Full Intranet with Hub Sites for Professional Services

Business challenge

The firm had accumulated four disconnected systems over eight years: a SharePoint 2013 on-premises intranet, network drives for project deliverables, a company email list for announcements, and a standalone HR system for forms. The old SharePoint farm scored 2.1 out of 5 in the annual IT satisfaction survey and cost €18,000 per year in licensing and maintenance. Microsoft 365 was already licensed but severely underused. The greatest challenge was not technical but organizational: three department heads had built informal sharing workflows in Teams channels and were resistant to migrating to a centrally governed platform they did not control. The IT director had seen a previous intranet project fail four years earlier for exactly this reason — adoption had collapsed when departments felt the platform was imposed on them rather than designed with them.

Implementation approach

The project used a hub-and-spoke SharePoint architecture: a root Communication Site served as the company homepage, with four associated sites (HR, IT, Finance, and Projects) connected via hub site navigation and inheriting a shared theme and search scope. The homepage featured a personalized news feed powered by news posts from all associated sites, a company calendar using SharePoint list view web parts, and a quick-link section personalized by department using SharePoint audience targeting. The employee directory was built on Microsoft 365 People web parts with enhanced profile cards populated from Azure Active Directory, including manually curated skills and project history fields. Power Automate flows covered two high-volume request types: vacation requests (three-step approval logged to a SharePoint list with manager notification) and IT support tickets (routed with SLA tracking and escalation alerts). The critical change management step was running three co-design workshops before any configuration began, in which each department head defined their sub-site structure within a governed framework — giving them ownership of content while IT retained governance of permissions, theme, and taxonomy. This co-design process was the primary driver of the 80% adoption rate achieved within two months.

Measurable outcomes

• Single hub replacing 4 legacy tools
• 80% employee adoption within 2 months
• Ongoing support and training included

Project timeline

5 weeks from strategy to launch

Key takeaways for similar organizations

The co-design process was the decisive factor. Professional services firms have highly autonomous department cultures, and imposing a centrally designed intranet generates the kind of quiet resistance that shows up as low adoption statistics six months after launch. Giving each department ownership of their sub-site within a governed hub framework achieved both the organizational consistency leadership required and the autonomy department heads needed to commit publicly to the platform. The phased rollout mattered equally: launching the homepage and HR site first in week five, adding IT and Finance in weeks seven and eight, then holding a full company launch event in week nine, gave the organization time to build habits before adding complexity. For firms migrating from SharePoint on-premises, the most under-budgeted risk is orphaned user accounts from legacy Active Directory synchronization. Budget at least five days for identity cleanup before beginning content migration — every hour spent here prevents hours of broken permissions discovered by frustrated employees after go-live.

The IT director noted that the co-design workshops eliminated the 'imposed from above' perception that had sunk the previous intranet project. Each department head presented their sub-site structure at the week-nine launch event, which created public accountability and drove sustained adoption. We now recommend this approach for any professional services firm with more than two departments — the extra week of workshops pays for itself in adoption metrics.

Technical stack