Update: as well as reading this article you can also check out our webinar video: Can you build your intranet on Microsoft Teams? When customers first started asking us if it was possible to build an intranet inside Teams we were pretty adamant that it was a bad idea. However, since then a lot has changed: there is now a Teams intranet app and other apps we can use; there are new and more sophisticated developer tools for Teams; and the Teams platform itself has matured giving us useful features we can use in our task. So whilst before we said, no you cant, were now saying, yes you can. There is a but: its clear that what you build on Teams is going to be different to your standard browser-based or mobile intranet experience. An intranet built on Teams will inevitably have a different structure and a different user experience to a conventional intranet but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. In this article we are going to explore the different tools, apps and techniques you can use to build your intranet on Teams.  Before we get into this we will also cover off a few important points and sub-questions as the way the you answer these will determine how you approach the task:

Why would you want to build an intranet on Teams?

First, its because of the tremendous levels of Teams adoption. The fact youre reading this article means its likely that Microsoft Teams is well adopted within your own organisation. People are spending less time in email and a lot more time in Teams. Furthermore, the Covid-19 crisis has led to a mass and accelerated adoption of Teams. This has also been helped by Microsofts free Teams licence during the crisis. Creating an intranet in Teams seems like a no-brainer: why not try to piggyback on these high levels of adoption? In fact, many companies have struggled to drive traffic to their traditional browser-based intranet and so a Teams intranet might seem like a good way around the eyeballs problem. Its worth considering however, that whilst Teams has great appeal for an office-based and desktop-using workforce, for the frontline and field-based worker that appeal is likely to be more muted. If youve got a mobile workforce you will have to work harder and smarter to gain good levels of intranet adoption, or you might need to look at a separate tool to reach them, such as a mobile intranet or employee app. Second, weve also seen Microsoft invest heavily in improving Teams and in pushing it out to the market. This twin strategy has made it Microsofts fastest ever adopted tool with over 44 million daily active users as of March 2020. Its entirely consistent for digital workplace professionals to continue to want to extend the capabilities of Teams within their own organisation, confident that Teams is only going to get better and better via Microsofts own roadmap. Microsofts continuing investment in making it easier to integrate different elements of Office 365 is also a factor here. The third reason why you might want to build your intranet in Teams is because youre looking to save on costs and effort. This theme goes way beyond Teams thanks to the ease with which citizen developers with only moderate technical skills are now able to spin up all manner of apps (built with Powerapps), intranet pages (built with SharePoint communication sites) and workflows (built with Power Automate). With its structure of channels, apps and tabs, Teams seems like it would be pretty easy and quick to build something at least half decent. If this is a key driver for you it is important that you are realistic: doing it yourself is going to take time and a lot of trial and error. And you should definitely not overlook building an intranet on SharePoint, whether you end up building an out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet or turning to an intranet-in-a-box.  

Get in touch to discuss your project

 

What services do you want your intranet to deliver?

Before diving into what Teams can and cant do you really need to put the technology discussion aside and explore what you need your intranet to actually do and what you want it to contain. Running a research and discovery exercise with end-users and stakeholders and developing an intranet strategy is an essential place to start. Have a look at some intranet screenshots and examples or read some digital workplace case studies to see what other companies are putting on their intranets. Having carried out these activities most intranet projects end up with a requirements list that include the following pillars:

• Communication corporate news, departmental and team news and noticeboards.
• Collaboration and social tools to support people search and expertise finding, file sharing, working on files collaboratively and peer-to-peer conversations. On the surface it might seem that Teams covers this pillar really well but it does have some major gaps which well come to later.
• Business processes tools and workflows for delivering common business processes such as HR processes as well as more bespoke operational processes.
• Knowledge, resources and search places and tools for the storage of more static information and knowledge. This would also include the information sources that might underpin business processes above, including policies and procedures libraries, FAQs and I need to… links.

As we go through the options for a Teams intranet well discuss how well they deliver on the high-level requirements list above. Of course the devil is in the detail so you do need to do your own research and testing or speak to us about your project. Weve also got a tonne of articles and blogs and videos on intranet research and planning so do take a look.

Problems and challenges with Teams

Teams has some glaring gaps most users and organisations that have been using it for some time will be aware of these. There are also inherent issues that make building an intranet within it somewhat challenging. Most of these can be overcome to a certain extent but you definitely dont have a blank slate on which to build such as you have on SharePointyou have to work with or around Teams issues and quirks (yes, I know SharePoint has its own quirks but there are more options for overcoming these). Lets look at the main challenges youre going to have to think about:

• Flat structure all the teams in your organisation are displayed in a single list. Theres no hierarchy or nesting. When you get into a team youve only got channels and single-level tabs. This compares poorly with an intranet which can have many different types of menus, mega-menus and navigation aids. When you consider that workspaces form a key part of modern digital workspaces, even a small organisation is going to struggle to help users find relevant collaboration spaces. A good intranet will contain a sophisticated index of available workspaces.

