The Wellbeing Services County of Vantaa and Kerava (‘VAKE’) provides health, social and rescue services across an area with a population of around 280,000. The organisation employs almost 5,000 people.
With such a vast number of staff representing multiple different professions, internal communications can be a challenge. One way to overcome the challenge is to invest in the organisation’s intranet. For VAKE, the intranet is a one-stop shop of information for every member of staff.
A newly formed organisation in need of an all-in-one intranet solution
VAKE was established as a result of a national reform that reorganised health, social and rescue services into ‘wellbeing services counties’. The newly formed organisation turned to Advania in the hope of building a comprehensive internal communications solution to bring everyone together. The goal was to have the intranet up and running before VAKE opened for business on 1 January 2023.
‘VAKE wanted its staff to have access to the environment from the very first day in business, so that people would learn to rely on the intranet for whatever information they needed. The look of the intranet was also important, as we needed to draw a clear distinction between the new organisation and the local organisations of Vantaa and Kerava. Work on the intranet has continued since its launch, and our current priorities are building a directory of organisation-wide procedures and customising people’s news feeds’, says Communications Specialist Matti Keponen from the Wellbeing Services County of Vantaa and Kerava.
No radical changes for users
The news that the SharePoint-based Valo Intranet suite, which VAKE had been using, would be discontinued broke towards the end of 2023. The organisation decided to quickly upgrade to another SharePoint-based solution, Fresh Intranet, with Advania’s help. There was a sense of urgency, as VAKE wanted to have the new features of Fresh incorporated into its intranet environment from as early a stage in the process as possible and to minimise the number of Valo components that would need to be migrated to Fresh.
According to Keponen, Fresh Intranet is extremely user-friendly and has been easy for the intranet administrators to learn to use.
‘The training provided by Advania made the transition very smooth. There was no radical change for the average content editor, as text, pictures and links can still be imported using SharePoint’s default functions, but more advanced users now have access to a wide array of new features, such as bulk updates of metadata.’
VAKE’s Valo solution also included a centralised news feed, from where articles could be shared to other pages based on metadata, and the structure of the intranet therefore changed very little from a technical perspective.
VAKE wanted to keep the look of its intranet largely unchanged, and the fact that the menus have stayed the same has also made the transition easier for the organisation.
Fresh comes with more flexible web parts and search bars are easier to link than in the Valo environment, which have been welcome improvements for administrators. The analytics show that almost all VAKE employees visit the intranet at least once a week.
Fresh features and new opportunities
‘Fresh lives up to its name in terms of visual appearance, and it also seems to run faster. We are still learning about the new features but are already seeing potential in using the searchable content summaries that can be created based on metadata to build our procedures directory and content menus’, Keponen says.
‘One feature that we are eagerly looking forward to is a tool for running personnel surveys. There is also no purpose-built tool for creating FAQ pages at the moment, but Advania’s experts have shown us how to get around this issue using another feature of Fresh.’
A smooth transition from Valo to Fresh
Keponen has enjoyed working with Advania. Most of the sites were migrated to the new Fresh environment in a single afternoon, and there was minimal disruption to users.
‘The fact that Valo Intranet was being discontinued so soon after we had installed it came as a disappointment at first, but the upgrade to Fresh was extremely straightforward and we could not imagine going back to Valo now. The process of migrating from Valo to Fresh was well planned and executed on schedule, thanks to Advania.’
What is Fresh Intranet?
Fresh is a user-friendly intranet solution that reduces the need for organisation-specific customisation and comes with an impressive range of new features compared to Valo Intranet. The development of Fresh Intranet follows a dynamic roadmap, and product updates are published every three months.
Fresh and SharePoint complement each other: Fresh incorporates features that are not standard in SharePoint, but all the default functions of SharePoint can also be accessed in the Fresh environment.
