SharePoint Online Powered Intranets

Nowadays, many companies use Office 365 with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online as their strategic social collaboration platform. Moreover, SharePoint Online has developed to an excellent content management system in recent years. In the past, intranets had the purpose to inform employees and functioned as a platform for corporate news. The intranets however have been changing into social intranets in the past years. The focus now lies predominantly on interaction, employee engagement and tools to support daily work. Just recently, our Raytion experts have successfully migrated the intranet of a German DAX customer to SharePoint Online and modernized it at the same time. Our customer thus has a future-proof intranet portal, which meets the highest requirements without causing additional software costs. As the intranet is based on SharePoint Online, it is directly integrated into the mobile SharePoint app or into Microsoft Teams via Viva Connections.

What Are the Central Elements of SharePoint Online as an Intranet Platform?

The Portal Page as Intelligent Entry Point

Based on our experience, we design the portal page together with the customer, so that it satisfies all relevant use cases. It has to comply with the information needs of colleagues, reflect the digital workplace, enable interaction and promote social collaboration.

The portal page provides the news feed and many other elements, so that you can see the most important information and content at one glance. The portal page usually displays personalized and interactive elements. Additionally, it can use content, such as videos, events, favorites or the share price from the O365 environment and other systems. Moreover, our interactive search box takes up little space, but can navigate and find relevant information easily.

Of course the portal should also have a recognition value, for example through alignment with the look and feel or the corporate design of the organization. This is possible through a mixture of configuration parameters, adapted and standardized elements, the so-called WebParts. From experience, when requesting larger requirements, it should not be enough to just set the color scheme. However, with slight adjustments to our Newsfeed WebPart or Quick Links WebPart, the intranet will have the perfect recognition value and will comply with corporate design guidelines.

Mobile-First and Microsoft Teams

Many of our customers do not only have people working in the office but also people working in production, in laboratories or in shops. Many of these users do not own a personal desktop workstation, but only use mobile devices or shared workstations. With the SharePoint app and in the future with the Viva Connections app too, mobile devices can easily display information and news at no additional cost. For the integration you only have to consider that you need to roll out the SharePoint app, set the intranet as the home site and consider that new web parts, which are specially written for the customer, are responsive. However, this is considered a good standard in web development.

Information Architecture and Navigation

You can map the information architecture with the navigation, in particular through mega menus, and also throughout several levels. On the hub site, the navigation can contain three hierarchies, as well as three more within the page navigation. Likewise, all other associated pages can easily provide three additional navigation levels. There are no visible breaks for the user. For editors, the configuration of the navigation is also easy to use. In addition, intuitive, search-driven news overview pages make navigation easier. Our experience has shown that you can map even the most complex architectures on navigation elements in SharePoint Online, even if there are some limitations here and there.

Multilingualism

SharePoint Online is designed to be multilingual. Multinational organizations in particular can easily translate, display content as well as navigation in all important corporate languages. In the context of multilingual portals you can show all elements, including taxonomies and dynamic features on the news overview pages in multiple languages. We consider the multilanguage concept even from the start of the concept phase onwards, which avoids costly changes later on.

Authorization Models and Editorial Processes

Editors can intuitively create content with SharePoint Online. Even before the launch, creating new templates is a perfect starting point for news posts or content pages. With these templates editors can quickly create content which stays the same for the look & feel of the corporate intranet.

When creating new pages, editors do not only leverage a steadily growing number of Microsoft (out of the box) WebParts for their news, but can also use individually developed WebParts if necessary. With this option you can transfer the corporate design to news or content pages. An example is that we implemented a text box with the option to select the background color flexibly.

Through taxonomies the editors can also control what is known as audience targeting, i.e. the personalization. Using one of our approaches, users can subscribe to certain topics, where the intranet displays further news posts. This approach is a slightly modified but compatible concept to the audience targeting and is built-in in SharePoint Online. The difference is that users can actively decide which news topics they want to subscribe to.

You can implement flexible authorization models within each site. As a rule, you can dinstinguish between administrators, editors, as well as approvers or normal users.

The interaction with PowerAutomate Flow enables a reliable approval process. Regardless of whether news should be published immediately, later on or at a scheduled time. Even when implementing complex editorial processes, we generally manage it with two central workflows. This way we can control the approval, as well as any archiving of news posts.

Content Migration

As part of our projects we use our migration tools, which can import existing news or content pages from legacy systems. This means that you can quickly integrate HTML exports into modern SharePoint Online pages. It is even possible to migrate and correctly link multilingual articles to each other. The migrated content, as part of a so-called modern page, can be a starting point when revising the article. In the same way, you can also migrate old news to the archive of the new SharePoint Online intranet and thererfore the old news are not lost.

License Costs and Operation

Most O365 licenses, especially the popular F1, E1, E3 and E5, include SharePoint Online. As a PaaS solution, SharePoint Online does not require any additional hardware or operation, making it possible for most companies to implement an intranet based on SharePoint Online without license costs. We however recommend that you have at least one of the non-productive environments within the targeted release ring. This way, you can test major feature releases or changes by Microsoft early on. We call this concept evergreen monitoring.

The Way to the New Intranet – Agile Project or Big Bang?

At the beginning of a project, we develop a concept for the prospective intranet together with our customers. This concept, among other things, consists of the look and feel, contains definitions of the most important overview pages, includes the information architecture, a definition of the editorial processes, the integration of the intranet into the digital workplace as well as a migration concept. Based on the reached decisions in the conception phase, you can implement the new intranet in several sprints.

We recommend to set up at least one development environment as well as the productive environment during development. A separation of the environments is usually not a problem, as new releases can be deployed in production using our provisioning and deployment engines.

After a successful test phase, you can roll out new releases to production without any friction. A smooth roll out has the advantage that you can quickly launch new features, which shows progress and turns the intranet into the key platform that helps supporting change.

In this way, even complex intranets based on SharePoint Online can be released unproblematically.