With the shift to hybrid working, it has never been more important to have a strong digital estate to support your employees and an intranet is the key asset. Most employees will use your intranet every day and yet most organisations intranets do not work as intended or have fallen into disrepair.
When looking to upgrade your intranet to support your employees it is now strategically important for you to get this right and develop an intranet that supports your employees now and in the future. In this article we discuss some of our tips to successfully roll out a new SharePoint intranet.
Don’t just lift and shift
Lifting and shifting is normally crime number 1. On the face of it, taking your current ntranet, migrating it to SharePoint Online and updating the home page is the most cost effective approach but means all the issues with your current Iitranet transfer over to your new one. It also assumes that your requirements haven’t evolved in the 5-10 years since you launched the last one.
Data driven decisions
You will have assumptions about your intranet but there is a range of different SharePoint reports available to help you understand what is actually going on. This can inform what pages are causing problems, are the most popular and ones that might be redundant. The key is to spend time upfront to identify some actionable insight that can help shape your new Intranet.
User centric roll out
It is key to put users at the center of your SharePoint Intranet project. You should do stakeholder meetings and focus groups to fully understand what they are looking for, what current pain points are and help.
What’s new in SharePoint?
SharePoint Online has a host of new features, additional capability, better usability. All of these need to factor into your implementation project. Understanding what these are and how they differ from the version you are on can help you to unlock huge amounts of value.
The wider Microsoft stack
This is an important element of unlocking value from your SharePoint project. SharePoint is a great home for a wide range of capability from SharePoint Syntex, AI driven document management to Microsoft Viva topics to Power Automate driving process automation. Each of these are available and should be part of your intranet project.
The focus on any successful SharePoint intranet is on the planning and design phase. With proper design principles, applying the latest technology, designed around your users, you are set to create an intranet that truly delivers for your organisation.
If you would like some help with your SharePoint intranet please visit our SharePoint services or contact us.
