A good intranet has a clear and high-quality structure and content, making the organization’s communication smooth and reliable. SharePoint provides an excellent framework for building a social intranet.

An intranet portal is usually the core of an organization’s internal communications. It provides every employee with content related to everyday life, such as current news, instructions and materials needed at work, and important links.

Through a successful intranet, the work community creates cohesion between employees working in different locations and home offices. In hybrid work, a modern intranet strengthens community and involves people in building a common culture.

An easy-to-use intranet promotes employee satisfaction and job success when available, regardless of time, place, or device.

Intranet on the Microsoft SharePoint platform for easy use

Built on a Microsoft SharePoint platform, the SharePoint social intranet integrates seamlessly with other systems in your organization and Microsoft 365 services. It is available and easily accessible regardless of time, place and device.

An intranet portal implemented using SharePoint communication and main sites does not require any special IT skills from its content producers and administrators. Webmasters of a constantly evolving, live intranet can focus on producing quality content.

Various functionalities, such as site and page templates, as well as unified navigation, branding, and site structure, for example, for the intranet sites of the organization’s different functions help to build the portal into a coherent entity. Utilizing shortcuts and quick links makes it easier for visitors to navigate through different sections of the intranet.

SharePoint’s comprehensive set of different elements helps intranet administrators create new pages and sections easily and quickly. Intranet content stays up-to-date, and users can find relevant content, such as news and other site activity, through various features such as:

• News and content highlights​
• Event calendar
• Feeds for social media channels
• Discussions with commenting functionality
• Blogs.

Intranet enhances the discoverability of information and boosts working

In most organizations, the abundance of outdated information is one of the biggest challenges in using and maintaining an intranet. Users rarely find the information they are looking for easily and quickly, if at all.

SharePoint’s strengths include retrieving information and documents from all sites quickly and easily. Microsoft Search, integrated with SharePoint, also finds content elsewhere, such as OneDrive and laptops and computers connected to the domain.

Versatile document management functionalities in SharePoint, from version management to creating document-specific scheduled notifications and rules, also make work more efficient. Custom functions support an organization’s business processes with, for example, electronic forms, alerts, and workflows.

A social intranet brings a competitive advantage

A clear, up-to-date, and user-friendly intranet brings the entire organization together and reinforces a sense of community among all employees. Once an intranet is built specifically for users, it will be easier to maintain and develop in the future.

A functioning intranet not only improves internal communication but the internal culture of the entire organization with many benefits:

• Increase employee awareness, mutual understanding, trust, and commitment by improving the organization-wide communication and collaboration experience.
• Achieve strategic goals with readily available information and other resources.
• Reach all members of your organization by sharing information, news, and events holistically across different departments, activities, and teams.
• Enable peer-to-peer communication between employees through discussion and poll functions on the intranet.
• Improve the discoverability and availability of information with effective search and organization of information.

The work becomes more efficient in many ways and there is time to focus on the things that are relevant to each employee’s work.

Always updated intranet on your mobile

In our customer’s organization, different functions were in different locations, and some employees did not have easy access to the old intranet that required a connection to an internal network. In the old intranet, the search for information did not work as desired and the information did not change but accumulated in addition to the outdated information.

Users and administrators wanted the new intranet to be more interactive and lively with up-to-date information and communication. For those doing mobile work, there was a need to access the intranet via mobile devices as well. The solution was a SharePoint communication intranet consisting of separate sites for the various functions.

With the new solution, users have become more active in commenting and using the liking feature in connection with news and other content published on the intranet. According to a post-deployment survey, intranet usage has increased significantly and user access to the intranet has become easier.

The intranet administrators of the various functions ensure that they are informed about current issues in their area of ​​responsibility, and the internal communication of the organization has become more diversified. In addition, the work of the communication department has been speeded up by the easy and quick selection of intranet news for the internal newsletter using SharePoint’s function.

Is it time for your organization to reform its internal communications? Contact us and we will design a solution that supports your goals together!