See five great SharePoint site templates to drive your intranet design in 2022. The templates include the SharePoint start page, project sites and team sites.
See SharePoint intranet examples that will cut your research time and help you brainstorm ideas for a new Office 365 intranet.
See four brilliant SharePoint communication site examples and templates to inspire you in 2022!
Chances are, you landed on this page because the SharePoint website examples you’ve seen so far look clunky, out-of-date, or just plain ugly—and you want your site to look just the opposite.
If you’re with me on the fact that SharePoint search should just work like Google, raise your hand. Almost 60% of respondents using SharePoint online and on-prem today say they need a better search. Here are some tips that can help you make your SharePoint search experience better today.
First, let me give you a scenario:
You have 30 documents in a folder. You need to find a document with an “agreement” as part of its name. Would you use search or look through file names?
Hold that answer!
Here is a scenario 2. You have 30,000 documents and you need to find the one with the word “agreement” in it. Would you still look through file names manually?
Wait, how did I know you’re going to chose “manual answer” for the first scenario?
In one of my projects we tested user’s behavior in a similar sort of way as you did just now. Instead of files, they needed to find case records. We found that users resort to more structured approach when the amount of information they must deal with appears to be manageable. They prefer to look through views, names on a record, file creation date etc.
In contrast, when there is too much to go through, it becomes data. Data is best parsed by our unconscious intuition because our brain relies on finding patters since it understands that there is no match analyzing all the data consciously.
According to this an autonomous driving car processes 100GB of data each second – that's what your brain does and you don’t even bother!
Now, back to designing your document management system. How much data are you presenting to your users? Are you providing tools to help users find what’s in front of them?
Many organizations rely on search to help users find documents, but do nothing to improve it. Is your search contextual? Is content being searched for specific enough? What about draft content or duplicate sources? What about old and irrelevant content?
1. Turn data into information as early as possible. It’s easy to create a document library and drop forms in Excel format into the library, but now the data in those Excel sheets is not readily available until someone opens the file.
Perhaps a better solution is to offer users enter the data in a structured way using a list, CRM system, or an app.
Now that data is safe but you can also report on it, draw pretty graphs, search with variety of filters and tools. I’m not suggesting you should convert every document into a list or an app. Simply identify those high traffic, high value types and automate them. The effort you’ll spend will pay off each time your users interact with the structured data.
2. Retire obsolete content. Why, you ask? Isn’t storage cheap? Yes, the storage is cheap but not the time your users are going to spend looking for something useful in a whole pile of not so useful, old content.
You don’t have to delete things right away. With SharePoint you can set expiration workflows which will automatically archive and eventually delete content passed their set expiration. You can even have SharePoint send you a report of expired content before you decide on what to do with it. So if those are business expense receipts you’re keeping for the 10th year – it’s time for them to go.
3. Know your user’s workflow and design the system accordingly. Does your user’s day start with working on documents from yesterday or last month? Perhaps create views to help them see most recently accessed or worked on documents. Perhaps you need a “manager view” to separate some features used mainly by managers and not overburden the interface with too many filters and buttons.
If part of the workflow is for your users to fill in a form and attach a document, help them out by putting related functions together. Minimize button clicks, new browser sessions, tabbing and switching. If it doesn’t seem intuitive for you, and you built it, it probably won’t feel intuitive to others.
4. Eliminate useless features. Just because something is cool it doesn’t mean it’s helpful. With constant overload of new features in the product it’s important to only introduce the ones that will help your users. Think what’s usable, intuitive, simple, and easy to find.
Best part of all, most of the tools are there out-of-the-box so there is very little configuration investment involved.
What are your thoughts?
If you have questions on how to make your intranet more engaging while leveraging your existing Office 365 and SharePoint investment, we’re here to help you make that impact.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.
See SharePoint intranet examples that will cut your research time and help you brainstorm ideas for a new Office 365 intranet.
See four brilliant SharePoint communication site examples and templates to inspire you in 2022!
Get inspired with six company intranet examples built on data collected from hundreds of intranet sites. See intranet best practices and design ideas to help you build an intranet employees will love.
The purpose of the intranet homepage is to provide quick access to what employees need most. This includes: apps and tools employees need most frequently, critical communication, stats and performance at a glance, and easy navigation to get to more resources.
What you’ll see here are the things you can do TODAY to make your homepage POP and create an experience your employees will value.
The most successful HR portals have the tools and resources to cover all three categories of employee needs.
When you organize your HR portal in a way that matches employee needs, essentials first, at the top of the page, available with minimal effort, followed by other needs in order of importance, employees will find your HR portal useful, intuitive.
Let’s get more specific.
Chances are, you landed on this page because the SharePoint website examples you’ve seen so far look clunky, out-of-date, or just plain ugly—and you want your site to look just the opposite.
So, how much is it to build a SharePoint intranet?
What’s surprising is that there is barely any information that can help you put together a budget—let’s look at real numbers you can build a business case with.
We’ve all been there.
You start using SharePoint, and you finally feel like you’ve got the handle on it. And then, someone at work points out an issue, and you go online, search for it, and find another way to do things you didn’t know existed.
Now you’re wondering, is their way the “right” way? Did I do it “wrong” before all along? Do I have to re-do everything?
What is the right way anyway?
If you’re with me on the fact that SharePoint search should just work like Google, raise your hand. Almost 60% of respondents using SharePoint online and on-prem today say they need a better search. Here are some tips that can help you make your SharePoint search experience better today.
A pre-built SharePoint Intranet that feels like it’s been made just for you.
See five great SharePoint site templates to drive your intranet design in 2022. The templates include the SharePoint start page, project sites and team sites.