By Adam Hickman, Microsoft 365 consultant lead
Powered by Lightspeed365. Delivered by our team at Content Formula, the consultancy behind Lightspeed365.
Summary
The Aurora Group is a UK based education sector organisation. Its existing SharePoint intranet had grown without a consistent structure, so employees found it hard to locate information, trust search results, or stay connected to organisational news. Our consultants ran a discovery-led programme covering information architecture, governance, search, and communications, then implemented the redesigned intranet on SharePoint Online with Lightspeed365. The result is a clearer, more accessible digital workplace, built with the governance and search foundations to keep working long after go live.
The challenge
This one had a familiar shape before we'd finished the first round of workshops. The Aurora Group's intranet was not broken in any dramatic sense. Employees could still get to things eventually, and the platform still ran day to day. The trouble is that an intranet which only works "eventually" is quietly expensive: time lost searching, confidence lost in the platform, and communications that never quite land with the people they are meant to reach.
Discovery conversations with The Aurora Group surfaced a familiar set of symptoms:
- the existing intranet lacked a coherent structure and consistent user experience
- employees found it difficult to locate information quickly, which reduced confidence in the platform
- search was not surfacing the most relevant content when people needed it
- document management needed stronger ownership, metadata, and governance
- accessibility and mobile access mattered for a diverse workforce
- employee engagement with internal communications had room to improve
- the organisation wanted the intranet to become a genuine front door to the wider Microsoft 365 environment
This is a common pattern in organisations where SharePoint has been established for a while but the employee experience has not evolved alongside changing business needs. The Aurora Group was not looking for a repository. It wanted an intranet that would encourage engagement, collaboration, and adoption, which is a considerably harder brief to deliver against.
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The approach
Why start with discovery, not design?
The temptation with any intranet refresh is to jump straight to wireframes and colour palettes. For The Aurora Group, we started with discovery instead: understanding needs before proposing solutions.
We followed a structured, people first approach: discovery, strategy, design, implementation, and knowledge transfer, run in that order. The project moved through the following stages:
- requirements gathering workshops with key stakeholders to understand employee needs, communication challenges, and ways of working
- synthesis of discovery findings and recommendations covering information architecture, governance, employee engagement, and collaboration
- development of governance guidance and frameworks to support content ownership, publishing standards, and long-term intranet management
- information architecture planning and site mapping to create a clearer intranet structure and navigation model
- wireframing and theme design to shape the user experience and visual identity of the new intranet
- solution implementation and configuration using SharePoint Online and Lightspeed365
- knowledge transfer, administrator guidance, and support for long-term adoption and management
That sequencing matters. Governance and information architecture decisions made early are generally cheaper to get right than a site structure unpicked after launch.
What was delivered
The resulting solution is a SharePoint Online intranet, extended with Lightspeed365, built around a more engaging, personalised, and user-centric employee experience. In practice, that meant:
- Lightspeed365's News feed, placed at the very top of the intranet homepage as a carousel, so organisational news and updates are the first thing employees see when they land on the page, putting internal communications front and centre rather than something to be searched for
- Lightspeed365's app launcher, positioned immediately below the news feed for prominent, one-click access to key tools and apps. Individuals can personalise their own view alongside the company's mandated apps, with the organisation's highest-priority apps always displayed first, so day-to-day tools are never buried
- enhanced search and findability, so the first result is more often the right one
- Lightspeed365's People search and People directory, letting employees start typing a colleague's name straight from the homepage or browse and filter the full directory by department or team, making it easier to find the right person, not just the right document
- a clearer site structure and more intuitive navigation, so employees spend less time guessing where something lives
- improved document management and knowledge-sharing processes, with clearer ownership behind the content
- Lightspeed365's accessibility component, supporting a diverse workforce's mobile and accessibility needs
- governance guidance to support content quality, ownership, and long-term sustainability, so the intranet does not drift back to where it started
- a more connected experience across Microsoft 365 applications and services, positioning the intranet as a genuine front door rather than one destination among many
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Why it mattered
For The Aurora Group, the intranet was never just a communications platform. It needed to help employees find information quickly, reach the tools they rely on, stay informed about organisational updates, and feel connected to the wider business. That is a higher bar than an intranet that simply works, and it is the bar this project was measured against.
Employee experience sat at the centre of the design process throughout, alongside user research, accessibility considerations, governance planning, and engagement focused features. Left unaddressed, the original challenges would not have gone away on their own. They would have continued to show up as low intranet adoption, information scattered across inboxes and personal drives, and communications that need repeating through other channels because the intranet was not trusted to carry them.
Rather than simply implementing technology, the project focused on building a digital workplace that employees can navigate with confidence, engage with regularly, and rely on as a genuine source of truth.
Why Lightspeed Plus services was the right fit
The Aurora Group could have installed Lightspeed365 and configured it alone; the product is built to allow that. What made the difference here was pairing the platform with expert delivery. Discovery work surfaced the structural problems that a self-serve rollout would likely have missed, the governance framework was designed to outlast the project team, and sequencing architecture and design before implementation meant the app launcher, accessibility tools and other components went live already configured around how Aurora Group's people actually work, rather than left at default settings to be figured out later.
If a similar starting point sounds familiar, it is worth seeing what other organisations have built with the platform. Browse more SharePoint intranet examples.
Get in touch to talk through what a similar programme could look like for your organisation.
Read more Lightspeed365 case studies to see how other organisations have transformed their SharePoint intranet.