A modern SharePoint intranet across nine offices. A Microsoft 365 environment people actually use.

Nine offices on a single intranet. Six departments through tailored M365 cutovers.

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The situation

The situation we walked into.

The Southern Environmental Law Center had been on Microsoft 365 for a few years, but the environment had never been configured for how the legal advocacy work actually got done. Staff were using a fraction of what M365 offered. The intranet was outdated and hard to navigate. A migration from iManage to NetDocuments for legal file management was underway and adding complexity. The leadership team wanted a digital workspace that supported the way nine regional offices collaborated on long-running legal and policy work, not a generic deployment that left staff to figure it out themselves.

What we did

What we did.

We started with a discovery that asked SELC staff what worked and what did not. Stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and a system review surfaced the specific places where the environment was working against the work: scattered content, an intranet nobody used, collaboration tools configured for a generic mid-size organization rather than a nine-office advocacy practice with a unique relationship to its case files.

The Microsoft 365 optimization layer came next. We defined the optimization strategy, reconfigured Teams and SharePoint to support the way departments actually collaborated, and put measurement approaches in place for the adoption and engagement KPIs that mattered to SELC’s leadership team. Six-plus departments went through individual optimization consultations, each with a customized content migration plan and a 90-minute cutover orientation tailored to what that team did day-to-day.

The intranet was the marquee deliverable. We designed and built “The Hub” on SharePoint Online, branded to SELC’s identity and shaped to its information needs. Branding, design, user experience, permissions, integrations. The Hub launched as the primary gateway to SELC’s digital workplace and the central destination for internal communication and virtual community building across the regional footprint.

We supported the change with a comprehensive plan: change communications, end-user training, and launch events. Five all-staff lunch-and-learn training sessions covered the M365 fundamentals that staff most needed, and a branded M365 Resource Hub gave people a self-help library they could return to. An M365 Champions program gave each department a peer-level expert to learn from. The NetDocuments integration was sequenced so legal staff could keep their existing file management while still benefiting from the optimized M365 collaboration layer.

For ongoing sustainability, we developed an Intranet Governance Plan with an Intranet Steering Committee and an Intranet Site Managers group, policies for intranet usage, content lifecycle management, user access and permissions, and a mechanism for collecting and acting on user feedback.

What changed

What changed.

“The Hub” launched as the connective tissue across SELC’s nine regional offices, replacing an outdated intranet with a SharePoint-based platform shaped to the way the organization actually communicates. More than six departments went through customized optimization consultations and cutover orientations. The five all-staff lunch-and-learn sessions and the M365 Resource Hub produced a measurable lift in user confidence and capability across the staff. The M365 Champions program and the Intranet Governance Plan gave the organization a durable model for ongoing ownership of the environment. The engagement extended into a second phase, with a scope covering Microsoft Purview information protection and an AI agent pilot, both grounded in the foundation laid by the first engagement.

The human moment

Working with Ideal State has taught me so much about how to get it right the first time with large-scale tech projects. I wish we had hired them years ago.

Mary Margaret Pearce, Director of Administration, Southern Environmental Law Center

What sticks

What sticks.

The Hub is the artifact people see every day, but the durable thing is the Intranet Governance Plan and the Champions program that runs underneath it. The Intranet Steering Committee owns the ongoing direction of the platform. The Site Managers group keeps the content current. The Champions support their peers through the small everyday friction that determines whether tools get used or worked around. The second phase of the engagement, on Purview and an AI agent pilot, is being built on the foundation the first phase laid. Each phase makes the next one possible because the people who carry the work are the same.

Lessons we carried forward

Lessons we carried forward.

The SELC engagement reaffirmed what we already believed about intranet projects: a SharePoint launch is a change management project that happens to involve technology, not the other way around. The technical build was the easier half. The harder half was making sure the nine offices each saw The Hub as theirs, not as a corporate artifact. The Champions program was the mechanism that made that happen, and we now write a Champions cohort into every intranet engagement. We also carry forward the discipline of customizing the cutover orientation department by department. Generic training sessions never produced the same adoption curve.

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Have an intranet nobody opens and a Microsoft 365 estate nobody uses?

SELC started with a discovery call about an intranet that did not work and ended with a digital workspace that connects nine regional offices. A 30-minute conversation with one of our co-founders is a useful place to start. No deck. No consultant-speak. No pressure.

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