Knowing where to locate your tools is important in any craft.
It is difficult to develop creative marketing concepts when your process is interrupted to search for information about brand standards, template sizes, or vendor email addresses. One of the management goals I set this year was to create an organized and accessible home for the policies, procedures, and other resource tools used by my department of design, marketing, and multi-media staff members.
The department had previously been using an out-of-date and poorly maintained website to train and onboard new staff members. As my team revised policies and updated information, I decided it was time for a clean slate to organize and present information by topic and audience. There was a need to collaborate with our retained partners, and the building staff as a whole.
I chose to build a SharePoint intranet site because of the platform's flexibility and easy-to-learn capabilities. SharePoint is a Microsoft collaboration tool in the family of Teams and OneDrive. It has templates which are easy to customize and a set menu of features that can be configured within a basic grid. Because the team had already built 120 training slides earlier in the year, I could integrate the same documents easily, and they could be accessed both in the office and remotely.
The resulting site wireframe divided content by subject matter and level of access.
The parent page acts as a main landing page for department news, updates, and staff contacts. It is available to anyone with a university email address.
The first sub-page highlights building resources including logos, photos approved for general use, a building-wide social media account listing, and a directory of campus-wide branding resources. It is accessible by any building employee.
The second sub-page has material specific to our contracted client accounts, including an overview of these offices and individual document libraries for marketing plans, assets, or other supporting information. Accountability reports, such as the amount of projects completed for each parter during the semester, could be hosted here. Consequently, file access needs to be limited to staff from the partner departments.
The final sub-page hosts tools specific to the marketing department, including vendor information, project management platform tutorials, and instructions on producing products such as name badges and office signage. It is only available to the marketing team.
The largest challenge I met was establishing the pages and getting the correct credentials in place. This was the first time SharePoint has been used in my building on campus, so there was limited support from the site IT staff, who support local PC workstations and networking. To request the hub pages, I needed to submit a ticket to campus IT in another building. While campus IT could authorize and create the pages, they didn’t have resources to support establishing credentials or building out the site content. A third IT resource was our contracted Macintosh platform tech, since building IT does not service individual Macs such as those used in the Marketing office. Between those three contacts and a “Sharepoint for Dummies” guidebook, I took on many of the site administration tasks myself.
The user interface was deliberately designed to be minimal with strong use of the university’s branded color. Building leadership did not want department or site logos detracting from the university as a whole. Since the content on this site is limited in scope to a single campus building, I chose to identify the information source typographically. Members of my team contributed some of the interface items, including icons for links and photographic treatments for the building and partner pages. I selected an abstract landscape illustration for subtle integration of color and to reference the unique geographic location of the university.
The most detailed information on the site is focused towards the marketing team. I utilized the media player feature in Sharepoint so interactive .pdf composites of department training slides can be embedded directly into the page. Drop down dividers separate the content by topics. Quick links near the top provide easy access to the time clock for students and the project management platform. As information such as vendor contacts change, the site can be easily updated by replacing the linked and embedded documents, I anticipate this will be easier for inexperienced staff than making changes in a full-blown website, and most of the content can be downloaded or printed for easy access.
I am excited about the new level of accessibility and organization we have gained from this new online tool. Since SharePoint is bundled in our existing Microsoft package, there was no additional cost incurred for the tool. Because it is intuitive and easy to edit, we saved time taking on the development tasks internally. Our department is running more efficiently with the site and I am excited to bring in our building colleagues soon.
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