How NZ Organisations Can Compare Agencies for SharePoint Intranets

SharePoint intranet proposals tend to look alike from the outside. Same Microsoft logos, same news-carousel screenshot. For a New Zealand organisation that also needs its public website to talk to the intranet, the real differences sit underneath, and a capability deck won't show you where they are.

So this isn't a ranked list of agencies. It's a set of questions any NZ buyer can put to any shortlist, wherever the agency's based: Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or across the Tasman. What to ask, what good and weak answers sound like, and the evidence worth demanding before anyone signs.

Key Takeaways

• An enterprise intranet is information architecture, permissions, search and governance first. The template is the easy bit.
• Get permissions and search right before switching on Microsoft 365 Copilot, because an assistant that can find everything will also surface what nobody should have been able to see.
• "Integrated website" should mean something specific: shared sign-in, shared documents or forms flowing into a CRM. Ask which, and ask for proof.
• Raise the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard, the Privacy Act 2020 and data residency with every agency, local or not.
• A local partner can be the right call. If on-site work or NZ procurement rules dominate your project, weight that heavily.

What an Enterprise SharePoint Intranet Actually Involves

SharePoint ships with perfectly decent templates. Plenty of organisations could run a small intranet on them and they'd be fine (that's a legitimate, cheaper answer, and a good agency'll say so). Enterprise scale is different. With a few thousand staff, several divisions and a decade of file shares behind you, the template's about the least interesting part of the job.

Here's what the work actually covers:

• Information architecture. How hub sites, departmental sites and document libraries relate, and what metadata ties them together.
• Permissions and groups. Who can see what, inherited how, and managed by whom once the project team leaves.
• Search. Staff judge an intranet on whether they can find the leave policy in one go. On a large tenant, search gets configured. It doesn't just arrive.
• People directory. Searchable, filterable and accurate, which usually means drawing on whatever identity data you already hold.
• Document hubs, knowledge hubs and news. Separate jobs that templates blur together.
• Custom web parts. For the things out-of-the-box parts can't do. Fewer is better.
• Teams integration. Most staff live in Teams, so the intranet has to turn up there too.

On custom web parts, I'd rather a partner talked me out of three of them than into ten. Every custom component is something you'll test and maintain after launch, so the honest answer often starts with what SharePoint already does.

Permissions and search come before any AI layer

This one matters more every year, and it's where shortlists split. Microsoft 365 Copilot works within the permissions the signed-in user already holds. Sounds reassuring. It isn't, if the tenant's carrying years of over-shared libraries nobody's audited. Oversharing that stayed hidden because search was poor becomes very visible the moment an assistant can retrieve anything a user technically has access to.

If Copilot's on your roadmap, and for most enterprises it is, treat permissions hygiene and search configuration as part of the intranet project, not a clean-up for later. Ask every agency how they'd sequence it. A good answer puts the audit early. Honestly, nobody's got this fully settled yet: the features keep changing and every tenant carries a different history, so you're working it out alongside whoever you hire. A weak answer treats Copilot readiness as a licence purchase.

The Integrated Website Half

Plenty of briefs pair the intranet with a public website, and "integrated" gets used loosely. Pin it down. It usually means one or more of these:

• Single sign-on, so staff, members or partners use one identity across the public site and the intranet.
• Shared content or document libraries, where a policy or report is published once and appears in both places.
• Forms on the public site feeding a CRM, with the intranet showing staff what came in.

Each one's a different piece of engineering. The public site usually runs on a separate CMS, so the questions become: which system owns each piece of data, what happens when they disagree, and who gets alerted when a connection fails at 2am on a Sunday?

Judge integration evidence by specifics. "We integrate with everything" says nothing. "We connected this ticketing system to that CRM, and here's what flows in which direction" tells you plenty. Ask for a diagram from a past project, client name removed if they'd prefer.

NZ Context to Raise With Every Agency

These obligations sit with you, not the supplier. A contract can share the work. It can't hand over the duty. So every shortlisted agency, local or offshore, should be able to talk about each of them without notes.

Accessibility and usability

For public sector sites, the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard and Web Usability Standard set the bar. The Accessibility Standard is mandated for Public Service departments and certain other agencies, including the Police and the Defence Force, and it covers internally facing pages such as intranets as well as public websites. Other public sector and local government organisations aren't required to implement it, but are encouraged to. The current version of the Accessibility Standard is built on WCAG 2.2 at Level AA, which is also the current W3C recommendation. These standards keep moving, too, and a new Digital Accessibility Standard is in development, so check what's current when you go to market. Private-sector buyers aren't bound by them, but WCAG 2.2 Level AA is still the sensible benchmark. Either way, ask which WCAG version the quote is written against, and get the answer in the contract.

