Epworth Healthcare was replacing an ageing SharePoint intranet with a newer platform. But moving the old content into a new version of SharePoint was not going to make the intranet better.
Over the years, the existing site had grown organically. Information lived in different places, content was duplicated, navigation had become inconsistent, some parts of the organisation were barely represented, and there was no useful search. In some cases, the only people who knew where something lived were the people who had originally put it there.
The migration became an opportunity to make the information useful again.
Don’t migrate the mess
I worked directly with business units, departments and subject-matter experts across seven hospital locations. Rather than beginning with pages to be moved, we began by understanding what information people actually needed, who needed it and how it was used.
We ran workshops and card-sorting exercises to rethink how information should be grouped and where an employee would naturally expect to find it.
Make every piece of content earn its place
Part of the work was a detailed content audit. Existing content was put into working inventories — including Excel sheets that departmental teams could review together.
For each item, we could make an explicit decision:
- keep it
- update it
- move it
- rewrite it
- delete it
- identify it as a duplicate
That process helped us clean up years of accumulated material before it reached the new intranet, and the patterns we saw across departments informed the broader information architecture.
Bridge the people and the platform
I worked between the business and the SharePoint vendors developing the backend. My role was not to be the SharePoint developer; it was to make sure the platform structure reflected how people across the hospitals needed to find, publish and use information.
That meant translating what we learned in workshops into an information structure the technical team could build — while helping departments prepare their own content for migration.
Make the new intranet sustainable
The launch was successful, but not every department was ready at the same time. I stayed involved and continued working with teams as they came on board.
I trained departmental content owners and content leads to edit their sections and publish in SharePoint, and created practical user guides and technical documentation they could refer to afterwards.
The goal was not simply to launch a cleaner intranet. It was to give people across the organisation the skills and tools to keep it useful after the migration was over.