Anyone Can Author
Meridian Energy
APAC | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
A look at the technical tools that can be used to create a low-maintenance intranet that is accessible for all. Using in-built features of SharePoint online, mixed with some basic Power Automate flows. Opens up the intranet to allow anyone to author, with safety nets in place to keep content clean, relevant and professional.
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We have Jack from Meridian Energy presenting next. Meridian have an interesting approach to content on the internet and they use a philosophy of anyone can author and Jack is going to probably look at this from a slightly more technical perspective, which I think is going to be really interesting. But that certainly doesn't mean that anyone with more of an internal comms focus in their role won't find this to be incredibly valuable.
I feel like this is going to be another part where we'll have some mad screenshotting happening as well. So if you're ready to take some notes, Jack's going to share more about some of the safety nets he keeps in place to keep content clean, relevant and professional. So from here, Jack, I will hand over to you to share your screen.
Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Emily.
Let me get this all set up in the right space. Awesome. Good afternoon.
I'm Jack. I work for Meridian Energy in New Zealand. Just opened there with a traditional Maori introduction, which just says that Benmore is my mountain.
The Ahuriri is my river. I'm from Omarama down in the South Island of New Zealand. Zorab's my family and my name is Jack.
And if I'm allowed to do shout outs and extra special kia ora to the New Zealand crew on the line, we're just past 4pm. So I appreciate all you guys staying on to listen when you're probably starting to think about packing up and navigating the evening commute. So big thank you to SWOOP for the invitation to jump on and speak here this afternoon.
Certainly enjoyed the sessions that we've had so far and frantically taking screenshots as well. I'll be watching those recordings back. It's great to be a part of this first SWOOP festival for SharePoint.
So me, I'm going to talk a wee bit about some of the simple tools that we use at Meridian to try and keep our Internet decentralized and accessible for all. So a quick bit about Meridian first, we generate around 30 percent of New Zealand's electricity through 100 percent renewable sources, wind, water and sun. We've got five offices around the country, 15 generating assets operating or underway, and just over a thousand employees with around 100 of those at our more remote generation sites.
If you aren't familiar with all the tiny rural towns in New Zealand, my hometown of Matamar is conveniently placed right in the middle of our largest chain of hydropower stations down there in the South Island. And so with all our people spread about across the two islands and having small teams dotted around the place, it definitely poses some challenges in keeping, sorry, in terms of keeping people connected and sharing stories. And that's where our corporate comms channels come into play.
So our Intranet, we use SharePoint online, which replaced the SharePoint 2010 Intranet at the end of 2020. As with all good names, we held a staff competition and ended up calling it Electric Avenue, Electric Ave for short, or EA. Remember, I said before, we have around a thousand employees working for us.
We get around 430 unique daily visitors and around a thousand unique visitors per month. And it is worth noting, just included in those figures are contractors and third parties who work on behalf of Meridian, but have access to our Intranet for their work. So it's not every single person is accessing the Intranet every single month.
So access to the Intranet is managed through Microsoft 365 identity groups, and this allows us to have different permission sets for people that need elevated privileges for things like page editing or super users that manage the Intranet. Electric Ave itself is made up of six SharePoint sites that are tailored to things like news, information and resources. And that doesn't include team sites of which there are hundreds, but just the individual business units and teams, they have their own separate ones.
We try to keep the Intranet as simple as possible in terms of upkeep and maintenance, and that was a key requirement through the implementation back in 2020. So we really tried to bake simplicity in instead of retrofitting it after it was implemented. Our old Intranet on SharePoint 2010 required all content and edits to be done by a small group of super users, and it really restricted things like news articles and content to mostly come from the comms team because they had the permissions and the skills.
A lot of the information and resources would often end up out of date because they weren't able to be edited by content owners unless they had a good enough knowledge of the back end system to give it a go. And to be honest, it was quite complex, even for experienced users. And so with Electric Avenue, anyone can contribute a story or news article using a button on the homepage.
And this was a good exercise during this presentation, so I looked up a heap of stats and numbers. Around 55% of the 200 articles that were posted in the last 18 months were created without support required from the comms team. And most of the remaining 45% were comms-led communications or messaging.
And so we obviously still want to know when news is posted so that we can do a bit of moderation and maybe some basic formatting if spelling, grammar or layout aren't quite right. And to achieve that, we use a basic Power Automate flow, which just spits out an email notification to our internal comms team when a new article is posted. Then we can jump in using the link provided and just make sure everything looks OK.
