SharePoint intranet examples
Now that the advantages of implementing an intranet for their company are clearer, however, some may still wonder what it consists of in practice and what concrete examples can be used to get a more precise idea of which communication and collaboration spaces can be developed for their SharePoint intranet. Let's go see some of them right away.
Company home page
A company's home page on a SharePoint intranet is often the main entry point for employees. It may contain company news, recent updates, quick links to important resources and tools.
In addition to a section dedicated to the latest company news and important announcements, it could provide quick access to frequently used resources such as the HR portal, company manuals, and request forms. A search bar on the homepage could also allow employees to search for documents, people, and other information within the intranet directly from the home page and avoid lengthy manual searches for each section of the intranet.
To manage routine business activities and encourage participation in events organized by the company, you could insert a calendar that shows upcoming corporate events such as meetings, training and team building activities.
Human Resources portal
An HR portal within the intranet is a space where employees can find all the information related to human resources.
Employees will be able to access digital forms for their vacation requests, benefits, and feedback and easily consult all those documents that concern the implementation or updating of the most recent company policies.
To facilitate onboarding processes, it could contain an entire section dedicated to training, providing new intranet users with online training courses and study materials and allowing them to monitor the progress made through convenient dashboards that track the course of their studies.
As is well known, it is often the most trivial things that can give rise to the biggest doubts and to unravel them, a section dedicated to frequently asked questions can help us to resolve quickly and with clear and straightforward explanations to the point the uncertainties common among employees.
Portal for a specific team
Another interesting idea could be a site dedicated to a specific team or to a particular project that the said team is working on, which can facilitate collaboration between members and the management of documents regarding the task of our team.
This portal would then become a single space for archiving, sharing and collaborating on project documents, providing links to resources and tools specific to the project and providing lists of activities assigned to team members, with deadlines and priorities to maintain control of the organizational side and promote communication between members through virtual bulletin boards on which to post updates and communications relating to the status of the work and the achievement of the set objectives.
Business Knowledge Base
A centralized collection of business knowledge, technical documentation, operational guides, and best practices could be an amazing addition to your intranet, which in this way would have a real company wiki that is always accessible and updated with the latest information, detailed articles and operational guides on business processes, implemented technologies and procedures followed.
The document tagging system and the extensive categorization of documents and the advanced search features provided by SharePoint will make finding specific information on a topic a breeze for all those new employees looking for information to facilitate their inclusion in business processes.
And don't think that it can't be a useful resource even for office veterans who want to update themselves on the constantly evolving landscape of their company or provide useful information in the spaces dedicated to submitting questions from their colleagues, sharing their knowledge and experiences within the reality of the company.
Internal communication portal
A company doesn't have to be just a simple place to work. After all, it is a concrete reality in the lives of its employees and becomes, for better or worse, an important part of their lives.
Internal communication with your employees therefore becomes fundamental, and this is precisely why within your intranet you should always think about building and managing spaces where employees can find news, updates, and business initiatives to promote a sense of cooperation and belonging among their employees.
From blogs where business leaders and employees can share updates, strategies and visions for the company's future, to access to past and present corporate newsletters, an internal communication portal can become much more than a banal bulletin board for announcing new policies, organizational changes, and business initiatives.
If we also count on the close integration of SharePoint with Viva Engage and the possibility of inserting customized web parts, our internal communication portal can become a real corporate Social Network with dedicated sections for video messages, presentations and other multimedia content.
How to create an intranet with SharePoint
At this point, the benefits and examples of what to implement and why within a corporate intranet should be clear to everyone. It only remains to understand how.
So let's see together how you can start creating your SharePoint intranet starting from a simple home page in a few steps in order to test the medium a bit and become familiar with the features provided by SharePoint.
1. Initial preparation
First, with our Microsoft credentials, we access the SharePoint Online environment and once we have chosen the 'communication site' option, the process of creating the intranet will begin.