The Privacy Act 2020

An intranet is full of personal information: staff profiles, contact details, sometimes HR documents. The Privacy Act 2020's information privacy principles cover how that information is stored and secured, and principle 12 deals with disclosing personal information outside New Zealand. According to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, sending information to an overseas provider that only holds or processes it on your behalf generally isn't a disclosure under principle 12, as long as the provider doesn't use it for its own purposes, but you stay responsible for how it's protected. Ask any agency, and particularly an offshore one, what personal information its team will actually see during the build, and where.

Data residency

Microsoft opened its Azure New Zealand North region in December 2024. That gives NZ organisations an in-country option for many Azure workloads. Microsoft 365 is different: Microsoft's documentation lists in-country storage for SharePoint, Exchange, Teams and Copilot data in New Zealand only through its paid Advanced Data Residency and Multi-Geo add-ons, not as a default commitment, so check the current position before you assume your intranet data stays onshore. For a SharePoint intranet the cleanest arrangement is usually that everything lives in your own Microsoft 365 tenancy, under whatever residency arrangement you've chosen, and the agency works inside it. Ask each agency to confirm in writing where your data will sit and whether any of it will pass through their systems.

Questions to Ask, With Good and Weak Answers

1. "How do you run discovery?" Good: workshops with real staff before any design, and a written architecture you can challenge. Weak: "We'll start with our standard template and customise."
2. "Who designs the permissions model, and when?" Good: a named person, in discovery, working with your IT team. Weak: "We'll set permissions up at go-live."
3. "How will search work on our tenant?" Good: metadata, managed properties, search verticals and bookmarks for the pages people look for most. Weak: "SharePoint search is built in."
4. "What's custom and what's standard?" Good: a list, with reasons. Weak: everything custom, or nothing.
5. "Show us a past integration." Good: a diagram and a named direction of data flow. Weak: a page of platform logos.
6. "What happens after launch?" Good: clear ownership, training and an agreed arrangement for changes. Weak: vagueness. Get it written down.

Evidence That Separates SharePoint Practices From Template Resellers

Ask to see working features. Not mock-ups. Interactive floor plans, filterable staff directories, knowledge hubs for policy and document hubs are hard to fake, because each one forces the agency to solve real problems with data, permissions and search. A practice that's built them can walk you through the decisions. A reseller shows screenshots.

Ask for case studies with the platform named, and ask whether you can speak to someone at the client. If the referee's in another country, fine. A video call's still a call.

Working Across the Tasman: An Honest Trade-off

An Australian agency is one option among several, and it isn't automatically the right one. The practical gap's small. Sydney runs two hours behind Auckland for most of the year, and three for a short stretch in spring when New Zealand starts daylight saving before New South Wales does. That still leaves a full shared working day, and discovery workshops, sprint reviews and user testing all run comfortably over video.

The gaps that do matter are elsewhere. Ask any distant agency how much on-site time it's proposing, and who's paying for flights. Ask how it'll handle NZ-specific procurement, such as the Government Procurement Rules if your organisation is one of the agencies required to follow them. And where on-site presence is essential (frequent workshops with frontline staff, say, or a security posture that rules out remote access), a local partner may simply be the better answer. I'd much rather a buyer chose well than chose us.

Where Webcoda Fits

Webcoda's a Sydney agency, operating since 2005, with clients across Australia. We don't have a New Zealand office and we don't hold any NZ government accreditation. We're a Microsoft Partner, and SharePoint intranet development and Microsoft 365 integration are a specialty, delivered through our intranets and extranets work and our systems integration practice.

The evidence is public. NSW Justice Health has a searchable, filterable, exportable employee directory, a media hub with trending-document filtering and a knowledge hub for policy. NSW Health 1 Reserve Road has a fully interactive floor plan with filtering by floor, keyword search, tooltips, pan and zoom. MA Financial Group started with UX discovery workshops and ended with an employee directory and a secure knowledge hub. Mid North Coast LHD is a custom SharePoint intranet, and Saluda Medical is a SharePoint intranet for a medical technology company. On the website side, UTS College runs on HubSpot CMS integrated with its CRM, and Sydney Zoo links its CustomLinc ticketing through to HubSpot CRM. For an NZ client, we'd work inside your own Microsoft 365 tenancy and confirm in writing where your data sits.

Talk to Webcoda

Webcoda is a Sydney-based, B Corp certified digital agency that has been building websites and enterprise web applications since 2005, for organisations including Sony, BridgeClimb, the Australian Federal Government and NSW Health. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so platform advice comes without a single-vendor agenda.

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