perfect. Actually, for our media group, it was particularly suboptimal, but what we did was we actually narrowed down as much as possible the data that we relied on, so we relied on country, which broadly was populated and accurate. We relied on line of business, so we have three different businesses.
Again, that was broadly correct, and function, so actually three pieces of data that you think actually, if you haven't got that in the Active Directory, then you have bigger issues, so that's what we rely on and we combine that to then pull through if someone sits in the radio business and in the UK and in HR, that gives us kind of the unique combination of what they need to see. It is complex. It's not perfect.
What we did do is work closely with tech to make sure there was a workaround, so where people, A, educating people that they should be seeing a personalized homepage, and B, educating them on what to do if they don't or if they're missing particular sites that they need to be feeding through their My News, or some people, you know, their data is accurate, but they also need to see other stuff because of the particulars of their role, so we have worked with tech and there is a process, so they do it through a service request, an IT service request and ask to be added to a particular site. Going forward, we are hoping to launch customization, so actually enabling people to opt in or out of stuff based on what their interests are, apart from the stuff that's in their AD, so that you won't be able to opt out of the stuff you should really be seeing. Yeah, yeah, and from the VELUX perspective, what do you see as the complexities of that personalization piece? Yeah, it's kind of the same picture.
It's a little bit complex. We have Workday as an HR system, then that synchronizes, of course, into Entra or HAD, as it was called before, and we do have some properties there we can leverage. We have one unique property, where we, for each person, have basically the organizational breakdown, so in one property, we can see which business units are they in, which department below that, and which team below that, etc., so we can basically make dynamic groups on any level within the organization, except that is quite difficult to maintain, because you're depending on the department names not changing their names or managers not being other managers, depending on how you define that dynamic formula, so yeah, it is a little bit complex.
You have to work closely with your HR people or your tech people to get this to work. Yeah, anything to add on that, Signe? No, no, no, I guess we would love to be able to leverage this more, and I love Emily's presentation. This is a dream scenario for us also, to be able to personalize it more, and just because we also have an overload of comms channels and information flowing around, people missing stuff that they would like to see or getting presented with stuff that they don't care about, so it's really a dream scenario and something we are looking into leveraging, but as you're also alluding to, it comes down to the data and the quality of that.
Yeah, and that's a never-ending challenge, right? Melinda, from the Syngenta side of things, is it a similar story or anything extra on this personalization angle? I think it is a very similar story. I mean, we have content that's targeted to people that they can't get out of, but there's a lot of things that they can opt into as well, but we do also have personalized internet experiences now, so kind of similar to what Emily was showing. Again, we're just doing that with SharePoint out of the box, where you can target certain pieces on that home page with quick links and other content directly to a particular area, so we do it region-based, and yeah, I mean, we have really strong Viva and Gage usage as well, where people do tend to stay in their communities as well, so it's kind of half of it is what we're sort of pushing to people, but there's other things that are really pulling people in as well, and it's kind of like a nice balance.
Yeah, I'm really, I'm not sure if it's just my natural bias that I love Viva and Gage, but I just, every conversation now, it's really great to hear more and more that it is that true partnership of Viva and Gage working hand-in-hand with the intranet as a key part of the digital workplace. Another big theme we had coming through in the questions, I am very conscious of time, but we've got a few minutes left, and there were many, many questions that basically all boiled up to advice around making the business case. We had one specific question that I thought was a really nice one that I'll put this to you, so if you could give only one piece of advice to someone building a pitch for more resource investment in their corporate intranet, would that one piece of advice be, and why? Melinda, I'll start with you.
Obviously, invest in an AI tool. I think, I mean, I'm leading a lot of the kind of AI adoption across the company, so I always bring it back to that, but honestly, the productivity increases and the benefits you get from it are just unbelievable, and I wish I had it when we were actually implementing our intranet, which we did three years ago now, and we moved across from a third-party wrapper product to SharePoint Online out of the box, and making the business case for that was really, really tricky because comms teams were really used to having these platforms where they had a lot of different bells and whistles, and they didn't want to move away from that, and they really saw this as the front door to the company and the company culture, and they just didn't see how it could be recreated, so when we went in with the business case, it was actually that we wanted, that we had less resources on this. It wasn't about asking for more resources per se.
We were trying to turn it around to saying, we don't have resources to spend on this anymore, so that's why we need to simplify it, and the way that we got them on board with the thinking, because we had to tell them that there were compromises to be made, that you have to sacrifice some of those bells and whistles, but it's now going to be more simple and easy to run, so whatever resources that we have on the internet, they're going to be able to really concentrate on the content delivery and making the experience really good for end users, so bringing it back to a purpose. What's the purpose at the end of the day? Is it to be something fancy and a window into our soul? No, it's to deliver content to users who need to get things quickly and easily, so enrolling people around a purpose rather than going straight down the line of, it needs to be this, and it needs to be this, and we need this, and we need that. We always had this.
You cut out all that conversation, just said, here's the purpose at the end of the day. Let's work towards that, and again, it was going in a kind of tool agnostic way, the way I said with AI is thinking about what's the business problem first, and then thinking, well, how do we solve that? Is it actually a tool, or is it just some clever thinking? Nice. Amelie, if you could give one piece of advice to someone pitching for resource investment, what would it be, and why? I think Melinda really summed it up nicely, is think about the purpose, not what you as communicators are trying to achieve, but actually looking at it from your user's point of view, and looking at it from the business point of view as well, so what is the value? How can you demonstrate the value that you are tangibly delivering to the business through better user engagement, productivity, efficiency gains, et cetera, so looking at that, because at the end of the day, it's the boards, the leadership teams that will sign off the budget, and they're interested in hardcore figures, not the fluffy, nice to have stuff.
Yeah. Cool. Christian and Signe, your one piece of advice for someone pitching for investment in their internet.
Yeah, it's a tricky one. I think going evergreen, out of the box, is key to a lot of other advantages, so you can invest in people, empower them, you can make great content, make good communications. I think that would be my advice.
Yeah, nice. Yeah. Can I add just one more point, sorry? Also, thinking, so pitching it as a part of the digital ecosystem, not just the internet, so not looking at it from a narrow point of view, but looking at how it fits within the broader digital ecosystem of collaboration tools, because at the end of the day, our users don't really care if it's the internet, if it's some other tool.
They just want to get, as Melinda said, to the content fast, and they are agnostic, and they don't even know if it's the internet, or if it's Viva Engage, but actually looking at it holistically is key. Yeah, really interesting point. I totally agree on that.
That's why we focus on digital employee experience, not digital workplace technology. It's a matter of trying to be in the user, in the colleagues, viewpoint. Super important.
Yeah. Now, I'm going to put a handbrake on myself right here. I'm going to apologise to the four of you that we don't have another half an hour, although you may be thankful, but you can now go relax, because we could have gone through loads more questions, but I want to be respectful of all the time that everyone who's attending today has donated, but especially thankful to the four of for standing up, and I know we only got through a few questions.
If you do have a chance to check and add to any questions you may have already answered in the Q&A, do take a chance to look through the chat, because a lot of people have got a lot of love for the knowledge and the presentations that you shared today. So, whilst I still have you spotlighted on screen, let me say thank you so much.
Meet the speaker:
Signe Lukowski
Senior Corporate Editor
Amelie Roland
Head of Group Channels and Content
Christian Skjæran
Senior Digital Workplace Consultant
Melinda Schaller
Global IT Capability Lead, Strategy & Operations
