Any company with over 100 employees has some form of an intranet.
Even if it’s just a few pages with links.
How do you know that it’s time for your intranet to grow?
A few weeks ago, one of our experts had a call with a prospective customer.
This financial services company, with about 400 employees was using a custom-built SharePoint intranet built about 5 years ago when the company was smaller.
This custom-built intranet mainly hosted news, marketing & investor collateral, a few policies, and some HR resources.
During the pandemic, this company set up Microsoft Teams for collaboration, and some department managers started poking at SharePoint because it came with Office 365.
Their issue with the old intranet was that the information was hard to find, and things like the staff directory and org chart were not integrated with tools like Workday or Microsoft AD. There was a lot of manual updating and this took time and often the information was not up to date.
Employees started to adopt SharePoint organically in their departments.
If you’re seeing a drop in your existing Office 365 intranet usage as % of the total employee population - it’s time to look at the redesign or migration.
How to build an Office 365 intranet portal?
When it comes to building your SharePoint intranet, you have a few options:
Use vanilla SharePoint intranet templates to build your landing pages
Pros: fast and easy, can be done by a single person in one day
Cons: resulting intranet looks very basic
Buy a pre-built Office 365 intranet solution
Pros: superior intranet design and features without needing custom development
Cons: can take a few weeks or months; additional costs
Hire Microsoft Office 365 intranet consulting to build an intranet for you
Pros: fully bespoke solution meeting any requirements
Cons: it can take many months and costs can be high with consultants working by the hour
Can these options be combined?
Absolutely.
You can use a SharePoint consulting firm to build custom functionality (like workflows) while using a pre-built intranet solution for a website-like design experience.
So, how do you go about selecting the right option?
Our recommended approach to building an Office 365 intranet
1. Understand all intranet requirements
Well-adopted intranets always bring together the needs of at least HR, Communications, and IT.
Having some stakeholders missing when collecting requirements may impact your success in securing an adequate budget.
Sometimes internal influencers that were not included early enough in the process may block your initiative at the very end because their concerns weren’t addressed before the decision maker got involved.
It’s always helpful to see examples of what other intranets look like when deciding on your intranet requirements.
Your team will also appreciate example designs, especially if they follow SharePoint intranet best practices.
Below we listed some of the top features every SharePoint intranet should have.
2. Understand Top Office 365 Intranet Portal Features
In our recent survey, we asked hundreds of intranet teams about their top intranet requirements.
Here are the top 6 intranet requirements that made it to the top.
News, events, and announcements
These intranet features keep employees connected with what’s happening at their workplace. They can include news carousels, calendars, and urgent alerts.
Links to applications and KPIs
Having links to the most frequently used applications saves employees time and helps make the organization more productive.
One-stop-shop for forms, templates, and how-to’s
We often hear from SharePoint users that they are struggling with the search. Having a one-stop shop for important documents can improve the search experience and make the intranet more usable.
Staff directory
In growing organizations, it’s difficult to know who does what within the company.
A staff directory helps find co-workers and experts in a company, allowing for better collaboration and can help cut down on a lot of internal emails.
Employee onboarding
Onboarding checklists, timelines & roadmaps, FAQs, and video training all help new employees hit the ground running.
Employee engagement
Features such as polls, bulletin boards, and employee shout-outs improve intranet engagement and strengthen a team’s knowledge-sharing.
3. Understand what is available in vanilla SharePoint and what isn’t
You want to know what is available for free with Office 365 and to what degree your team is satisfied with it.
For example, even though SharePoint online has a modern design, company leaders often tell us that it falls short with the look & feel. They worry the intranet may not be well adopted because of that.
Check our Microsoft lookbook and see what is available right out of the box.
Check out the SharePoint Intranet examples of what other companies have done beyond vanilla SharePoint.
4. Understand costs
Once you have the requirements from your team, you’ll need to know how much it will cost to build the intranet. Some requirements might be right out of the box, while others can be “asking for the moon.”
The key to remember is this:
[Implementation cost] = Sum of ( [each high-priority business requirement] x [cost to implement that requirement] )
So it’s important that you don’t fill screen with pixels, so to speak, that don’t matter much to your users.
Below video explains how to rank intranet requirements priority.
If you don’t have an in-house capability to estimate a cost, consider sending your requirements to vendors for a quote.
You can request a demo with a vendor and get a quote.
5. Choose from Office 365 Intranet Solutions
Once you hear back from Office 365 intranet solution vendors, you will know which requirements will be fulfilled at which cost. It’s time to decide.
You might choose to use a SharePoint solution and an Office 365 consulting company for an intranet project.
For example, customers often choose Origami for its website-like design while, in parallel, selecting a content migration provider to help them with content and email migration, building workflows, integrations, and business processes.
When selecting a vendor, be sure to ask a vendor about their implementation process and timelines. It can be a big hidden cost when you realize that you’re buying an intranet solution, but you must put it all together yourself.
This can take time and additional consulting costs.
Here is a high-level project plan we follow for many intranet projects: SharePoint Intranet Project Plan
Here is more on choosing an Office 365 Consulting partner: SharePoint intranet consulting
I hope you enjoyed this read and it was helpful.
Feel free to pass it along to your colleagues, comment below, or ask a question!
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.