Rural Payments Agency
EasyShare to SharePoint Online
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). A long term client, the RPA first used our SharePoint ‘intranet-in-a-box’ product EasyShare in 2014. Since then, their intranet has evolved to Office 365 using SharePoint Online.
The Challenge
The RPA wanted a quick and stress-free rollout of their intranet with News being the cornerstone of the new communications portal. Driven by a desire to achieve their aims of unified and clear branding across all content on the site, the RPA needed an intranet that could ensure cohesion without the need for lengthy custom development. From a user perspective, the RPA demanded easy to use navigation as a benchmark of success.
The Impact
The RPA first bought the EasyShare product for on-premise SharePoint servers in 2014, successfully rolling out the new, branded intranet to 3,000 users. When in 2016 the RPA began moving to either a hybrid or fully cloud solution, they chose EasyShare once more as the platform due to the success of their previous project.
The move to the cloud (SharePoint Online) involved a migration of all the content onto new pages using the new product. This project was handled smoothly in-house by their SharePoint staff with guidance from our team. Being experienced SharePoint users, the RPA IT team particularly appreciated the way in which the EasyAdmin app allowed them to centrally manage the Navigation and Branding of their SharePoint intranet sites, without any custom development work.
The Impact
The RPA intranet has now been migrated to SharePoint Online, with minimal disruption for the end-users.
With guidance and support from ClerksWell, RPA have also now incorporated a branded teams site experience into their intranet.
As the whole of the department started to move into Office 365, EasyShare is also now being used by two other DEFRA agencies, the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and Natural England. These projects involved migration and feature matching from existing intranets which was done collaboratively with our team.
