Tesco

SharePoint Intranet Expansion

Tesco is the third largest retailer measured in gross revenues worldwide. With over 6.5 thousand shops worldwide and having a UK market share of 26.4% the grocery giant now has offices and stores in 11 countries. This year they are celebrating 100 years in business with their first one-man market stall opening in Hackney in 1919, they will be celebrating this special birthday with half a million employees worldwide.

Tesco already had a company intranet hosted on Microsoft SharePoint Online. However, there were some features the client wanted to remove from the intranet, and instead add some new functionality. During this time, Tesco was additionally migrating away from Orica 11 (external vendor software) to Orica Fusion, meaning their cost and account codes had been changed as well. They therefore needed a solution to help them find these codes quickly and easily. An intranet was the obvious platform to be used for this function.

As an international business, Tesco were also concerned about the language barrier. They had to be able to publish content to their intranet that could be viewed by regional users wanting o read it in their own language.

The Solution

The initial step of the solution was to discuss Tesco’s requirements and expectations regarding the changes that had to be made to their existing SharePoint intranet. Firstly, all the unwanted tools, part of the existing intranet, were removed. Then our experienced SharePoint developers went on to build the new tools and content pages following a branded design, as required by the client, to make the site more suitable and user friendly to the client’s needs. This was possible through SharePoint master pages, which allows for customising sites according to the needs of the client.

The new intranet consisted of many bespoke web parts, in addition to a custom stylesheet and layout seen throughout the whole solution as per the client’s requirements.

For example, Dolphin IT Solutions built a code translator for Tesco’s intranet’s finance landing page, to quickly find the new Orica Fusion codes. In addition to this, to track the time until the day in which Tesco switched over to the new Orica system, we built a simple countdown web part. A live web part was also built which allowed users to look up cost codes. The information for those codes was driven by an Excel spreadsheet that the client could update.

To help make the business become more connected, and help employees easily navigate through business resources, our developers also included some quick link panels. The aim of this was to direct users to tools and other useful web pages, such as financial tools and excel templates.

As another step of delivering the project, our expert developers automated the creation of SharePoint links thumbnail tiles. Previously, the client had to manually configure each tile (i.e., the title, background image, and link). To simplify this process, out automatically generated links were designed to build the grid of tiles without any configuration other than the user specifying on the site itself whether it should be shown or not.

Finally, as a solution to the language translation concern Tesco had, Dolphin IT Solutions built some scripts which would handle multiple pages for different languages. The admin would need to create different versions of the same page, with a language prefix at the end of the file name such as EN or FR indicating it is a multilingual page. In this way, when a user enters a multi-language page, their location is determined via the browser locale, and the user is redirected to the appropriate language.