And our homepage, it has two news web parts, a big bright hero section at the top where the comms team curate the stories, maybe because they're organisational announcements or calls to action, for instance. And then we have a smaller news web part just below, which automatically updates as the news is posted. So, whilst a news post will go live as soon as it's published, you wouldn't see it become the hero post at the top of the Internet unless there's some kind of intervention from comms.
And there's just a few examples of what comes through from people contributing without comms team input and assistance. To be honest, most of that's blurred out just so we're not sharing too much without asking permission. But we've got there a New Zealand sign language article from one of our working group leads.
We've got a training team letting know that there's some new materials available on our LMS. And there's one there from someone who works on one of our remote assets, just about a community event that their team attended and assisted with. So, it's a real mix of things that we see come through and it's great to have a almost a constant feed of news and stories coming from our people on the ground and in our offices that the rest of the business can engage with if they're interested in reading them.
For our information site, we use content owners to manage the majority of pages. I did actually have a quiet laugh watching Sarah's presentation earlier on the Vic Police Internet. She mentioned hearing that common phrase like this page needs a refresh, which we certainly get that every now and then.
And I don't know if it's the same with everyone else, but the trend at the moment seems to be that everyone wants a hub for their content. It's not good enough to have a page now. We want a hub where everything can be hosted, but maybe that's just us.
Anyway, content owners, they're chosen either because they are the subject matter expert for their information, or they may just be the lucky person in a team who gets chosen to manage their page. Of course, things always change over time and content can become quickly out of date or incorrect. So, to manage these pages, we have automated reminders go out to content owners every six months, asking them to review their pages and just make sure that the information is still current.
Most content owners have editing access for their pages, so if they do have updates to make, they can just do them themselves. But again, we want to have a bit of oversight from the comms team just to check edits as they go through. And for that, we use a basic approvals automation.
And when a page owner has finished updating their page, they just submit it for approval with a short message about the changes that they've made. And that generates a notification to the internal comms team, who can then review the page and choose to either approve, which publishes the changes, or reject and send a customized message back to the editor. And finally, our resources section contains things like policies and procedures, things that you need to do your job and various documentation.
But because of the nature of the resources, we want to keep some of these a little more locked down than the rest of the Internet. And so the majority of these pages are maintained by our HR and comms teams with content sought from the subject matter experts, all those that have the information and then loaded in by either HR or comms team. Again, we just use those Microsoft 365 groups to keep things locked down, as well as some specific page web parts that allow people to view some documents without being able to edit or download them if required.
And as with the info pages before any edits, just have to go through an approvals process to get a second set of eyes and also to keep a bit of an audit trail that we can look back on if we need to. So, I know this is the SharePoint Festival. I am going to make a quick mention of Viva Engage, which has already been spoken about a wee bit in some of the other presentations, but we do use Viva Engage with our other corporate comms channel.
And I guess I won't get into the ins and outs of when to use each channel, as that's a whole other conversation in itself, but I can't really talk about one without talking about the other as we use them to complement each other. And we've talked about cross posting already in some of the other presentations, but for us, big announcements or key messages will usually have a longer form article posted onto the intranet on Electric Avenue with kind of the detail for those detail lovers or those that want to sit down and have a good read. And then we'll put a shorter attention grabbing post on Viva Engage for those who just want the key messages along with a link to the SharePoint article at the bottom if they choose to read on.
And it's really just trying to replicate what people experience, I guess, on social media where you have that kind of clickbait kind of post linking to the main content, which is then hosted in a more appropriate place. So we find it's a pretty effective way of directing people to the big news that's maybe too long to go in a Viva Engage post by itself, especially if we're using that announcement function on Viva Engage, which sends a notification into people's Teams inboxes. We also have a Viva Engage feed embedded on the Electric Avenue homepage.
So for those who might not be as confident or compelled to head to Viva Engage to kind of peruse the feed, they can still keep up to date with what's happening around the organization, sometimes without even knowing they're looking at Viva Engage. And so in terms of who can post and where, we apply the same principles to both the intranet and Viva Engage in that anyone can author and share their stories on both platforms. The exception being our all company feed on Viva Engage, which is just locked down to admins to prevent spamming and kind of protect their users inboxes.
