Aston University’s requirement stemmed from a project which reviewed and replaced their public website. Once this project had finished, the University were keen to review and improve the employee experience with a new intranet. It was felt that the legacy intranet was outdated, and did not provide the digital experience that the University employees required for efficient and productive work and communication.  

The legacy intranet was not used consistently by staff, and when the University moved to a permanent hybrid working model following the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear it was no longer fit for purpose.  

Though the University had views on what was wrong with the legacy intranet, there was not a strong sense of what should replace it. As a Microsoft-first institution, Aston University had a digital policy to review Microsoft solutions first, so knew they wanted to explore what was possible with SharePoint Online, and how that could be enhanced with Microsoft Viva.   

Following internally led focus groups, it was clear that the University staff wanted to be able to easily access information and resources, and be kept up to date with current and relevant news, information and events.

Aston University needed help to define what the overall digital experience for employees should be, and which solutions would be able to deliver the improvements to employee engagement, communication, and collaboration.

The project began with an extensive discovery phase led by Solution Architect John Votaw from the Core team. A list of high level priorities had been gathered through internal staff focus groups prior to engagement with Core, however John and the Core team led the University through a structured and comprehensive deeper analysis of the University’s requirements, and linked them to out of the box platforms and solutions, and identified any areas requiring more complex or custom development.

Some of these requirements included effective search, relevance of information, user experience, and integration with other business systems. The University’s project sponsors were keen to see an improvement to the platform, and not just a like-for-like replacement of the existing intranet.

The result was, ‘OneAston’, the name given to the new intranet by the University.

OneAston has become the University’s news dashboard, with staff having access to relevant news and events information on a timely basis, and are able to view both public and internal news in a seamless and intuitive user experience.

All news and events content can be created in one place, and pushed to the Intranet home page and the public website to be presented to the right audience and keep everyone completely up to date. This has removed duplication of effort required to reach different audiences. Prior to OneAston, staff did not see public news unless they visited the public website. Staff news was sent in a weekly email so was often overlooked or out of date.

Employees now get the information they require, delivered to them in a timely manner, and access to more news and events promotion. And all business systems are linked from OneAston, so users can find all they need by starting from the same place. And the user feedback itself has been universally positive, with users praising the features but also usability of the platform.

When asked what it was like working with the Core team, Charlotte responded:

When asked what advice she would provide to a similar organisation looking to take on a project of this kind, Charlotte commented:

Aston University are confident that Core are the right organisation to continue working with them on further development to their digital employee experience platform.  

Charlotte added, “For the first phase, we were keen to put in place a foundation which met our most urgent staff requirements, and allowed us to archive our legacy intranet. We can now move forward with future phases without these legacy considerations and any associated time pressures. 

The University are dedicated to continuing to push the OneAston platform into new areas of digital experience for employees and embrace the future of what an Intranet can be, such as employee insights and learning. We are also planning greater integration with our other business systems such as our Helpdesk. 

Use of elements of the Microsoft Viva suite are part of this vision and will help us make the OneAston platform a broader digital environment for staff, and possibly students. 

We believe Core are the right choice to explore what the Viva suite can add to OneAston, how it can be used to deliver the next phase of our requirements, and then work with us to implement it.”