Ten top tips for planning a great SharePoint Intranet

Considerations before starting out on a SharePoint intranet adventure

Reading time: 10 minutes

Hi, I’m Matthew and I joined Scott at Your 365 Coach in March. I’m a SharePoint Superfan and it’s a bit of dream to now be in a job where everything we do is focused on helping people to be empowered using the Microsoft 365 tools that they already have to achieve their goals. 

My (quite long) history with SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 tools spans a career in the workplace supporting Customer, HR and Senor Leadership teams. Most of this time I’ve been involved with leading the development of corporate intranets. 

In these days of digital democracy, where anyone can be a content sharer, is there still a place for a company intranet? Well, personally I believe the answer is definitely, yes.  

In fact, with Copilot just around the corner (or maybe even here!) there has probably never been a greater call-to-action to make sure your organisation has a rich source of current, credible corporate information to enrich the AI leverage of your teams. 

The good news is that for once in the Microsoft galaxy the planets have aligned, not only is there a need to have a great intranet, but the tools available in the modern SharePoint Online experience can provide everything you need to build one, out-of-the-box and with minimal previous experience.  

So, I decided that with the need and the solution so well defined for many, it seemed the community spirited thing would be for me to share my pearls of wisdom (also known as scars!) of several SharePoint intranet creations. 

Just to save you reading, if you’re hoping for a blog full of design tips and content hints to create an eye-catching beautiful web experience, this isn’t it. This is the foundational work that you can build your sparkling palace safely on top of! 

So here goes... 

The Intranet is always open to all

This is a basis of the governance plan that I’ll cover in a bit. But before anything happens there needs to be a conversation with your Information Security team, knowledge management experts and communicators to agree what content can be stored on your intranet.

I find that the best user experience and lowest overhead for maintenance is to agree that only corporate information classified as Public or Internal is ever added to the intranet. Your classification names may differ but essentially this means content that is already in the public domain externally or can be viewed by internal colleagues without concern. I.E. you might not need it for your job, but it doesn’t matter that you can see it.

There may be times when there is an exception to this, take a look at my Microsite point.

Create a governance plan

Don’t worry this is governance with a small g, you’ll not be needing a huge rulebook for your intranet but there are some fundamental points that should be documented to help everyone work happily together, they are:

• Who owns the intranet – a sponsor with ultimate say on direction
• Who can use the intranet – see point above
• What the purpose of the intranet is – can be as simple as providing a one-stop-shop for news and fit-for-purpose corporate information
• Roles and responsibilities – like site owners, content owners, IT support
• Permissions and access – what access groups are used, what permissions do roles have
• Training and support – how we teach new users and editors to use the intranet
• Content lifecycles – agreed review periods, what happens with redundant content

Copilot is your manual

This one used to be called ‘Google is your manual’ and still could be. It means that if someone took over your intranet with no prior experience, they could understand how everything works by only using the product support material available online.

Basically, the concept is that you compromise your design and structure to fit SharePoint’s out-of-the-box technology. Don’t try to bend SharePoint to your ideas as you’ll always be fighting the system and at risk when things change. You’ll remove a big learning burden from your intranet team too.

In reality, with the ever increasing flexibility in SharePoint design, rock solid options like publishing or scheduling and the new branding options, it’s likely any give or take would be minimal.

Create a community of practice

An intranet is supported by a community of stakeholders, fostering the relationships between these people will pay dividends particularly in developing the intranet in a cohesive way, knowledge sharing between the community and creating a set of advocates to help adoption within the organisation.

Roles that you should consider within your community:

• Steering committee – a small group of engaged intranet content owners, editors and users to provide feedback and suggestions for development
• Site Owners and Editors – individuals appointed to be responsible for creating and maintaining defined areas of the intranet
• Advocates – people who help to promote the intranet’s purpose, folks like learning and development, onboarding and knowledge managers

Regular questions, meetings and knowledge transfers within the community help to drive the intranet. You might find it’s useful to have everyone in a Microsoft Team to keep them engaged with progress.

SharePoint Intranets use Communication Sites with templates

This is important, mainly because if you start using the wrong site you’ll never be able to change it.

Intranets are not a place for collaboration (lots of people working together on documents etc) they are a source of finished, reliable, published reference material, the SharePoint Communication Site provides this through the age old permission model:

• Owners – Full Control (about 2 people)
• Members – Editors (a very few people)
• Visitors – Read (everyone in the intranet's scope)

A Communication Site doesn't come with the bells and whistles of a Team Site, no mailbox, no Planner, no Groups and can’t be connected to Microsoft Teams.

