SharePoint based intranet - things you need to know

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Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk.

Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding the user and user experiences, and awareness of approaches and best practices in Microsoft SharePoint. An important best practice is providing a consistent experience for everyone.

Many people complain that going from site to site across their organization’s intranet feels disjointed. Each site looks different from the other with similar types of information scattered in different places. While it’s great to allow site owners flexibility, without some basic design principles and guidelines that can be applied consistently, the impact is costly and time consuming – for both site owners and visitors.

The best way to ensure a positive experience for site owners and visitors is to establish design patterns for your intranet sites and use site designs and templates to ensure that the patterns are applied consistently on all sites.

Below, we will dive into the following areas + resources throughout:

  • Ensure consistency across all sites throughout your intranet scripting
  • Organizing with hubs that can organize themselves
  • Utilizing Microsoft Teams templates
  • Manage who can create Microsoft 365 Groups

When people in your organization create new SharePoint sites, you want to ensure a level of consistency across all sites or sets of sites. For example, you may need consistent:

  •  Branding, theming for look and feel
  • Library or list configurations to help people achieve more and ensure metadata alignment
  • Functionality by configuring settings, features, extensions, and solutions
  • You may also have detailed site provisioning scripts, such as using example designs from the SharePoint Look Book, that can be applied each time a new site is created.

 One of the most important goals for well-used intranets is to share and leverage organizational knowledge. Traditional intranets are typically not much more than a collection of sites. Modern intranets provide a collection of experiences that align to business outcome goals and initiatives. Creating great experiences for users means that you need to focus on the content and task stories that the visitor needs to accomplish – not just the content and stories that the site owner wants to tell. Establishing a consistent (and flexible) pattern for sites helps site owners of each individual site optimize their information architecture to create the best visitor experience. Stories that can be told, read, and understood.

Site designs and site scripts allow you to quickly and consistently create sites that incorporate your organization’s preferred design patterns and governance. This allows site owners to focus on quality content instead of page layout and ensures that site visitors can quickly find what they need. Hubs extend the ability to create optimal experiences by allowing you to create families of related sites that work in concert to improve user experiences with shared navigation, scoped search, consistent designs and connected content.

As a Microsoft Gold certified partner and certified O365 consultants, we have extensive experience in delivering Office 365 based solutions. For more information, please contact us from enquiries@prometix.com.au

 

 

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