I think we find that having the same set of rules to play by for both platforms reduces the confusion for people about where they're allowed to post and where's off limits. I guess in short, neither is off limits, but comms is always watching just to make sure there's nothing outrageous posted, of which there never has been. I'm happy to say.
So that's our intranet, Electric Avenue in a nutshell. I'll move on to briefly touch on three automations that I believe could change your life if you're an administrator, an intranet administrator or someone that has something to do with SharePoint. They might be completely new to some of you, but I would hazard a guess that there's probably already heaps of people out there who are already using the same tools in similar ways.
I did see a comment from Bob at ASB earlier about an automation feeding intranet data into Power BI, which sounds like a great idea. So I'll be looking at more on that later. And look, I'd be really keen to hear from from others who think there's a place for using some of these automations in your own intranet.
Or if you are already using them, how it differs from the way that we're using them to see how we might improve our processes. So, I talked about using email alerts to let our internal comms team know when a new article has been posted. And we use Power Automate to run a really simple flow and Power Automate is something that's available to everyone who has a Microsoft Enterprise license, assuming your global administrator hasn't disabled it for your organization.
And I probably should say at this point, for those that haven't used it before, Power Automate can look quite intimidating to use. So if you think that you might benefit from automating a couple of processes to make your life simpler, the easiest way to learn is just to give it a go. There's YouTube tutorials for everything under the sun, as well as a massive community of users on the Microsoft forums.
I started using it a few years ago. Most of the flows I've created have just come from looking at the problem that I want to solve, deciding on what I want the end product to look like, and then using YouTube videos to help me fill in the bits from start to finish. If you do start moving into the more advanced stuff, you'll hopefully have a couple of people in your organization who are experts at this stuff and can step in as a Gary and Christina, and quite often they've helped nudge me in the right direction when I get a bit stuck.
So hopefully you've got a Gary or a Christina in your organization too. And so this email alert flow is really basic. It's just always looking and watching our SharePoint news site.
And when it notices that a page has been created or modified, it starts the flow. That's called the trigger. Once it is triggered, it pulls page information and metadata so it can perform a check.
And the check is to see if the page has been published before. So is the page still in draft form or is it able to be viewed by everyone? If the version is 1.0 or greater, that means it has been published under 1.0 and it's still in draft. So the page version is greater than 1.0. If this statement is false, the version number is below 1.0 and therefore still in draft, the flow terminates and no further action is taken.
If the statement is true, the page is in its published form, then I would like an email sent to comms to let us know. And for this one, it's a super basic email. It just tells me who has posted the article name and a link to take me straight there for review.
And that email is fully customizable. We've just kept it simple because we don't need a heap of details. So email alerts.
Automation number two. So this one is content review prompts. And you might remember I said before that we use these for keeping our information pages up to date.
And so we use these just to prompt the specified content owner with a six monthly reminder to check their content. Again, it's pretty simple and basic flow. It requires your SharePoint pages to have a review date column in the metadata and for this page to be, sorry, and for this field there at the bottom to be filled.
Once per week, the flow runs and checks all pages within the SharePoint site. And like the previous example, this uses a statement. So the statement here is the review date is equal or older than today.
If that statement is false, no action is taken for that page carries on its merry way. If the statement is true, the review date is either today or older. It will send an email to the content owner to let them know that they need to review their page.
Goodness me. So with this email, we've just included a wee bit more detail because a lot of these people may not do a lot of editing on SharePoint and more often than not, there's very little that needs to be done. But if they need some extra help, then they've got contact details on there as well.
And I guess full disclosure, while we've been using SWOOP or Viva Engage for nearly three years, we've only just signed up for the SWOOP SharePoint product in the last few months. And one of the features that SharePoint use to measure that page health is aging content. So now that we've started collecting a bit of data in there, it's definitely something that I'm going to be looking at in the next couple of months, whether the page health function is something that we can use to replace this page review process or whether they complement each other working in tandem.
And possibly asking in a slightly biased forum, but if you're using SWOOP for SharePoint yourself and you think that maybe that would be a good way of replacing the content review process, then yeah, please let me know. And the third and final automation I've got there is page approvals. So this uses SharePoint workflows combined with the approvals app in Teams.
