Intelligent intranet overview

Article
05/31/2024

Keep employees informed and engaged by providing a shared place to securely view and collaborate on content, and to connect and communicate with colleagues. Build community and culture within your organization by bringing people together through events, networking opportunities, and strategic communication channels. Personalize, share, and manage organizational news and shared content to drive organizational efficiencies securely on any device.

In this solution

Build an intelligent intranet

Learn how to move through the process of creating an intranet for your organization. Get familiar with common intranet planning and creation roles, design stages, and the intranet lifecycle. Learn how to align goals into priority scenarios that you can get started implementing quickly. Then, learn how to engage with viewers and maintain your intranet over time as the organization changes and scales.

Help your organization engage and inform

Use SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 products to create communication channels that serve specific audiences. Learn how to create and share organizational news and use the News web part into key landing pages and portals.

Integrate Viva Engage and the Viva Engage web parts to embed conversations and highlights in sites. Use the power of video to share pre-recorded messages and record organizational events for later viewing. Use content services like audience targeting to make sure key audience are targeted specific content.

Create and increase opportunities to collaborate across your organization. Use Microsoft Lists and document libraries to securely store and dynamically display content that can be accessed on any device. Then, users can view, share, and coauthor content in real time.

Use SharePoint team sites to create secure collaboration spaces for teams to share content, get updates, and news. Consider adding Microsoft Teams to your team site to add real-time chat and virtual meetings.

Achieve specific outcomes

Use SharePoint to achieve specific business outcomes like narrowing the distance between leadership teams and individual contributors by creating a leadership site that encourages sharing news and starting conversations. Use SharePoint to unite and inform groups of people with related interests by setting up news for a hub site. View custom solutions in the SharePoint Look Book to help inspire your next site design or simply navigate to the custom PnP site templates and select the template you need from the available templates.

Overview of how to set up an intelligent intranet

Harness the power of the intelligent intranet to communicate effectively across the organization, engage employees, and connect with relevant information and knowledge. Learn more about intranet planning and implementation phases and how to get started, and considerations like how to design your home site and use multi-lingual features. Then, use the intranet roadmap to prepare business owners, stakeholders, site owners, and content authors.

Intranet set up overview

1 - Explore what's possible

Start by getting inspired by what you can accomplish with SharePoint by viewing compelling business scenarios, the SharePoint Look Book, and guided walkthroughs.

Identify your key sponsors and stakeholders
Organize priorities
Align goals with SharePoint capabilities
Document and share the vision with others

Learn more about how to think about your intelligent intranet.

2 - Understand and align

Get started planning your intelligent intranet. Learn more about intranet governance before you start building and ensure you have a plan in place to manage intranet governance. Explore various opportunities to engage viewers in workplace communications using Viva Engage, Teams, live events, and site templates.

Work with business owners and IT to prioritize projects
Audit existing content before migrating
Establish a governance plan
Plan intranet hubs and branding

Get familiar with the intranet lifecycle and site building blocks.

3 - Implement plans and start building

Start building the home site, hubs, sites, and pages that will make up the framework of your intranet. Consider using Microsoft Purview Information Barriers to ensure confidential content is seen by the right users or use audience targeting to target specific content to certain groups of users.

Get feedback from stakeholders and users along the way
Test site architecture with real users
Use engaging communication apps like Viva Engage and Stream
Plan launch communications

Learn more about intranet way finding and how to implement multi-geo features if needed.

4 - Engage and manage

Measure intranet effectiveness by reviewing Microsoft 365 usage analytics and SharePoint hub and page usage analytics. Make sure site owners and authors have appropriate training to create, build, and maintain sites.

Ensure site owners have access to SharePoint training materials
Plan to review site and hub metrics
Consider using Microsoft Learning Pathways to surface training content on SharePoint pages

Design process	Learn more
Plan sites - Help site owners understand how to plan to create high impact sites that meet objectives.	Plan your SharePoint communication site Get inspired with the SharePoint Look Book Guided Walkthroughs: Creating sites for your organization
Build sites - Learn how to create and customize sites that align with your organization.	Create and use modern pages on a SharePoint site Customize your SharePoint site Customize the navigation on your SharePoint site Using web parts on SharePoint pages
Manage sites - Show site owners how to maintain site content and use site analytics to engage viewers.	Management and life cycle of a SharePoint modern page Manage your SharePoint site settings View usage data for your SharePoint site

Learn more about forming a site owner or intranet champions community to ensure that site owners stay up to date of new capabilities and guidance. Learn more about how to improve SharePoint adoption.

SharePoint intranet key capabilities by enterprise product license

Capability or feature	Description	Licensing
Office apps	Office client apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher, and Access on up to 5 PC/Macs, tablets, or mobile devices per person.	Microsoft 365 E5 Microsoft 365 E3
Social and intranet	Use SharePoint and Viva Engage to connect and engage across your organization with an intelligent, mobile intranet and enterprise social networking.	Microsoft 365 E5 Microsoft 365 E3
Files and content	OneDrive helps you work on a file and save it directly to OneDrive or SharePoint and changes are updated across synced devices. Stream lets you easily create engaging video content. Access and sync files on PC or Mac and mobile devices. Share files with external contacts by providing access or guest links.	Microsoft 365 E5 Microsoft 365 E3
Work management	Efficiently manage work across individuals, teams, and organizations. Create and automate business processes.	Microsoft 365 E5 Microsoft 365 E3