New intranet makes Lejonfastigheter’s employees more productive and flexible

Municipal real estate company Lejonfastigheter in Linköping has improved its digital workplace and mobile accessibility by implementing Omnia. It’s now much easier to find, share, collaborate on and keep information and documents relevant and updated.

”Our new intranet has made us more productive, flexible, and mobile. We now have a single entry point to our tools and a shared space for all common information, significantly facilitating the finding, sharing, and updating of information, processes, and documents. Omnia’s responsive interface and mobile app have also made life very much easier for our project managers and other employees who are constantly on their feet visiting our properties and construction sites on a daily basis. Our previous intranet didn’t offer mobile access. Today our employees have every tool, document, process, and other relevant information at their fingertips while working out in the field”, says Anders Verde, IT Manager and Governance Leader at Lejonfastigheter.

Maximal functionality with minimal management

Lejonfastigheter own, manage, develop, rent and let out premises and properties for Linköping Municipality's operations in education, care, culture, sports, and community services. The company is wholly owned by the Municipality and has about 90 employees. Among the company's 242 owned and managed properties, Konsert & Kongress, Saab Arena, and Linköping's Grand Theatre are some of the most well-known.

Lejonfastigheter previously had a self-developed SharePoint-based intranet. When Microsoft stopped supporting SharePoint 2013 and Lejonfastigheter decided to implement Microsoft 365, the platform needed an upgrade.

”We first considered developing a new intranet ourselves but quickly came to the conclusion that the best option was to invest in a standard intranet platform. In addition to costing more and taking longer to build, a self-made solution also requires more internal resources to run. And with an intranet provider such as Omnia, who has the knowledge and resources to be a technological frontrunner, we can ensure that our solution is always abreast of the very latest developments. Among the most compelling reasons for our choice of Omnia was the platform's smooth integration with Microsoft 365, competitive price per performance, and well-developed functionality”, Anders explains.

The implementation project started at the end of the summer of 2020 and the new intranet was launched in January 2021.

One million files migrated to the new intranet

In addition to seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams, the new intranet offers a more accessible and easy-to-navigate interface and a new Register System, developed with Omnia's document management. Omnia and Teams are integrated mainly via an app in Teams, giving users access to the entire intranet from Teams.

”It’s been quite a time-consuming and challenging mission to migrate all the content from the old intranet and other sources to Omnia. Not from a technical perspective, but in terms of coordinating the work and sorting out and restructuring content and files. More than one million files have been transferred in total. Some training has also been required as there is a big difference working in SharePoint 2013 compared with the new integrated environment with Omnia, Microsoft 365, and Teams. We’ve actually had some help from the pandemic, however, as all employees were forced to quickly learn working in the new modernized workplace”, Anders points out.

Boosted accessibility and efficiency

In order to determine a “user experience base value”, prior to the launch of the intranet Anders and his team conducted a user survey to ascertain how employees experienced the digital workplace and intranet. They can then compare future studies with this base value to see how internally-set impact goals are met.

“When the new solution had been up and running for a few months, we conducted a new user survey. It showed, among other things, that our employees consider it to be easier and that it takes less time to find, share and collaborate on information and documents. Above all, Omnia has made it possible for them to access all the intranet’s resources via mobile phone and tablet. This has boosted their productivity in the field which was an important reason for the platform change”, Anders emphasizes.

Better organized processes, documents, and collaborations

Anders says that the increased accessibility to all internal information and the resources of the intranet has generally made it easier to work and get things done. One key reason for this is that everything is now consolidated and accessible in just one place. The Management System and other business-critical tools are also accessible via the intranet. With the help of Omnia's UX specialists, the appearance, architecture, and navigation of the intranet have all been tailored to match the working methods and needs of employees.

“We have also spent some time developing well-structured intranet templates for creating collaborations in Teams. The templates simplify the work of our employees and ensure that collaborations follow the same structure and processes regardless of how and where they are created”, Anders points out.