And I honestly believe that this tool has so much potential to transform your business's ways of working if you're not already using it. In this instance, really simply, when a page author or content editor is ready to publish their page, they hit the submit for approval button at the top of the SharePoint page. This brings up a pane in the window, which gives them the option to write a message to the approvers and we encourage people to let us know what changes they've made so that we can easily review them.
And once they hit submit, an approvals request pops up in the approvers Teams notifications and email. We've just got three people on our approvers list, all of whom get the notification and can see the message from the submitter. All the approver then has to do is review the page and then choose whether they approve or reject the changes with the option of writing a message back to the submitter.
And once the task has been approved or rejected, it sends an email back to the submitter to let them know the outcome and updates across all approvers apps so it will no longer show as a task for them to complete. The task will still show in the history, though, so any of the approvers can go back in and see the audit log of who submitted the page, any messages and who approved. And I really do encourage you to take a look at the approvals function if you're not already using it, not just for SharePoint, but for anything from basic page approvals through to document approvals, leave requests, training applications, the lot.
It's a real versatile product. I don't get paid by Microsoft, I should say. Awesome, so those are my three quick automations that I think might have the potential to change your life.
If you're feeling inspired to give Power Automate a go, it really is as simple as hopping onto Google and searching for Power Automate and then whatever it is that you want to do. There's heaps of videos out there and loads of support in the Microsoft community forums. Yeah, that's it from me.
I'll hand back to you, Emily, for any questions and certainly keen to hear from anyone who's using automations to manage their own internet. Yes, awesome. Thank you so much, Jack.
That was so insightful. Also right on time. So well done.
We have about 10 minutes or so for questions. So let me jump into our Q&A and I can just start firing some questions at you, Jack. Do you have a different number of indoor slash outdoor users and specifically non-desk or field-based staff and how do you connect with them? Yeah, sure.
So those generation sites that we've got dotted around the country, all of them have workstations and offices, but what we'll tend to find is that people come in for the morning meeting, get their safety briefing, what are we doing for the day? They might have 20 minutes to jump on and then most of the time they're then off, whether it's out onto a wind site or down to the depths of a dam. So, you know, we kind of sometimes have to really remind ourselves that we're thinking, oh, they're logging on, so they're going to see the stuff that we put on. But when they log on, they check their emails, they're checking their work orders and, you know, maybe we've said before, you know, 17 seconds or something to be checking stuff.
So if there is stuff that we know must be seen by people, we make sure that we reach out to that business units manager or administrator, put it in there, put the link to the SharePoint news in their weekly newsletter or we make sure it comes up in their morning meetings. So I guess it's a mix. If there's anything that must be seen, we use other channels other than just kind of posting on the internet and hoping that people see it.
Is that the whole question? Yes, that was the whole question. We do have a few more, so I'll keep running through. How do you manage content quality and what is a new story in the contribute and article functions? Yeah, I guess.
I don't think I've ever come across a situation where someone has put something into a news article that wasn't news. If you see what I mean, like no one's put content into a news article that seems to just manage itself. People get in touch with us.
We have another button on there, which is we call ourselves the Electric Avenue Sparkies. We're a power company. But, yeah, you can get in touch with the administrators if you need to for help generating your own content pages.
But, yeah, people just seem to know you put news in a news site. I think possibly by seeing what's on there, you kind of copy what you see. And in terms of managing the quality of stuff that comes through.
We've definitely been on a journey, maybe 18 months, two years ago, where we'd jump in and if it wasn't up to comm standards, then we'd go in and, you know, you'd change the wording. It needs to sound like this. And what we realized was that was kind of whilst we were trying to empower people, that's putting people off because then I'm not a comms person and they're changing stuff.
So now, you know, as long as it's not outrageous and there's not, you know, terrible grammar or spelling mistakes, if it's in the user's voice, then absolutely. It's their story to tell and we want people to be comfortable to tell their own story without thinking they're going to get judged by, you know, comms people. And, you know, comms people probably know we're pretty judgy people.
Not at all, but I do love that approach. And I did notice there was a flurry of activity and comments in the chat around mention of hub sites. I have a question here from Evita.
How do you manage requests for new hubs? Do you have a criteria to determine if they need a standalone site or should you build new pages in a pre-existing site? Yeah, cool. So we, I mean, we never build new sites for people. It all sits within the existing sites that we have.