  The flat structure in Teams makes it hard to find relevant teams. It lacks a workspaces index page such as this example built inside an intranet

• Intranets help employees find things and often requires users to explore via navigation, either through a mega-menu or through elements on a homepage or landing pages. Teams is not designed to do this and for users to navigate will require largely physical clicking through tabs, for example, which ends up becoming very clunky and slow. There isnt the convenience of features such as mouse-overs and expanding menus. This means if we are going to use Teams as an intranet we need to avoid making employees feel like they are navigating through a series of files and folders, a concept that modern intranets ditched a long time ago.
• Content governance – the successful publishing of content requires governance around it to ensure that pages and items are accurate, up to date and relevant. This is essential not only to sustain employee interest and adoption but also to ensure that content can be relied upon, for example to support customers. The kind of governance that needs to be put in place includes having clear ownership of every page, approval workflows, automated reminders to review pages perhaps every six months, restrictions on who can publish where and more.  Teams is simply not going to give you this and organisations may find that a more conventional SharePoint intranet is the better option (well find out later that there are ways to bring your SharePoint intranet into Teams).
• Content management Teams lacks common CMS and publishing functionalities. Everyday content management tasks such as publishing a news item or retrieving analytics on a page might make a comms professional progressively frustrated having to use Teams as their main comms channel.
• Branding the Teams canvas is blue and grey and you cant change that unfortunately. You can use your own logos for apps and teams but these end up looking more like icons than branding. You cant change the colour of the team or channels. Any branding that you do put in place is going to be buried within the Teams interface.
• Teams governance there are some controls to help manage how Teams works in your organisation but there are some gaps. Controlling Teams provisioning is an obvious one and is leading to companies Teams environments quickly growing to hundreds if not thousands of Teams. This can cause the overall experience to seriously deteriorate as users struggle to find quality and relevance. There are some bespoke things we can do to help reduce Teams proliferation, by adding approval workflows so that users have to request a team, for example.
• Office worker focus – Teams is a knowledge workers tool, not a frontline workers tool. Using Teams as your main channel for frontline workers is probably not going to be effective, even though there is a Teams mobile app.

What not to do when building your intranet in Teams

Theres one trap that Ive seen people fall into when considering a Teams-based intranet. This trap pretty much encompasses every weakness of Teams that Ive highlighted above so it is one to avoid: dont be tempted to create a complex structure of Teams, channels and folder structures for your Teams intranet. This makes for slow, clunky and frustrating user experience and you will get very low levels of adoption because of this. Furthermore, intranets in large organisations can become extremely complex and in reality, are often a series of locally run intranets or microsites, tied together with a navigation and a homepage that aggregates and surfaces content in ways that make sense to different groups, and presents global and local content together side by side. Currently it is going to be nearly impossible to reproduce this complexity within a Teams hierarchy in a way that helps employees find what they need and also delivers a good and relevant user experience.

What are the good options for building our intranet in Teams?

So far weve looked at what services an intranet needs to deliver and then the challenges and traps to avoid with Teams. Thankfully we are left with multiple options for us to explore and use. What I would say however, is that it is unlikely that any one option on its own will be right for you. The right solution is going to be made up of a variety of options layered together. In some ways this makes Teams less than perfect because your intranet is going to be somewhat fragmented across the Teams environment. As we present the different options to you below well start with the simpler ones and move to the progressively more complex ones where you are going to need some development skills. Lets look at the different options:

• Apps can also include chat integrations. This means you can interact with your app in chat. Theres a nice example of a chat integration inside LMS365, the Learning Management System for Teams and Office 365 that I mentioned earlier. This allows you to search the course catalogue from within Teams chat and then post a result as a card inside a chat (see screenshots below).

  Clicking the little LMS365 tick icon below the chat field brings up a simple course catalogue search…

  …the user then selects the course he wants to post and this gets dropped into the chat field as a card.

  Another example of a chat integration could be the app reaching out to you through chat to notify you that a task is due. Similar to LMS365 the notification could contain an adaptive card with details and action buttons related to the task.

I think that well start to see more companies creating custom Teams app so as to deliver intranet functionality within Teams. It will of course take some investment but out of all the options, I think this one is going to give users the best and most integrated user experience. However, there is one downside with having a Teams app in the sidebar: the Teams mobile app doesnt incorporate the sidebar. This can be partly overcome by also placing your new app in a tab in an org-wide team since apps in tabs are still visible through the mobile app.  

Get in touch to discuss your project

 

Conclusion

The intranet inside Teams is never going to be the same experience that you get through the browser. And there are definitely trade-offs to think about when youre choosing and designing the intranet services you want to deliver through the platform. Youre also not going to get a great experience unless you are prepared to invest time and money. If you asked me for a recommendation I would say try setting up a SharePoint site to publish news and pages and bring this into Teams purely because SharePoint gives you much more sophisticated CMS tools than Teams on its own could ever do. I would also say look at a Teams app, whether youre buying one off the shelf or choosing to build your own. I hope youve found this article useful and that you agree that there is value for organisations and users in delivering intranet services through Teams and its worth experimenting and investing. As with anything intranet related, remember to do your research beforehand, seek and act upon continuous feedback, and always have a clear governance plan. Intranet governance is what keeps intranets healthy and stops them failing. If you want help with any of the topics raised in this article, do please get in touch. We can help you with:

• General SharePoint and Teams consultancy to help you plan and set up your Teams intranet
• Wizdom for Teams licence, implementation and support
• Developing a custom Teams app
• LMS365 and LMS365 Teams app