SharePoint intranet in the Luxury sector

Development of an innovative and customizable SharePoint Intranet for a company in the luxury market. A solution, wanted by one of our clients who operates in the luxury market, which presents itself to intranet users with an elegant and refined layout, functionalities focused on the end user for access to content and, above all, to the services that the company makes available.

The challenge

The management of an enterprise project in which figures from different departments and from the 18 countries in which the customer is located have been involved.

The creation of a complex architecture, fully integrated with SharePoint, capable of offering functionality at maximum performance and the implementation of a user-oriented intranet, where each content and functionality is presented based on the user’s position, interests and specific choices, through the creation and placement of personalized widgets.

The attention to graphic detail and a high-level User Experience on a product like SharePoint that doesn’t actually offer many possibilities from a layout point of view.

Our solution

We have created a SharePoint intranet that places the user at the center and is fully customizable from the homepage, the search and the news, which are targeted on the basis of belonging to a department or a country while always maintaining the same graphic style.

We have implemented widgets to access the email, the calendar and your tasks and created a team site for each country. A company people directory, the organization chart and a multitude of more operational functions have also been implemented, such as the approval of trips, expenses and orders.

Finally, operation via PC and tablet, single sign on and monitoring of accesses and behaviors have been guaranteed.

The technical architecture: SPFx and advanced customisation

SharePoint out-of-the-box simply could not meet the visual and functional standards expected by a luxury brand. Native templates are rigid, and the design constraints would have resulted in an intranet that felt generic — inconsistent with the brand’s identity across every other touchpoint.

We built the entire front-end layer using SharePoint Framework (SPFx): custom web parts for each functional block and application customizers to control the global shell — header, footer, and navigation — without touching native SharePoint templates. This approach keeps the solution fully compatible with Microsoft platform updates, so each new SharePoint release doesn’t require a rebuild.

Content targeting goes beyond standard SharePoint audience settings. We combined SharePoint audiences with custom logic at the web part level, so a Retail colleague in France sees region-specific news and operational tools, while an HR counterpart in Japan sees a completely different set of content — with the same visual experience on both screens.

Widgets for mail, calendar, and tasks connect directly to the Microsoft Graph API, pulling real-time data from each user’s Microsoft 365 account. This keeps the intranet as the single starting point for daily work, without requiring users to switch between applications for routine tasks.

Managing an international rollout

Deploying an intranet across 18 countries means dealing with 18 different realities at once: multiple languages, time zones spread across three continents, local regulatory constraints, and very different levels of digital readiness across the workforce. A single global launch would have created noise and risked poor first impressions in markets that needed more preparation.

We structured a progressive, country-by-country rollout instead. Each country went live on a defined schedule, with a dedicated onboarding phase before launch. Internally, the client nominated an “intranet champion” for each country — a person responsible for coordinating the local launch, fielding questions, and driving initial adoption within their team.

On the governance side, each country received its own team site with full autonomy to publish local content. Central governance defined the boundaries: structure, permissions, naming conventions, and page templates were standardised across all sites. Local teams worked within that framework, which kept the global experience coherent without being restrictive.

Change management was an integral part of the project, not an afterthought. We supported the client in developing internal communication materials, key messages for the launch announcements, and a post-go-live monitoring plan. Usage data from the analytics layer made it straightforward to spot countries with lower adoption rates early, allowing the team to schedule targeted follow-up sessions before habits had time to form around workarounds.

Achieved results

The SharePoint intranet is in daily use on a population of 4000 users interiors and has been named as the second best intranet in a European contest in the year following its implementation.

User adoption was highest:

• ‍Personalization: 90% of users have customized their home page.
• Views: the intranet records an average of 6800 page views per day.
• ‍Team sites: 200+ team sites have been created on Microsoft 365, and more are being created.