SharePoint intranet: 10 reasons it's your best option
Posted on 21 Oct 2024 by Joe Perry
For over twenty years now, SharePoint has remained the most popular base technology for corporate intranets. But with so many new technologies coming to market and offering a plethora of new features and functionalities – is SharePoint still the best option for your intranet?
The answer is absolutely yes! Here’s why...
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The best base technology option for an intranet is SharePoint or SharePoint Online. It offers the most flexible option for an intranet and the most value, particularly if you are using other Microsoft tools like Viva Engage or Teams that can integrate with it. If you’re on Microsoft 365 then a SharePoint Online intranet is pretty much a no-brainer as the licence is included.
Of course, every organisation is different and will have:
- A set of strategic aims for their intranet, covering everything from increasing engagement to supporting productivity
- A unique set of functional and non-functional requirements
- Wider requirements around the digital workplace
- Potential integrations with other enterprise solutions
- Compliance and security considerations
- Branding requirements
- Budgetary factors
- And more.
While all of the above will impact your choice of intranet software – including products like Lightspeed365 that can sit alongside SharePoint – we invariably find that SharePoint emerges as the preferred base technology for an intranet and will tick the most boxes.
There are also a number of specific reasons why SharePoint and SharePoint online is very likely to be your best intranet option.
1 SharePoint is the world’s most popular choice for intranets
SharePoint’s reputation as the world’s most popular base technology for intranets is not only based on our experience but is also reflected levels of adoption. As long ago as 2020 SharePoint already hit over 200 million active monthly users, and it continues to have enormous levels of adoption.
The various global intranet awards like Nielsen Norman Group’s annual top ten intranets and the Step Two Intranet & Digital Workplace Awards also regularly feature SharePoint intranets as the winners. These recognitions are a testament to the art of the possible with SharePoint, showcasing its capability to adapt to diverse organisational needs and push the boundaries of what an intranet can achieve.
2 There are a great many SharePoint options
One of the great advantages of using SharePoint (and particularly SharePoint Online) is that it opens up a huge variety of options for your intranet. Although you can now deliver an intranet out of the box (i.e. using just pure SharePoint), there is a now very mature market of SharePoint intranet-in-a-box products that work alongside SharePoint.
These products offer:
- additional site templates and page layouts
- ready built web parts
- more flexible branding options
- stronger governance
- additional capabilities that bridge the gaps in SharePoint
- have an active and evolving product roadmap
- and more!
The right in-a-box software allows you to deliver an exceptional intranet within weeks. For example, Content Formula’s own intranet product Lightspeed365 adds multiple new web parts to your intranet, effectively extending the value of SharePoint, and filling many of the gaps in branding, design and functionality.
Because Lightspeed365 provides a complete set of web parts to support a SharePoint Online intranet, it can prove to be highly cost effective, because it reduces the need to purchase a more expensive “in-a-box” intranet solution.
In our view Lightspeed365 is the best product on the market and one that we highly recommend. But the good news for intranet teams is they have a great number of choices.
Lightspeed365 makes it easy to create a beautiful and powerful employee intranet in SharePoint and Teams.
3 Integration with Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft tools
A major draw of SharePoint is the ability to integrate with other Microsoft tools, increasingly without any help from developers. Integrating Viva Engage feeds, lists of Teams spaces and OneDrive documents is straightforward and can often be done by content editors without needing to fall back on developers. There are also exciting opportunities to weave process improvement (using Power Automate, for example) and reporting (Power BI) into your intranet too. It also works the other way, so you can integrate the intranet experience into popular applications like Teams.
Having a close relationship between your intranet and your 365 suite of tools allows you to create a great digital workplace experience, while also using your intranet to drive adoption of Microsoft 365 and establish some governance. The Microsoft Power Apps now also give us the ability to rapidly build custom apps that can integrate easily with your intranet – great for automation, advanced workflow, connecting to other company applications and more…
4 Flexible, scalable, customisable
One of the most powerful capabilities of SharePoint is its flexibility and scalability. It’s used for intranets both by companies with 100 employees and 100,000 employees and supports a range of capabilities including internal communication, content services, collaboration, search & findability and more. Flexibility and scalability come into their own as organisations restructure and as strategic priorities change over time. SharePoint is also customisable, so it is perfectly possible to craft an intranet (or even an entire digital workplace) truly wrapped around the way you work. Many IT functions want to avoid customisation if they can, but it remains an option for particular use cases, and we’ve worked on many SharePoint intranets that have customisation.
