Iberian Digital Workplace for a Communications Consultancy

Client Overview

An independent communications consultancy formed by the integration of a Portuguese agency and a Spanish agency, now operating across Portugal and Spain with roughly 200 consultants. The group delivers public relations, public affairs, digital and social media, content, events and influencer marketing through distinct but connected agency units.

Business Challenge

The merger created one company on paper, but two operating realities in practice.

• No shared workplace. Portuguese and Spanish teams had different intranets, different naming conventions and no common place to find people, policies or client information.
• Client work lived in mailboxes. Briefings, press releases, approved copy, media lists and clippings were spread across email threads, personal OneDrives and legacy file shares. Onboarding a new client account meant recreating the same folder structure by hand every time.
• Language friction. Consultants worked in Portuguese, Spanish and English, often on the same account, and a single-language intranet was never going to be adopted on both sides of the border.
• Confidentiality risk. A communications agency frequently serves competing brands in the same sector. Without clear boundaries between account workspaces, the group could not demonstrate to clients that their embargoed material was properly contained.
• No visibility of talent. Staffing an Iberian pitch meant asking around, because there was no way to search who had experience in a given sector, language or client type.

Solution Overview

Avantit built a multilingual digital workplace on SharePoint Online, designed from the start as a single Iberian platform rather than two intranets bolted together.

Information architecture

• A corporate home hub serving both countries, with content translated across Portuguese, Spanish and English using SharePoint multilingual pages.
• Dedicated hub sites for each agency unit — PR and public affairs, digital and social, content, events and influencer marketing — so each discipline keeps its autonomy under a shared identity.
• Country landing areas for the information that genuinely differs: HR policies, benefits, legal notices and local announcements.

Client workspace provisioning

• A site template defining the standard shape of every client account: briefing, strategy, press releases, approved assets, media lists, clippings, reporting and archive.
• A provisioning request form in Power Apps, approved by the account director and executed through Power Automate and the PnP provisioning engine, creating the site, the Teams team, the permission groups and the retention settings in one pass.
• Automatic decommissioning workflow when an account closes, moving the workspace to a read-only archive instead of leaving it to drift.

Custom SPFx web parts

• News Center with targeting by country, office and agency unit, so a Madrid announcement does not flood Lisbon feeds.
• Media Clippings board, aggregating coverage per client and campaign with outlet, reach and sentiment metadata.
• Campaign Calendar, consolidating launches, embargo dates and events across all accounts.
• People & Skills Directory, searchable by sector experience, language and client history, built for cross-border pitch staffing.
• Approval Tracker, surfacing every press release and content piece awaiting client or internal sign-off.

Governance and security

• Sensitivity labels applied at the workspace level, with embargoed material protected and externally shared links time-limited by default.
• Access boundaries between competing client accounts, with membership driven by the account team rather than manual permission edits.
• A published governance model covering who publishes what, in which language, and how long client material is retained.

Adoption

• Viva Connections gives consultants the intranet inside Teams and on mobile — essential for teams who spend their days at client offices, events and press briefings.
• Champions were nominated in both countries and trained in their own language, with the launch phased unit by unit rather than in a single switchover.

Business Benefits

• One company, one workplace. Consultants in Portugal and Spain now work from the same platform, in the language they choose, with the same client workspace structure on both sides of the border.
• Faster account onboarding. A new client workspace, correctly structured and correctly secured, is provisioned in minutes rather than assembled manually over days.
• Client material under control. Press releases, approved assets and coverage reports live in one governed place, with a clear audit trail of who approved what and when.
• Better staffing decisions. Skills search turned an informal network of favours into a searchable capability map across the group.
• Credible confidentiality. The group can now show clients exactly how their embargoed material is contained — a genuine commercial argument in competitive pitches.

Technology Stack

• SharePoint Online — multilingual pages, hub site architecture, content types
• SPFx & PnP JS — custom web parts and provisioning
• Power Automate & Power Apps — workspace requests, approvals and lifecycle
• Microsoft Purview — sensitivity labels and retention
• Viva Connections & Microsoft Teams — mobile and in-Teams adoption

Lessons Learned

• Translate the structure, not just the pages. Adoption depended on Spanish teams finding a workspace shaped the way they already thought, not a translated Portuguese one.
• Provisioning is the real intranet. The homepage gets the attention, but the templated client workspace is what consultants touch every hour of every day.
• Governance sells. In an agency serving competing brands, demonstrable confidentiality is not an IT constraint — it is part of the commercial offer.