The recipe for smooth internal communications at Valio: Fresh Intranet

Valio is Finland’s leading dairy and food company and the country’s largest food exporter. It manufactures and sells dairy and plant-based products and also operates in wholesale trade. Valio produces goods at 13 plants across Finland. The company also has two plants in Estonia and sales offices in Sweden, China and the United States.

Valio’s intranet has nearly 5,400 users and is available in four languages. Its existing SharePoint-based Valo Intranet was approaching the end of its lifecycle. Valio wanted a replacement platform that, like the previous intranet, would enable smooth content creation for content producers and provide a good user experience for end users.

Seamless implementation and smooth content creation

Together with its long-standing partner Advania, Valio selected Fresh Intranet as the solution. Built on SharePoint, it integrates seamlessly with Valio’s own Microsoft 365 environment.

Fresh was selected because it offers a broad range of ready-made features that meet typical intranet needs. These include tools that make content creation, publishing and administration easier. Fresh also complements SharePoint extremely well by adding capabilities that are not included by default in a traditional SharePoint-based intranet, while keeping all core SharePoint functionality available alongside them.

During autumn 2025, Advania’s experts installed Fresh, delivered training and worked with Valio in workshops to define the intranet’s visual design and basic settings. This collaboration ensured that the final solution met Valio’s needs both technically and visually.

“Advania led our intranet renewal project with expertise, and the training gave us a good understanding of the new platform. Creating content in Fresh is even easier than before,” says Teemu Hänninen, IT Service Manager at Valio.

Valio has a strong, internationally recognised brand and particularly values the opportunities Fresh Intranet provides for enriching the visual identity and maintaining a consistent brand experience. Fresh not only makes everyday work easier but also supports communications and visual presentation that align with Valio’s brand – an essential consideration for the company.

Getting more from the Microsoft 365 environment with Orchestry

With Advania’s support, Valio implemented Orchestry alongside the intranet renewal. It helps the company get more from its Microsoft 365 environment by improving tenant management and the user experience.

Management based on automation and ready-made templates reduces manual IT work, lowers costs and brings greater clarity, especially to Teams and SharePoint environments. Workspace creation, security and governance policies, and guest user management can be standardised, helping to prevent uncontrolled growth and security risks.

The platform provides analytics and a consolidated view of the M365 environment’s status, supports decision-making and helps guide users towards the right tools. The result is a better user experience, higher adoption and more productive digital work – without increasing management complexity.