Storm ID supports Cefas intranet refresh
Storm ID has supported Cefas (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science) to deliver a refresh of its corporate intranet, helping to enhance how colleagues access, navigate and manage internal information.
The work focused on strengthening the intranet’s underlying structure and improving day-to-day usability, ensuring the platform continues to support the organisation as its priorities and ways of working evolve. The refresh also introduced improvements to content governance and reporting, enabling content owners to manage updates more consistently and maintain a clear, current and useful intranet over time.
Supporting access to information and science content
A key priority was ensuring that science content was easier to find and better represented within the intranet’s overall structure. We worked with Cefas to develop a clearer information architecture, including the establishment of a top-level Our Science area and an agreed structure beneath it. This helps staff locate relevant information more efficiently and supports consistent organisation of content across teams.
Alongside structural improvements, the refresh strengthened content lifecycle controls for intranet news and events. This supports timely publishing, routine retirement of out-of-date items, and a proportionate approach to ongoing maintenance, reducing the burden on content owners while ensuring information remains current and relevant.
To support continuous improvement, the work also enhanced insight and reporting, providing improved management information on how intranet content and updates are being used. In parallel, a set of usability and navigation enhancements was introduced to improve the overall experience for colleagues, including refinements to features such as Save for Later and more efficient access to team pages.
Automated insight into news engagement
To give Cefas a clearer picture of how intranet news is landing with colleagues, we built an automated daily reporting flow using Power Automate and the SharePoint Search and REST APIs. Each day, the flow identifies recently published news articles and captures their views, likes and comments, updating a single record per article from the day of publication through its first week.
This rolling approach tracks how engagement builds over each article's most active period rather than showing a single point-in-time figure. All results are stored in a central SharePoint list, giving the team a consistent, ready-made dataset for reviewing performance, spotting trends and informing future content planning. The whole process runs without any manual effort. It was built entirely on native Microsoft 365 capabilities, so it stays supportable and aligned with Cefas' existing platform.
Building on an existing relationship
Storm ID has previously supported Cefas on intranet development and drew on this experience and organisational knowledge to deliver an intranet that is clearer to navigate, easier to maintain, and better aligned to Cefas’ needs.
We're pleased to have worked with Cefas again to support improvements to its intranet. By strengthening the underlying structure and improving day-to-day usability, the intranet now helps staff find the information they need more quickly and supports effective content management over time.
About Cefas
Cefas is a UK Government science organisation focused on marine and freshwater environments. It provides data, evidence and advice to support the protection and sustainable management of seas and rivers, informing decision-making across government and the wider environmental sector. Cefas is an Executive Agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).