5 SharePoint supports most content publishing needs
Fundamentally intranets are about content, and you can fully utilise SharePoint for sophisticated content publishing and management to meet most of your needs around internal communications and where content needs to be carefully managed. Although communication sites have helped to bring more publishing capabilities to SharePoint, actually more sophisticated content publishing features like approval workflow, news templates, editorial calendars, automated content reviews and more tend to be included in in-a-box products.
SharePoint’s modern editing canvas makes it even easier to delegate content control out to colleagues and team members – with simple point and click editing experiences, it has never been easier to manage pages and documents in SharePoint.
6 An intranet ready for AI
Generative Ai is one of the most exciting tech trends in recent years, with AI set to transform how we work and supercharge the digital workplace. Microsoft is at the forefront of AI innovation through their integration with OpenAI’s Large Language Models (LLMs) and the set of Copilot products that are being launched across Microsoft 365 and its constituent tools.
An intranet based on SharePoint means you are in the best possible position to integrate Microsoft’s AI innovation directly into the experience for users – whether enabling content creation, supplying answers for employees, translating content, powering chatbots and more. While we’ve only really just got started with generative AI, by having a SharePoint intranet you will inevitably start to see more opportunities to introduce AI into your intranet in the coming months and years. If you want an intranet that is ready for AI, then SharePoint is the ideal choice.
7 Document sharing and management
Many organisations information distribution, collaboration, knowledge assets and project output remain resolutely document-centric. While that is perhaps not always ideal, it’s a fact. SharePoint’s relatively robust document library capabilities therefore have always been a valuable part of SharePoint, allowing for document sharing and distribution, knowledge management, collaboration and more. The easy integration of SharePoint libraries into your SharePoint intranet has always been a strong capability.
8 Supporting personalisation and content targeting
Most modern intranets include personalisation capabilities, so that content can be targeted to different groups such as all employees at one location, or in one division or function, or based on their seniority. This means that differently themed content can appear seamlessly together, targeted for each individual employee. Additionally, some intranets allow users to subscribe to different topics of interest. SharePoint and SharePoint Online intranets can very effectively support personalisation and content targeting, leveraging easy integration with Active Directory profiles to deliver truly relevant intranets. It’s another reason why SharePoint is an excellent base technology for your intranet.
9 An attractive design with strong usability
The development of SharePoint modern experiences with attractive designs, far easier publishing interfaces, better performance, some very useful site templates and a whole host of other improvements has been at the centre of SharePoint improvement in recent years. The modern experience is one of the things we love about SharePoint both as geeky developers and as SharePoint consultants too, helping clients implementing fantastic intranets.
Modern SharePoint not only delivers an attractive contemporary design for your intranet, but also own with good levels of usability and built-in support for accessibility too.
10 Microsoft’s Ongoing Investment in SharePoint
The evolution of SharePoint, including SharePoint Online, is a testament to Microsoft’s continuous investment in its capabilities. One of the key highlights from the past few years has been the integration with Microsoft Viva, Microsoft’s employee experience platform. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights, directly through the SharePoint environment, as well as access through Microsoft Teams. Meanwhile the Viva Connections dashboard web part provides an option to implement a task-based dashboard on your SharePoint intranet homepage.
There are multiple other areas where SharePoint has evolved – from the new branding centre to the integration of Microsoft Steam into SharePoint to the new AI capabilities of Copilot.
User experience improvements in SharePoint, focusing on intuitive navigation and better mobile responsiveness, make it more user-friendly than ever. Additionally, security and compliance have seen substantial upgrades, ensuring that SharePoint aligns with current data protection and governance standards.
These ongoing developments in SharePoint, bolstered by the capabilities of Microsoft Viva, not only improve functionality but also reinforce our confidence in SharePoint as a top-tier intranet solution. SharePoint continues to evolve, meeting the complex demands of modern enterprises and shaping the future of digital workplaces.
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If you’re considering creating a new SharePoint or SharePoint Online intranet, want to return to SharePoint, or need any advice in this area then get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.
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