Intranet with Office 365 for VNG AG

Today, companies are faced with the challenge of using many parallel platforms internally, on which information is exchanged and project work takes place in a wide variety of ways. Often, there is no central overview for important, relevant information. Employees have to constantly search for all the necessary data again. There is a lack of a central dashboard for digital collaboration.

An Intranet is like an organisation’s digital workplace. Brought together on an interactive platform, it contains everything an employee needs for their daily work. Targeted service, information and knowledge distribution is achieved through modern communication channels. Interaction between management and employees is improved with the help of clear document repositories and collaboration on tasks and projects.

An intranet solution with a future

A cross-company intranet also plays a central role in internal group communication at VNG, the gas group active throughout Europe with the business areas of gas trading and sales, gas transport, gas storage and biogas. The company, headquartered in Leipzig, has several subsidiaries and currently employs around 1200 people. The challenge in the joint project was to replace the existing intranet platform while at the same time revising the organisation and content structure of the intranet.

Likewise, extensive use was to be achieved via a modern platform with appropriate  security mechanism It was therefore important to find a solution quickly at the beginning in order to be able to make a platform decision first with a view to the requirements. On the VNG side, various product solutions were therefore evaluated as alternatives, but also the option of using an ecosystem, such as Office 365. Join GmbH was one of the providers approached and was considered as a consultant for an intranet with Office 365.

In view of the company’s strategy and the possibilities for future employee collaboration within Office 365, the company decided against a product solution, which might involve additional costs, and in favor of building a SharePoint-based intranet. Both the results of the preceding technical workshops and the economic considerations as well as the possible time horizon were decisive here.

Provision of the intranet in record time

Due to the thorough preparation and content analysis as well as internal workshops and surveys on the part of VNG, it was possible to provide the basic structure and content areas of the new intranet within two weeks, so that the content work of the editors could already begin at this point. This counteracted the existing time pressure and enabled a rapid start to the migration of the VNG intranet as well as quickly visible initial results.

In the further course, previously stored information could be transferred and existing knowledge about, for example, project procedures, norms and standards could be secured and also optimised and organised in the presentation.

This gain in time and the rapid implementation as well as migration were based on the excellent organisation and conceptual analysis of the content in advance. This played a particularly important role for the various subsidiaries and their future visibility within the group of companies.

Source: © VNG/Torsten Proß, Jeibmann Photografik

A platform solution with many advantages

Global intranet topic areas such as human resource management, employee health and internal services have been created, as well as a distributed news model for internal communication. In addition, each corporate division can present itself with its own content and also manage it itself.

An advantage of an intranet based on Office 365 is both the one-time login as authentication for using the entire Office 365 services, as well as its display option on all possible end devices. The latter automatically realised a mobile accessibility of the intranet. Furthermore, the possibilities of a detailed authorisation management regulate the access to information individually for each user and a global search function enables a fast research and relevant information access.

An important aspect during the entire course of the project was the involvement of all participants in the project team at VNG. This interdisciplinary composition made it possible to process many task packages in parallel and to make decisions more quickly across departments. Join supported the internal IT department as well as individual employees of VNG in an advisory capacity throughout the entire process. This meant that not only was the implementation carried out jointly, but an understanding of the possibilities of the Office 365 ecosystem and the intranet platform implemented within it was also systematically created. This interaction led to the successful completion of the project in a short period of three months.

Continuous further development of the intranet ensured

This means that the VNG team is now in a position to independently expand its own intranet in terms of content and structure or to make desired adjustments. At the same time, new features of the Office 365 platform can be included independently at any time as further developments.

In the future, Join will support the VNG Group not only in strategic consulting on Office 365, but also in the areas of IT security and compliance, since the basic functions and security settings already in place are sufficiently understood and their capabilities can be adapted for VNG, so that identities as well as files and content are protected to the necessary or desired extent. With our years of experience in internal and cross-company communication, it was possible to professionally implement VNG’s individual customer needs and convince them of our capabilities.