Fresh welcomes Canadian partner Creospark

Creospark and Fresh are joining forces in Canada. For 25 years, Creospark has been building digital workplaces that actually stick, helping organizations across North America think through strategy, adoption, and the human side of technology transformation. Now, they’re applying that expertise into Fresh’s mission: building intranets that communicators love and employees find impossible to ignore.

“The partnership works because we’re solving the same problem from different angles,” says David Bowman, Product Director at Fresh. “Creospark thinks deeply about organizational culture and adoption. Fresh builds the product that makes that thinking actually land. Working together allows us to deliver even greater value to our clients.”

As this partnership takes shape, we spoke with Eric Overfield, Chief Innovation Officer at Creospark. With decades of experience shaping digital workplaces, he shares how this collaboration builds on Creospark’s legacy, and the new possibilities it unlocks for organizations across Canada. 

Creospark has roots going all the way back to PixelMill in 1998; you’ve been living and breathing SharePoint intranets for longer than most. What made Fresh the right next chapter in that story?

ERIC: When we started PixelMill in 1998, there was no playbook for what a great intranet looked like. We wrote it. Over 150 digital workspaces later, through every evolution of SharePoint, we’ve learned exactly what makes an intranet stick: it has to look and feel like it belongs to the organization, it has to be simple for communicators to manage, and it has to run on a foundation IT actually trusts. Fresh checks every one of those boxes. It’s built entirely inside the Microsoft 365 tenant, which aligns perfectly with the governance-first, people-first approach we’ve always taken. What really sealed it for us is that Fresh shares our philosophy. They are solving the employee experience problem, not just deploying technology. After two decades of custom-building intranets from the ground up, partnering with Fresh means we can get clients to that polished, on-brand experience faster without sacrificing the strategic depth and Microsoft expertise that Creospark is known for. It’s not a departure from our story; it’s the natural next step.

You describe yourselves as a “people-first” organization. How does that philosophy shape the way you approach an intranet project, and where does Fresh fit into that?

With 150+ digital workspaces in the bag, you’ve seen a lot of intranet approaches come and go. What’s the most common mistake organizations make when building their intranet – and how does Fresh help avoid it?

ERIC: The biggest mistake we see is organizations treating the intranet as an IT project instead of a communications and culture project. They get caught up in technical requirements, over-engineer the architecture, and launch something that content owners can’t manage on their own. Within six months the site is stale, employees stop visiting, and leadership wonders why adoption fell off a cliff. Fresh helps avoid that trap because it was purpose-built for the people who actually maintain the intranet day to day. The interface is intuitive, content targeting is baked in, and deployment can happen in weeks rather than months. Pair that with the strategic guidance and adoption expertise Creospark brings to every engagement, and you get an intranet that stays alive long after launch because the right people feel empowered to own it.

You’ve got Microsoft MVPs on your team, and you were a finalist for Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year. How do you see Fresh fitting alongside Microsoft’s own direction for the employee experience?

ERIC: Our team lives inside the Microsoft ecosystem every day, as we have for over twenty years, and the direction Microsoft is heading with Copilot, SharePoint, and Teams is clear: meet employees where they are with personalized, integrated experiences. Fresh was built on that same vision. It runs entirely within the Microsoft 365 tenant, leverages SharePoint and Teams natively, and layers on the polished, consumer-grade experience that out-of-the-box SharePoint still struggles to deliver on its own. For our consultants, that alignment matters because it means Fresh doesn’t fight the platform or create technical debt. It extends what Microsoft is already building in a way that’s secure, compliant, and governed from the start. When a Microsoft Partner of the Year finalist tells you a product fits the roadmap, that perspective comes from years of working directly within the ecosystem and knowing where it’s headed.

Be honest, what was your first reaction when you saw Fresh in action?

ERIC: It felt like someone had built an intranet product we’d been custom-building for 20 years. After delivering over 150 digital workspaces, you develop a very specific picture of what works and what doesn’t. Fresh nailed the things we’ve always fought hardest for: clean branding that doesn’t look like a default SharePoint site, intuitive publishing that content owners can actually handle, and a deployment model that doesn’t drag on for six months. Our team’s immediate reaction was that this would let us focus on the strategic, high-value work our clients hire us for instead of reinventing the wheel every time someone needs a polished intranet. That’s a rare feeling after doing this for over two decades.

For a Canadian organization sitting on the fence between a DIY SharePoint intranet and going with a product like Fresh, what would you say to them?

ERIC: We’ve seen this play out dozens of times. The DIY route sounds cost-effective until you factor in the months of development, the specialized talent you need to retain, and the ongoing maintenance that pulls your IT team away from higher priorities. Most organizations end up with something that works technically but never quite feels finished, and the people responsible for content quietly give up on it. Fresh gives you a polished, fully branded intranet running inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant in weeks or a few months, not quarters. Your data stays in your environment, it meets Canadian compliance requirements out of the gate, and your communications team can own it without waiting on developers. Our North American-based team has helped organizations across Canada navigate this exact decision, and the math consistently favours starting with a proven product and investing the savings into adoption, governance, and making sure employees actually use the thing.

What are you most excited about as we kick off this partnership?

For Canadian organizations looking to build an intranet their people actually choose to use. Whether launching something new or evolving your current approach, this partnership makes it possible.