THE BEST INTRANET WITH MICROSOFT 365

An Intranet is an internal company portal providing employees access to organization’s resources in a structured way. SharePoint is a platform created by Microsoft that is designed to serve as a company Intranet but meanwhile can wear many other hats – Document Management System, Knowledge Management, HR toolset, Project Management, Workflow Management and more. SharePoint provides great potential for extensibility through custom development, so it can be modified to fit almost any unique business need from any kind of organization. To achieve that, it’s best to work with a Microsoft partner that has the knowledge and experience needed. We at Impactory help organizations build their modern Intranets based on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint for years and we’ll be happy to talk about your project goals.

Microsoft Teams is the hottest collaboration product right now with a big part of businesses and institutions switching to teleworking in 2021. Just recently, Microsoft announced the Home Site App, which is strengthening the already strong relationship between SharePoint and Teams. The app provides users a single-entry point to your organization’s Intranet straight from Teams. There is no complex setup required and the integration allows you to have multiple benefits from SharePoint, accessible right from Teams such as fully integrated Intranet Search, Global Navigation panel, co-authoring experiences and more. SharePoint and Teams are working better together, and we recommend having both as part of your Digital Workplace strategy.

An Intranet based on SharePoint is an internal company portal that provides employees access to the organization’s resources in a structured way with advanced search capabilities, document co-authoring experience, news broadcasting, content publishing and more. One of the main benefits of SharePoint is its flexibility and scalability. That makes it a first choice for organizations of many sizes and industries for their Intranet solution. You also get a lot more value from an Intranet based on SharePoint if you’re already using other tools from Microsoft thanks to the native integration that SharePoint has with all of them. One such example is the great integration between SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams thanks to the Home Site App. Another one is the seamless real-time co-authoring experience on Office documents with the Microsoft 365 Apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.

A SharePoint Intranet is typically used by the employees to find company resources such as documents related to your company’s policies and procedures. Communication teams use the modern SharePoint Intranet to publish company news such as events, new hires, or financial results. Project Managers use an Intranet to identify potential talent, manage and track progress on tasks and communicate to broader audience about the project progress. Teams use SharePoint to store their documents and collaborate on them in real time through the integration with Microsoft 365 Apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Users would typically use an Intranet to find the following organizational resources, published by communication teams, leadership teams and project managers:

• The latest company news
• Colleagues/skills directory
• Policies and procedures
• Document/presentation templates
• Organizational structures / organigrammes
• Important projects information

The main advantages of having a Corporate Intranet are:

• Easy access to information for employees
• Easy content publishing for communication teams
• Single source of truth for company policies and procedures
• Easy sharing and content targeting 
• A place to share information about company news, events, new hires etc.
• Document collaboration
• Global Search

As a disadvantage, we can count the cost to build and maintain an Intranet solution, as well as the potential confusion from users if your organization has already deployed multiple other tools that serve the same or similar needs. We recommend to our customers to consider consolidating such tools in a single platform or a suite such as Microsoft 365, as the best tools and applications are the ones that “play in concert”. A Corporate Intranet should still play a role in your overall Digital Workplace strategy.