Building Better Connections: How Becker & Poliakoff Modernized Its Intranet with Infodash

Becker & Poliakoff’s Journey to a Modern Intranet Built on Microsoft 365

Becker & Poliakoff is a business-focused law firm that prides itself on taking unconventional approaches to tough legal challenges on behalf of its clients. Founded in 1973, the firm has grown to 15 offices up and down the East Coast.
Becker initially decided to build inhouse, but quickly discovered it lacked the necessary resources.

The firm turned to Infodash for help. Because Infodash had been in development for years under parent company Acrowire, the firm benefited from the company’s experience in the legal space as well as its Microsoft expertise.

The Challenge

The firm’s intranet had been running on SharePoint 2003, which had reached its end-of-life date in April of 2009 and was no longer supported by Microsoft after 2014. The functionality was limited. Security had become an issue. And servers to support the application were taking up space. The intranet site had mostly been abandoned by the firm’s employees and was no longer
providing value.

In addition, the firm has started offering a hoteling model to allocate workspace in their offices because staff no longer come in to work every day, so a new need to accommodate reservations had arisen.

The Solution

Becker identified the need for a new intranet built on SharePoint Online, which would maximize its investment in Microsoft 365, eliminate the need for servers and offer easy-to-access single sign on. The following functionality requirements were determined to develop an intranet that would prove valuable and functional:

Employee directory
Conference room reservation system
Catering reservations
Visitor office booking
Employee office booking
Pages for each office

Pages for committees
Pages for practice groups
Integrated document management, financial and other systems
Dashboards

“Using Infodash for our intranet has helped us improve collaboration and connection among firm employees, helped mitigate a potential security vulnerability and allowed us to have features on our intranet that are not available in native SharePoint”

David Michel, Chief Information Officer at Becker & Poliakoff

Results

Intuitive site
Becker rolled out its new intranet site while the old site was still live, so users could share feedback on what they use and need. The new intranet site is intuitive, so users required little to no training.

Collaboration and connection among team members
Users are now able to search for and find more information about their colleagues than ever before. They can search by name, practice group, office, skill sets, bar admissions and more. They can learn who a fee earner’s assistant is and find birthdays, timekeeper numbers and more. People can get to know each other better, regardless of where they work.

Everything in one place
Using the Infodash platform to find everything in one place – from a laptop, desktop or phone – has proven valuable to the firm’s overall productivity. Single sign-on provides easy access to all firm information.

Increased security
Importantly, the firm has solved the security challenges of its old intranet and can now pass the security audits that many clients require. The increased security brings a level of service and reassurance, allowing the firm to retain its valued clients.