A modern SharePoint intranet is the key to the adoption and success of Microsoft Viva Connections. Many organizations have already been using the SharePoint platform to build engaging intranets. As Viva Connection surfaces the SharePoint home site inside Microsoft Teams, it is an important phase to plan your SharePoint intranet.
In this chapter, you will learn about the key concepts to building an engaging intranet with SharePoint for your organization.
The Role of an Intranet in an Organization
An intranet is home to key information across an organization. A digital workplace is a collection of tools that facilitate collaboration and communication, one of which is the intranet. It is an internal website that shares news and announcements. It serves as a platform to collaborate for employees. It reflects the culture of every organization. Therefore, an intranet should be considered a foundational element of your digital workplace. When designed and implemented corrrectly, it can play an important role in the work life of employees.
An intranet should not be a place to share read-only information that acts as one-way communication to employees. It should be a place where employees can express themselves by sharing their thoughts, inputs, and ideas to make the organization a better place to work.
Organization executives share important information on the intranet in the form of news posts, articles, discussions, etc. Every employee becomes part of it by sharing their thoughts via leaving comments, giving reactions, following topics, and sharing them with other colleagues. As a whole, an intranet is an integral part of every employee’s day-to-day life.
Having an engaging intranet helps organizations to build a powerful culture for collaboration as well as adapt to newer challenges and changes to create better lives for themselves.
Modern SharePoint Experience
SharePoint is an offering from Microsoft 365 to build powerful intranets. SharePoint has a rich history of more than two decades serving as a platform for communication, collaboration, enterprise features, and much more.
With the following experiences, modern SharePoint helps developers build a robust and adaptive intranet for organizations .
Information Architecture
While building an intranet, having clarity on which content to surface makes it easy to define your information architecture .
What information should be surfaced on the site?
Where do we surface the information?
Which audiences are we targeting with the information?
How do we best define the information hierarchy?
Service owners and department owners can define what and how they want to surface the information, as well as how to support any revisions based on user feedback after going live.
IT admins can plan for the technical aspects to build the information architecture to make it robust and performant.
Content creators can be involved at some later stage to make the content available to the employees and create a better presentation for the content.
A table with 4 columns and 4 rows represents the general plan in information architecture. The column headers are stakeholders, plan for information architecture, implement and go live, and support and maintain, and row entries are service owner, department owner, I T admins, and content creators.
Plan for information architecture
Navigation
Well-thought-out navigation makes it easy for employees to quickly get to the information they are looking for. Hub sites play an important role in the navigation of content. Employees start their experience by browsing the content first before trying the robust search option.
Group related links for navigation.
Define clear labels for your navigation links.
Define the correct placement for navigation links for better usability. Consider the global navigation and left navigation carefully.
Define the visibility of links using audience targeting.
Branding
Presenting content based on your organization’s look and feel is important. SharePoint offers theming support to brand your intranet by defining the colors and logo. This allows you to create a consistent look and feel throughout the intranet.
SharePoint provides you with built-in site designs to get you started. You can also create your organization’s branding experience by defining custom site designs.
Template Support
Team sites are useful to collaborate within a team by sharing documents, defining conversations, keeping track of events, managing tasks, and many more.
Communication sites are used to publish dynamic, engaging content across the organization and keep everyone informed and engaged on topics, news, and events.
The SharePoint lookbook is another option available from Microsoft to create great-looking sites quickly. The SharePoint lookbook templates can be accessed from https://lookbook.microsoft.com .
Organizations can develop custom templates with site scripts and site design for common scenarios (for example, department based, location based, or functionality based, etc.).
Search
Search is the core of every intranet. Modern SharePoint search is personal as well as contextual. The results seen by every individual are unique to them based on their permissions and what they follow on an intranet.
Collaboration
SharePoint provides easy collaboration by sharing the content with colleagues. The collaboration can be within the organization, and with external sharing turned on, one can also share the content outside of the organization (e.g., with partners and vendors) for better collaboration.
Performance
The intranet is one of the busiest places in the organization. One can expect it to have heavy traffic all the time, considering all time zones in which the organization operates. Modern SharePoint is designed to be flexible and performant .
Multilingual
Content presented in a native language is easier for employees to read. Modern SharePoint supports multiple languages. A major element in the SharePoint intranet is that site navigation, site titles, and site descriptions are included in the multilingual support.
