An Australian-only aged care intranet, delivered in six weeks

Doutta Galla Aged Services is a leading not-for-profit aged care provider based in Melbourne, Victoria. The organisation operates a number of residential aged care homes across the metropolitan area, providing permanent residential care, respite care and specialist support to older Australians. Its approach emphasises dignity, cultural diversity and individual choice, and it serves communities with a wide range of backgrounds and languages — something reflected in both its residents and its workforce. As a not-for-profit, DGA reinvests in the quality of care it provides rather than distributing surpluses. The organisation employs a substantial workforce of nurses, personal care workers, allied health professionals, hospitality and maintenance staff and corporate teams, working across multiple sites and around the clock. Australian aged care is a closely regulated sector with rigorous standards covering care quality, staff competency, record keeping and data handling, and providers are subject to regular accreditation and review.

Impressive Numbers

• 6-week delivery from design to live platform
• Zero data loss during migration, with structure and metadata fully preserved
• 100% of data stored and accessed within Australia, enforced at tenant level

DGA came to us with a clear objective and one absolutely non-negotiable constraint.

The objective was consolidation. Internal communication, document management and staff collaboration were spread across separate tools and locations. For a workforce that is largely hands-on — nurses and care workers who step away from residents to look something up, not office staff with a browser permanently open — that fragmentation was a real barrier. If finding a policy or a form takes more than a moment, it competes directly with time spent caring for residents.

The constraint was data residency. As an Australian aged care provider handling sensitive information about vulnerable people, DGA required that all data remain stored and accessible exclusively within Australia, with no offshore access whatsoever. This was not a preference to be traded off against other considerations; it determined which solutions were viable at all.

The existing document estate had to move without loss. Years of policies, procedures, forms and records needed migrating with structure and metadata fully preserved — in a regulated sector, a document that arrives without its classification or history is a compliance problem, not just an inconvenience.

Permissions needed to be defined and enforced across administrator, manager and staff levels, reflecting genuine differences in what each group should see in an organisation handling resident and employee information.

And all of it was needed in six weeks, fully branded and built around DGA's specific business processes rather than delivered as a generic template.

We designed and implemented a fully branded SharePoint Online intranet for DGA inside their existing Microsoft 365 environment, with the data residency requirement governing every decision from the outset.

We addressed residency first, because it determined everything else. All data is stored and accessed exclusively within Australia, enforced through Microsoft 365 tenant configuration and geo-restriction controls rather than through policy or assurance. The constraint is implemented technically, which means it holds regardless of who is using the platform or from where. For a provider handling information about vulnerable residents in a closely regulated sector, that distinction between 'we have a policy' and 'the system enforces it' was the whole point.

With that established, we built the platform DGA needed. A custom branded theme developed with the SharePoint Framework aligned the intranet to DGA's corporate identity — important for an organisation whose staff work across several sites and whose sense of shared identity matters to how it operates.

The home page was designed for people with very little time. News, announcements, quick links, resources and tasks are presented so that a care worker stepping away from the floor can find what they need in seconds. Everything frequently needed is reachable without navigating.

Document management was rebuilt properly. A centralised, version-controlled library holds DGA's policies, procedures and records, with metadata and category tagging so documents are found by searching for what they are. Version control means there is one current policy with a visible history — essential in aged care, where staff must be able to rely on the procedure in front of them being the approved one.

The migration itself was the most delicate part of the engagement. We moved the existing document estate with zero data loss, preserving structure and metadata in full. Nothing arrived stripped of its classification or history, so the migrated content was immediately usable and immediately compliant rather than requiring a remediation exercise afterwards.

We built custom lists with full create, read, update and delete operations for structured staff records, giving DGA a proper way to maintain information that had previously lived in documents and spreadsheets.

Permissions were configured across three levels — administrator, manager and staff — each with access appropriate to their role. Administrators manage the platform, managers see what their responsibilities require, and staff see what they need without exposure to information that is not theirs.

An organisation-wide event calendar with milestone tracking gives DGA a shared view of what is happening across sites, and advanced filter-based search spans every library and list so users can narrow results rather than browsing.

Recognising that a platform is only as good as its adoption, we produced comprehensive training materials and user guides. In a workforce that includes many staff who are not desk-based and some for whom English is an additional language, clear guidance was not optional.

The six-week timeline was met by running design, build and migration preparation in parallel with frequent client review, so decisions were made quickly and nothing waited on a scheduled checkpoint.

Client's Quote / Review

DRAFT FOR CLIENT APPROVAL — please confirm wording and attribution before publication.

"Keeping all of our data within Australia was non-negotiable, and it was handled properly from the start. Our documents came across without losing anything, our staff can find what they need quickly, and we had a working platform in six weeks. For an organisation like ours, that combination is not easy to come by."— [Name], [Job title], Doutta Galla Aged Services

DGA got a fully branded, business-specific intranet live in six weeks, which for a project involving migration, custom development and strict compliance requirements is an unusually short timeline. Meeting it meant the organisation started benefiting immediately rather than waiting through a lengthy programme.

The data residency requirement is met technically rather than contractually. All data remains stored and accessible only within Australia, enforced through tenant configuration and geo-restriction controls. For an aged care provider subject to regular accreditation and handling sensitive information about vulnerable residents, being able to demonstrate that compliance is enforced by the platform — not merely promised — is a substantial assurance to regulators, families and the board alike.

The migration achieved what it needed to: zero data loss, with structure and metadata fully preserved. Years of policies, procedures and records arrived intact and immediately usable. There was no remediation phase, no partial cutover and no period during which staff had to check two places. On day one, everything was where it should be.

Consolidation has had the biggest day-to-day effect. Communication, documents and collaboration now live in one branded platform rather than across separate tools. For nurses and care workers stepping away from residents to check a procedure, finding it in seconds instead of minutes returns time directly to care — which, in an aged care setting, is the outcome that actually matters.

Version control and metadata tagging have improved confidence in the document estate. Staff know the policy in front of them is the current one, and managers can see what changed and when. In a sector where working from a superseded procedure carries real consequences, that certainty is a genuine safety improvement rather than an administrative one.

The role-based permission model gives administrators, managers and staff access appropriate to their responsibilities, protecting resident and employee information while keeping general content open. The structured staff records held in custom lists replaced spreadsheets with something maintainable and properly controlled.

The organisation-wide calendar with milestone tracking has improved coordination across sites, and advanced filter-based search means users narrow to what they need rather than browsing libraries.

Adoption was smoother than such projects usually manage, largely because of the training materials and user guides produced alongside the build. In a workforce that is substantially non-desk-based and linguistically diverse, that investment in clear guidance was what turned a well-built platform into one that is actually used.