But what we might sometimes do is create, you know, kind of a landing page, which then feeds off to some sub pages if we think that it's suitable for a hub. I think the starting point is always to jump onto a call and have a chat. And sometimes, you know, a person's hub is actually just a page with information arranged nicely, whether that's collapsible web parts or whether it's linking off to other pages that already have the content that they were hoping just to compile into one place.
And then on the odd occasion where you go, actually, there's something completely new. So, for instance, we have a couple of years ago, 18 months ago, we introduced a Maori resources hub. And so that was in answer to people asking for support with things like, you know, basic stuff, language, greetings through to, hey, if I'm heading out to a marae, how do I interact with people on there? So when actually, yeah, this is really important to have a whole heap of knowledge.
So the hub is a landing page, which then has some nice tiles, and then you can head off to the stuff that's specific to that kind of topic within the larger topic. But I guess the really summarised answer to that is just being really harsh in saying, you don't need a hub, you just, we just need to spruce this page up and maybe reorganise your content is usually the answer. Nice.
And just on the topic as well, I know you were able to touch on how Viva Engage sits alongside SharePoint at Meridian. Is all of your corporate news published to SharePoint and also posted to Viva Engage? Or do you sort of pick and choose? Is it just some things get shared across both? Yeah, it's definitely some things get shared across both some of the time. It depends what it is.
And a couple of times we've tried to sit down and kind of write the rule book of this is when we will post here and this is when we will post here. But it's definitely more nuanced than that. You know, it depends.
Do people need to see it right away? Do people need a whole heap of detail? Does this affect the whole company or just a portion of the company? So I guess, yeah, we've got kind of maybe thresholds, if you like, of if people need to know it right now or within a certain time period, it's a Viva Engage announcement. If there's a whole heap of detail, it's going on the internet, maybe linked to from Viva Engage. But we certainly haven't kind of come up with a formula of this is when and this is when.
And this is a slightly longer sort of intro to this question here, Jack, perhaps just some insight. This is a note from Vanessa. I'm interested in the reasoning behind why articles don't require the same level of moderation as other content before being published.
I'm part of our employee comms team that manages both intranet and produces the weekly newsletter and our news content is specifically curated for diversity inclusion considerations and to ensure it meets the specific commitments slash messaging of the agency. So, I guess, yeah, reasoning behind why articles don't require the same level of moderation as other content before being published. Any insights around that, Jack? Yeah, I guess part of that possibly comes from how our internal comms operates within the company versus maybe some of the other organisations in that we definitely are more kind of advisors rather than drivers of a lot of the content.
And so if we talk about the diversity inclusion kind of stuff, you know, we have stream leads and we have stuff that comes out of our people team, our HR team. And so if the content is coming from them and it's kind of their messaging to drive, absolutely. We want to be making sure that it's not outrageous.
It's not going to be causing riots in the streets. But if it's their content coming through, then we can help them put it on. We can help them shape messaging if they want.
And I talked about probably 45% of the messaging that is either comms led or that we kind of assist with a lot of that would be those corporate communications. But furthermore, I guess the news that isn't so kind of corporate or led by the organisation, it's people's stories that they want to share. And we're really keen to let them have a platform to share those and build connections and engage with each other.
So, yeah, we definitely want to be seeing the strategic stuff and the kind of corporate messaging, if not being involved with it and helping write it ourselves. But sometimes things do slip through and that's when we've got those email alerts so we can jump in. And there is the odd time where we will quickly unpublish something and go back to the publisher and go, hey, would have been really cool to have been looped in on this.
Can we help you out with it? But that doesn't happen often. And then I was just one final quick question. I think I'm just this might reference part of the end of your presentation question from Tim.
How to control who is listed as the content owner. Another column. I'm just wondering, is this in reference to maybe some of the automations I think that we looked at earlier.
Yeah, so when you're on SharePoint, it's got the page owner under the title. You can have the page owner under the title. Ours has another column in that metadata for content owner.
So the content owner and the page author may not be the same person. And so, for instance, you might have the general manager of a business unit listed as the author of the page that belongs to their business unit. But we can then have a content owner who might be either the subject matter expert or the executive assistant, somebody else.
So that's contained in that metadata, certainly for us. Fantastic. Thank you so much again, Jack, for sharing all of those insights.
Meet the speaker:
Jack Zorab
Internal Communications Advisor
Meridian Energy