You can create Communication Site templates which will help bring some order and similarity to help your users. You might consider one for a department site, a project communication site, a community group site and so on.

Side note: your intranet can be the gateway to collaboration, I prefer to direct away to a dedicated app or place to do it (Microsoft Forms, a Public Team or Viva Engage for example)

Deploy Viva Connections

People work in Teams. Like they give away newspapers at railways stations, perhaps you should take your intranet to the people?

Viva Connections makes your intranet news and content available within Teams via an extra button on the lefthand rail. Viva Connections creates a dashboard of selected content, although you can configure it to show your SharePoint homepage just like it would appear in a web browser.

Probably more enticing is that Viva Connections makes your intranet content accessible from the Teams app on mobile devices, instantly you’ll have a mobile available intranet via good app experience. (The SharePoint app is hit and miss in my opinion!)

Be prepared to create more Sites than you expected

Once upon a time a SharePoint intranet was one Site (called Site Collections then) and a host of Subsites. Now Subsites are abandoned (hurrah!) and a Site is the primary container used in an intranet.

I would define the principles for when to create a Site as:

• the content is owned and edited by the same group of people
• the content is all focused on the same topic, team or department
• there is no other site available already focused on the same topic or with same owners and editors

Try not to bundle things together, this avoids complicated broken permissions on document libraries and mixed up page content in the Site Pages library. A worked example could be that you have an HR Site containing all your HR policies and a separate Learning and Development Site because although L&D are part of HR they shouldn’t be able to update HR policies etc.

Although the HR and L&D Sites in reality are peers, using the SharePoint Hub Sites feature lets you put Sites into logical groups supporting close interaction across Sites and a combined search experience. This simulated hierarchy can also be easily changed making your intranet much more able to cope with organisation structure change.

Use audience targeting 

I’ve said the intranet is available to all, but that can be confusing too. No one wants to ‘click here if you’re in the UK’.  

Create a site structure that can be accessed by all, but use the out-of-the-box audience targeting in SharePoint in both the navigation and in page web parts to show the most relevant information to the person who is using the intranet. Your IT department can help create the groups you need, in most places you can target up to 10 audience groups which is plenty. 

Migrate as little as possible

It’s probably unlikely you're starting with a blank canvas, maybe you’re looking to replace an existing custom built or older SharePoint intranet. Migrating content into SharePoint is a complex process and, in my experience, much more useful for moving big data collections and collaboration content in Team sites.

Using a system to move content can lead to content reviewers being risk adverse and can promote the ‘let's keep everything model’ which ultimately results in quantities of poor content littering your new intranet and hard to use structures.

Moving pages, unless from another modern SharePoint site, is pretty much impossible. The moved pages normally need more effort to make them look nice than creating a new one from scratch would take.

I’ve likened migrating intranets before to moving a bookshop with a digger, it all gets there but it’s hard to find anything.

Starting afresh affords content owners with the need to review information to make sure it’s up-to-date and pays dividends in their time by travelling light!

Have a Microsite policy

What’s a Microsite? Well, it’s something I sort of made up, in reality it’s just a SharePoint Communications site, it was a phrase that I used at a previous employer to describe a site within the intranet that met a specific set of criteria, these could be:

• Timebound – communication campaigns, conferences, charity of the year anything that was needed for a fixed time and then could be removed. It’s much easier to delete a whole site then pick though pages, documents and assets mixed in with other materials
• Collabs – when a programme is being jointly led by HR and Finance which site hosts the content? Answer, neither use a topic specific Microsite you can add editors from both HR and Finance safely into an independent space
• Permissions exceptions – occasionally audience targeting isn’t enough, there may be a genuine reason that part of the intranet is only available to selected people, an example might be consultation period. Using a Microsite, you can agree an exception to the intranet model on that site only

Marking sites as Microsites is a good reference that there is something special about them and need to treat them carefully. Caution: if you did this, be strong, you’ll not need too many Microsites!

Use an onboarding process

When you’ve got your lovely new intranet, everyone will be queuing up to have a site. Intranets can sprawl quickly when they’re new but lose momentum after a while. You don’t want to constrain growth but defining an onboarding process will help the intranet to develop in line with your governance. Onboarding would check:

• who the content owner and editors are, and that they understand responsibilities
• that there isn’t a place on intranet already that could be used
• the content is appropriate for the intranet

The onboarding is an opportunity to share the 'rules' and the new owners to promise to stick to them.

I once worked with an intranet that was themed on a house, we called onboarding ‘signing the lease’.

I hope that you found that useful, it was pretty whistle stop and I could have written so much more on design, style, structure and adoption. But maybe they’ll be topics for future blogs.  

Published: 31 May 2024

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