To start, Microsoft provides several templates to speed up the creation of a communication site dedicated to:
- Crisis Management
- Department-specific content
- Human Resources services and news
- Internal training opportunities and courses
Unfortunately, however, a real ready-to-use template for the corporate intranet is not yet available, so we'll start from scratch, using the “Blank” model that will give us a blank canvas, perfect for working in total freedom.
Once you have chosen the name for the intranet, SharePoint will ask you to write a brief description of the new site and to Choose the default language. The choice of language represents the second key moment in the process of creating the intranet, because SharePoint does not allow it to be changed later.
2. Customizing the template
As soon as you enter the empty site, we recommend choose the business theme to apply the appropriate color palette to SharePoint commands, labels, and graphics. To do this, it will be enough:
- Access the Settings menu, at the top right
- Click on the item 'Change the look'
- Select the theme you prefer
You can choose from the templates offered by Microsoft and use them as they are to accelerate the creation of the intranet. Or you can choose a template and customize it, perhaps to align the palette with the colors of the corporate brand. For greater customization, SharePoint allows you to create your theme from scratch.
Still in the item 'Change the look', it is possible to change the appearance of:
- Header, with specific settings for layout (minimal, compact, standard and extended), background color (the color is automatically taken from the palette chosen as the site's theme), title and company logo (to upload) . §
- Navigation bar with settings for adding/removing links, adding/removing labels (link groups) and link tree, inserting sub-links for the main entries. We would like to emphasize that it would be better not to exceed 3 levels, to maintain good usability.
- Footer
3. Definition of contents
Once the template of our intranet has been customized, it will then be necessary to define the content of the home. To get started, just select the 'Edit' item at the top right. SharePoint Online is, as we have already seen, a powerful Content Management tool and allows users to insert a large amount of different content on each of the pages of its sites.
First, Editors can change the number and formatting of sections that make up a page, in order to define the structure that will host the individual contents.
After setting up the page structure, you can then insert the web parts of the text and multimedia content supported by SharePoint. Among them, we can mention:
- News
- Calendar
- Organization chart
- PowerBI Report
- Single images or carousels
- Microsoft Forms questionnaires
- YouTube or Microsoft Stream videos
The web parts can be extended with a whole series of customized features, suitable to cover the specific needs of a company and its documents and that allow intranet users to:
- Manage the entire document lifecycle.
- Find internal contacts and get to know your colleagues better.
- Access your company's favorite or recommended work apps.
- Apply for open positions, accelerating the selection process.
- Publish news and communications for groups of users, using dynamic graphics and integration with Microsoft Teams to ensure maximum reception.
Whether standard or custom, it is important to remember that the web parts of your intranet must always be selected based on the real needs of the employees and the processes that characterize your company. Functionality is and must always be the highest priority in the design and implementation of an intranet since it is still a workspace.
Once the useful web parts have been inserted, all that remains is to create, publish and constantly update the contents of the intranet.
Obviously, the steps above are not intended as an exhaustive guide but more as an appetizer of what are the basic functions offered by SharePoint for creating an intranet and, as such, should be understood.
The creation of an intranet is a process with numerous steps that cannot really be condensed into a few points and, from its design to its implementation, requires a careful eye and attention to the operation and to the details that will distinguish the internal network of our company.
Conclusions
The implementation of a SharePoint intranet represents a crucial strategic move for any company that wants to improve internal collaboration, optimize document management and enhance team productivity.
The statistics speak for themselves: companies that adopt solutions like SharePoint see a significant return on investment (ROI). A Forrester study found that companies using SharePoint experienced a 301 percent ROI over three years, with a payback time of less than six months.
The use of intranets to centralize business information dramatically reduces the time spent by employees searching for documents, improving operational efficiency, as highlighted by McKinsey research that confirms how better knowledge management can increase productivity by 20-25% in organizations that implement this type of solution for their digital infrastructures.
Therefore, there is no better time to choose to adopt a SharePoint intranet than now. The tangible benefits in terms of productivity, security, and integration with other applications of the Microsoft 365 environment make it an essential investment for the success and future competitiveness of your company. So why wait?
