By Adam Hickman, Microsoft 365 consultant lead
Powered by Lightspeed365. Delivered by our team at Content Formula, the consultancy behind Lightspeed365.
Summary
tp bennett is a global architecture, design and workplace strategy practice creating distinctive environments for leading organisations. Its intranet ran on LiveTiles Hub and Reach, giving employees a personalised homepage and targeted news and communications across multiple offices. When Omnia's acquisition of LiveTiles prompted a rethink of the platform's future, tp bennett moved the intranet across to Lightspeed365 and native SharePoint in a like-for-like switchover, then built on it with new capabilities. The migration preserved the features employees relied on most, including News, Noticeboard, and the App launcher, which tp bennett use internally as My Links to give staff their own personalised set of everyday links. The result was a clean go-live with no disruption to the employee experience, and a foundation tp bennett has since used to add capabilities the previous platform did not offer.
The challenge
When tp bennett first explored options for a new intranet, the aim was to replace an ageing internal platform, create a better employee experience across multiple offices, and make better use of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. The solution built at that stage was based on LiveTiles Hub and Reach. It gave the organisation a personalised homepage and targeted news and communications, with ongoing managed support delivered by our team.
That intranet served the business well, and the next challenge was not a failure of the platform in day-to-day use. It was a change of ownership: when Omnia acquired LiveTiles, tp bennett sensibly took stock and asked what a sustainable, modern intranet path should look like. That reassessment raised several practical questions:
- how to move on from LiveTiles without losing important features and familiar user journeys
- how to modernise the homepage and the overall user experience
- how to preserve personalisation and targeted communications
- how to continue supporting different offices and user groups effectively
- how to choose a future-ready platform that would sit more naturally within SharePoint and Microsoft 365
Does this sound familiar? Speak to our team to see how we can support a similar migration.
The approach
Our relationship with tp bennett goes back to the original LiveTiles Hub and Reach implementation, which we delivered and then supported over several years through account reviews, technical support, and enhancement work, including a homepage redesign. That history matters here for one reason: we knew the intranet, and we knew what employees valued about it.
When the change of ownership prompted a reassessment, we helped tp bennett evaluate the options through comparative product demonstrations, including a Lightspeed365 demonstration focused on platform fit and the benefits for employees, teams, and the wider business. A follow-on Lightspeed365 licence and support arrangement then set the modernisation path in motion. We structured the transition in two phases:
- Phase 1: a like-for-like switchover. Recreate the familiar intranet experience on Lightspeed365 and native SharePoint, preserving the brand, personalisation, targeted communications, and everyday journeys employees already knew, so the platform could change underneath without disrupting anyone's working day.
- Phase 2: build on the new foundations. With the switchover complete, introduce the enhanced and more modern features Lightspeed365 has to offer. Push Notifications, a targeted alerts tool, was configured during this phase and is in place for tp bennett to switch on when they're ready. This phase also included a later redesign of the intranet to align with tp bennett's internal rebrand, which Lightspeed365 made quick and easy to deliver.
Why recreate before improving?
There is always a temptation in a migration to redesign everything at once. In my experience, that is usually the wrong call when the existing experience is well liked, and it is why Phase 1 was deliberately a simple switchover rather than a redesign.
The key thing to understand is that employees should not pay the price of a platform decision. If the homepage people rely on looks and behaves differently on the first morning, you have spent your adoption goodwill before you have delivered anything new. The requirements that shaped the solution reflected exactly that:
- a strong, on-brand experience that employees would recognise and engage with from day one
- a homepage that remained a key employee engagement tool, including support for user customisation and personalisation
- support for communications, events, and targeted content for different groups and offices
- a route away from LiveTiles that preserved the design effort and brand identity already established, keeping the experience familiar for end users while laying the groundwork for future improvements
Lightspeed365 suited that next phase because it extends native SharePoint in a sustainable way while keeping the experience user-centric and on-brand. The migration was about replacing the product layer, not the framework. tp bennett already had modern SharePoint in place, and the work built on it.
What was delivered
- Homepage rebuilt using Lightspeed365 and SharePoint native web parts. The homepage remained the daily front door to the business, keeping the personalisation and engagement features employees were used to.
- My Links, delivered through Lightspeed365's App launcher. One of the features employees most wanted to keep was the ability to set up their own everyday links, so this was one of the first things rebuilt. Each employee can still pin the tools, sites, and shortcuts most relevant to their day, while the comms team can still push shared links to different offices and groups, exactly as they could before.
- News carried over with audience targeting configured to replace LiveTiles Reach functionality. Targeted communications continued without a gap, and editors could publish confidently on the new platform from the start.
- Noticeboard recreated as a native Lightspeed365 web part, giving employees the same space for peer-to-peer posts and informal updates they had before, without it becoming a bolt-on to the new platform.
- Brand customiser and custom CSS applied to retain the previous look and feel. Matching an existing intranet is more exacting work than designing a fresh one. People notice when the page they open every morning is a slightly different shade of itself, so the detail mattered here. The result was a transition employees barely noticed.
- Navigation and remaining content re-created or migrated. Familiar journeys carried straight over, which meant no retraining burden for the wider employee base and no scramble to find everyday tools.
- A clean go-live with no disruption to the employee experience. For most people in the business, the switch simply happened.
- A Phase 2 roadmap established, including Lightspeed365 Push Notifications as a targeted alerts tool giving the business a more powerful way to reach employees with relevant, timely communications, a capability not available on the previous platform. The roadmap has already proved its worth: when tp bennett later refreshed its internal brand, the intranet was redesigned to match quickly and easily using Lightspeed365. A rebrand is exactly the kind of change that can turn into a project in its own right on some platforms, and here it did not.
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Sarah Creedon-Oram, Marketing Manager
Why it mattered
For tp bennett, the intranet was never just an internal noticeboard in the everyday sense of the word. It carries communications, homepage engagement, events, personalisation, and content visibility across the business. That is why the move away from LiveTiles needed to be handled carefully, balancing continuity with improvement.
Doing nothing had a cost too. Staying on a product layer that had just changed hands would have meant running the daily employee experience on a foundation tp bennett could no longer plan around, and risking a rushed migration later, on someone else's timetable rather than their own. Instead, tp bennett now has an intranet that feels familiar to employees, sits naturally within SharePoint and Microsoft 365, and stands on foundations the organisation can keep building on. The Phase 2 roadmap, starting with push notifications, and the ease with which the intranet was later redesigned for tp bennett's internal rebrand, are the proof that this was a platform for the next stage of the journey rather than a copy for its own sake.
Working with Lightspeed365
tp bennett could have bought Lightspeed365 and rebuilt the intranet from a blank template. What made the difference here was combining the platform with consultants who already understood their intranet inside out, having built and supported the original LiveTiles implementation for several years. That history is what let us plan a genuine like-for-like switchover rather than a redesign in disguise, get the brand customiser and custom CSS close to the existing look, and configure News, Noticeboard, and My Links to match the journeys employees already knew, all before introducing anything new. It's also why the Phase 2 roadmap, and the later rebrand redesign, came together quickly: the foundation was already understood, not being discovered for the first time.
If a similar platform-ownership change sounds familiar, it is worth seeing what other organisations have built with Lightspeed365. Browse our SharePoint intranet examples.
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Read more Lightspeed365 case studies to see how other organisations have transformed their SharePoint intranet.