By Adam Hickman, Microsoft 365 consultant lead
Powered by Lightspeed365. Delivered by our team at Content Formula, the consultancy behind Lightspeed365.
Summary
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the international non-profit that sets the standard for sustainable fishing and runs the blue fish ecolabel used across the seafood industry. Its intranet, The Wave, ran on LiveTiles and classic SharePoint, and the ageing architecture had started to limit what the organisation could do with it. MSC moved The Wave onto Lightspeed365 in a phased modernisation covering a redesigned homepage, News feed and Noticeboard, a branding customiser, editorial workflow improvements, and search. Around 600 news pages and 300 noticeboard posts were migrated across in the process, so staff kept the content they already relied on. The result is a modern SharePoint intranet that content editors find easier to run, and one that reflects the MSC brand more consistently than before.
The challenge
Marine Stewardship Council came to us with an intranet that was still doing its job. The Wave was in daily use for communications, knowledge sharing, and company news, but the LiveTiles and classic SharePoint architecture underneath it had become harder to sustain, and it was starting to hold back what the organisation could do next.
The brief was to modernise the platform in a way that would:
- move away from LiveTiles and classic SharePoint to a future-ready modern intranet
- retain the functionality staff already used and understood
- improve intranet communication and the visibility of company news
- give content editors a simpler, more efficient publishing experience
- strengthen the brand experience across the intranet through better use of digital assets
- support a modern SharePoint design and search experience without losing what was already working
- create a phased, sustainable route to improvement over time
Legacy intranets often carry genuinely useful features and user journeys that people have come to rely on. What usually needs to change is the architecture underneath them, not the things staff already value about it. For MSC, the real task was finding a route across to a new foundation while keeping hold of what already worked.
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The approach
Why phase the move rather than rebuild in one go?
We worked with MSC through a phased and collaborative process rather than a one-off rebuild. That is a deliberate choice. When an intranet has been in daily use for years, the risk is rarely doing too little too slowly. It is trying to change everything at once and losing the trust of the people who rely on it every day.
The work brought together:
- review of the existing LiveTiles and classic SharePoint setup
- homepage and SharePoint design input to support the move to a more modern experience
- editorial workflow review, to understand how content teams were creating and managing content
- digital asset management scoping, to improve how brand assets were stored, accessed, and used across The Wave
- migration planning from LiveTiles to Lightspeed365, including an audit with the resulting reports reviewed by the team
- migration of news and noticeboard content into the new environment
- modern SharePoint search discussions, to recreate useful legacy functionality in a future-ready model
- ongoing support, to prioritise and deliver improvements over time
The review stage matters more than it looks on paper. Understanding what staff already used and trusted is what let the modernisation keep what worked and only change what needed to change.
What was delivered
The solution centred on replacing the older LiveTiles and classic SharePoint intranet experience with a Lightspeed365-based modern SharePoint intranet, with specific focus on editorial usability, communications visibility, and brand consistency.
- Homepage and News feed refreshed together. The homepage was redesigned with a clearer content hierarchy, and around 600 existing news pages were migrated via PowerShell script into Lightspeed365's News feed component. MSC did not have to recreate years of company news by hand or risk losing any of it in the move, and news and updates now sit in a more prominent, better-organised place on the page staff see first.
- Noticeboard content migrated alongside it. Around 300 noticeboard posts carried across into Lightspeed365's Noticeboard component, so the crowd-curated space staff already used for social posts, classifieds, and informal updates carried on rather than starting again from nothing.
- Branding customiser applied across The Wave. MSC's colours and fonts were set up through Lightspeed365's branding customiser, giving the intranet a more consistently on-brand look without custom development on every page.
- An improved editorial experience. Fewer steps to publish, update, and manage news and pages, with better control over the homepage and clearer visibility for the communications team over what is published and when. Content editors now spend less time managing intranet content and more time creating it.
- A phased move from LiveTiles to Lightspeed365 as the platform foundation, including new SharePoint communication sites in place of the legacy classic sites, and the transition of site navigation from LiveTiles to SharePoint. Staff moved onto a supported, future-ready platform without the disruption of a single big-bang cutover.
- Modernisation of classic SharePoint search into a current, maintainable search experience, recreating useful legacy functionality in a future-ready model. This was treated as a strong first phase rather than a finished state, with room to build further as MSC's needs develop.
- A digital asset management model scoped and designed for The Wave, mapping out how teams will find and use on-brand imagery, documents, and media without leaving the intranet. This has not gone live yet. It is designed and ready to roll out as the next phase.
- An ongoing support model to refine and extend the platform after the initial migration, giving MSC a phased route to prioritise further improvements over time rather than needing everything right from day one.
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Why it mattered
MSC's own team reported early outcomes that reflect improvements across both the user and editorial experience: reduced time spent managing intranet content, improved visibility of company news and updates across the organisation, a better overall experience for employees using The Wave, easier content publishing for editorial teams, more effective use of SharePoint as an intranet platform, and a stronger foundation for search, findability, and future improvements.
There is a cost to leaving a platform like this in place too long, even without a dramatic failure. The Wave would have kept working well enough to make change feel optional, while publishing a routine news update or tracking down an approved brand asset quietly took a little longer each year. That is what the phased move to Lightspeed365 avoided as much as what it delivered.
Why Lightspeed Plus services was the right fit
The value in this project sat as much in the migration planning as in the platform itself. Auditing LiveTiles and classic SharePoint properly before migrating anything meant MSC's news and noticeboard archives, around 600 pages and 300 posts, carried across intact rather than being manually recreated or lost in the switch. The same Lightspeed365 delivery team then scoped the branding customiser and digital asset work around how MSC's communications team actually publishes day to day, not a generic template. That is what turned a platform switch into a modernisation MSC's editors can already run themselves.
If a similar legacy-platform migration sounds familiar, it is worth seeing what other organisations have built with Lightspeed365. Browse more SharePoint intranet examples.
Curious what a similar migration would look like for you? Get in touch with our team.
Read more Lightspeed365 case studies to see how other organisations have transformed their SharePoint intranet.