Modern SharePoint supports multiple languages by translated pages in a language-specific folder in the Site Pages library.
Flat Hierarchy
As we are adapting to modern SharePoint, we should think of the information architecture as a modern flat hierarchy over traditional or classic subsite hierarchy.
A flat hierarchy is based on the concept that every site is a site collection that can be represented as a discrete entity. Subsites are not recommended.
Microsoft promotes a flat site hierarchy with modern SharePoint. There are key benefits of adapting to a flat hierarchy. In a flat hierarchy, every site is a site collection with a unique responsibility.
If you think having a large number of site collections will make it difficult to connect them, then you can plan to use hub sites.
Hub Sites
Hub sites are one of the important building blocks of the SharePoint intranet. They are generally referred to as the “connective tissue” that binds related sites including team sites and communication sites.
With the flat hierarchy structure promoted by Microsoft, each unit of work should be a separate site collection.
Common navigation
Consistent branding (theme and logo) across all connected sites
Search abilities within all connected sites
Content from the connected sites on the hub site
In the past with classic SharePoint, organizations preferred an information architecture with a nested hierarchy structure, where multiple sites were placed under a root site. This approach was inflexible and involved designing the information architecture up front because the movement of any subsite later involved migration efforts as well as permission management.
A block diagram represents the nested hierarchy of SharePoint sites divided into Site collection A, and Site collection with sub sections, namely, Sub Site A 1, Sub Site A 2, and Sub Site A 3, Sub Site B 1, Sub Site B 2, and Sub Site B 3, respectively.
Nested hierarchy
A flat hierarchy, with every site being a separate site collection, offers the following benefits over the subsite information architecture.
Rearrange Site Structure
With a flat hierarchy , disassociating a site from one hub and associating it with another hub is an easy process.
Deletion of Site
With a nested hierarchy, deleting a site with subsites was difficult, if it had nested subsites below it. In a flat architecture, it is easy to delete sites without inadvertently removing any important content that you plan to keep.
Flexible Site Structure
With a flat architecture , it is easier to rearrange the site hierarchy without having to migrate anything.
Permissions Management
In a flat architecture , you no longer have to stop inheriting permissions and deal with complex permission models. Permission can be maintained at each site collection level.
External Sharing
In a nested hierarchy, external sharing could not be turned on for a single subsite but had to be on the site collection. In a flat architecture, this can be achieved easily without impacting other site collections.
Migrate from Classic to Modern SharePoint
Classic SharePoint sites are not supported in the Viva Connections app for the default landing experience in Microsoft Teams. If you are still using classic SharePoint, then it is time to upgrade to modern SharePoint.
The modern SharePoint experience is simple, flexible, and more user-friendly. Even if you have a huge number of classic SharePoint sites in your tenant, you can fully transform all of them into a modern experience with in-place modernization.
The experience in SharePoint is concentrated around the lists, libraries, and pages with which users interact most.
Enable Modern User Experience on Lists and Libraries
Consider using the SharePoint Modernization scanner available at https://aka.ms/sppnp-modernizationscanner to detect the lists and libraries not following the modern experience.
To enable the modern experience in lists and libraries, consider replacing your JavaScript-based customizations and custom user actions with SharePoint Framework extensions for list views and columns. From the list and library settings, consider setting up a modern list experience.
Connect a Site to a Microsoft 365 Group
Modern SharePoint team sites are by default connected to Microsoft 365 groups, whereas classic SharePoint team sites are not. Connecting your SharePoint site to a Microsoft 365 group enables you to take advantage of group-connected services like Teams, Planner, Yammer, and Outlook.
Modernize Classic Pages
Transforming your classic pages to modern pages is an important step in modernizing your SharePoint site because users mostly deal with site pages. However, this process is not straightforward, because there is no straightforward mapping of classic to modern features.
Consider using PnP PowerShell ( https://aka.ms/pnp/powershell ) as a starting point to modernize your classic pages. At the same time, your customizations can be transformed with the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web parts.
Conclusion
A modern SharePoint intranet is the key to setting up Microsoft Viva Connections. In this chapter, we briefed you on the key concepts of building an engaging intranet with SharePoint for your organization.
In the next chapter, we will take this a step further and show how to set up a home site and explain the intranet landing experience with the SharePoint home site.