Should you create your intranet in SharePoint?

If you’re looking to build a new intranet, inevitably you (or someone in your organization) will ask the question, “Should we create our new intranet in SharePoint?”

For many organizations, answering this question may require several meetings and maybe some feisty debate between your communications and IT stakeholders to understand your organization’s requirements and SharePoint’s capabilities.

Here are the top reasons we think SharePoint can be great for an intranet:

Security

Your IT and information security teams have likely already done their due diligence on the Microsoft 365 platform. They’ve configured threat protection, identity, and access, and evaluated how Microsoft encrypts, stores and manages your content.

If you’re considering using a platform that hasn’t been approved by IT, you should review the costs, complexity and risks that adding another tool will introduce. These hidden costs of ownership will often show up only when it’s too late.

Data loss prevention

Data loss prevention is a key Microsoft 365 capability that provides oversight to content stored in SharePoint. You can protect your policies, procedures, operational documents and even sensitive news from being used improperly or taken out of your organization.

These features also empower administrators to proactively discover problematic content that may contain employee information or other sensitive data. Very few platforms include such robust content governance, and you already have one at your fingertips with Microsoft 365.

Stability and performance

Intranets are a critical tool for crisis communications and often store the urgent content required for an emergency situation. With a global network of data centres, content and application redundancy and performance accelerators baked into the platform, you’re getting top-notch reliability.

You’re already using Microsoft 365

Communicators struggle with getting the attention of the entire workforce. In many organizations, a significant percentage of employees work within Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office on a regular basis. By creating your intranet in Microsoft 365, you’ll be meeting users where they already are. If you create yet another place for your users to go that’s loosely connected, there’s a good chance you’ll lose their attention.

You’re likely using SharePoint, even if you don’t think you are

Your new intranet might be one of many within a complex company. If you’re a large enough organization, you probably already have multiple division, group, business unit and departmental sites and pages that your employees use on a daily basis to get local news or resources. It’s unlikely you’ll want your intranet to compete with these groups, and you may even want some of the content from these sites to roll up to your corporate intranet. Keeping your intranet on SharePoint allows you to leverage your existing traction.

Reusability

A common goal for the communications team is to help all workgroups become better communicators. If you design and build your intranet in SharePoint, using Microsoft’s best practices, you’ll be able to reuse those designs throughout your organization. Do you have a great page layout for sharing policy information? Great! Let people use it in their team sites. Do you have a custom marketplace feature? Great! Let different offices create local versions of the marketplace. Did you build an amazing photo gallery? Great! Let people add the gallery to their project teams.

Ease of content authoring

No, this isn’t a joke. The content authoring experience in the latest version of SharePoint (called modern SharePoint) is incredible. Microsoft created a new authoring experience from the ground up and they did a great job. We’re still amazed at how quickly people get up to speed with the new interface. And, if your employees have been using Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365, they may already be familiar with page authoring features.

Search

An intranet is often seen as the gateway to a breadth of corporate content. SharePoint provides a new modern search experience that can search your intranet, collaboration sites, OneDrive for Business content and even external repositories like ServiceNow. It leverages the Microsoft Graph and artificial intelligence to present each employee with the most relevant content.

Microsoft’s innovation

Finally, Microsoft has been working at a dizzying pace to add new capabilities and features to Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Viva and AI-driven capabilities such as Topics and Copilot. If you’re worried about selecting a platform that won’t become dated or obsolete, Microsoft is a good bet.

Now, SharePoint isn’t all unicorns and puppies. IT groups are often bullish when it comes to using SharePoint and communicators can be leery, because many products in the market try to stoke their uncertainty about challenges with SharePoint, such as:

• Missing or incomplete features that are typical of intranets
• Branding challenges and limitations to an intranet’s look and feel
• Confusion around what’s fact or fiction in Microsoft marketing
• SharePoint’s reputation (both internally and externally)

Their concerns around essential intranet features that are half-baked or missing from the platform entirely are valid. However, Microsoft 365 and SharePoint include extensive APIs and a strong development framework that allows third parties to build new features and capabilities. We used this framework to create an intranet platform on Microsoft 365 called GO Intranet.

To overcome SharePoint’s branding limitations, GO Intranet is built on top of Fluent UI, which means we can create rich, visually appealing intranet designs, while still being aligned with Microsoft. GO comes with a collection of capabilities and components that help create beautiful, branded intranets in modern SharePoint, which organizations can’t achieve out of the box. 

If you want to keep up to date with what Microsoft is doing, you get the best of both worlds with GO Intranet. Communication features are evolved alongside Microsoft’s own roadmap and customers receive regular intranet performance reviews to sort out the fact from fiction and maximize their intranet potential.

GO Intranet enables you to create an intranet that your employees (and content authors) will love. It addresses many of the feature gaps that organizations encounter when building an intranet in SharePoint, while ensuring you can still take advantage of all the SharePoint goodness we explored above.

If you’re weighing SharePoint as a viable option, let us know if you’d like a tour of GO!