The SharePoint platform by Microsoft offers a wide array of tools and options to build intranet sites for your company.
Moving your Intranet to SharePoint in Microsoft 365 could take some time, especially if you have extensive intranet content already. Today, modern intranets require different strategic planning to evolve the digital workplace requirements, embrace the latest technology, and respond to the growing changes.
SharePoint development services use intranet software solutions that come up with the best collaboration and communication capabilities, which are focused highly to boost the employee experience. Because the backbone of all intranet needs is a content management strategy, the plan and strategy that perfectly aligns with the goals of the business, user needs, and operational capabilities are a must.
SharePoint is a wonderful collaboration tool, which helps employees access content easily and complete tasks anytime, anywhere, as well as stay connected with other employees and companies. However, even if you hire the best SharePoint development company, if you have no sound content strategy in place, users could encounter some issues, which include:
- Duplicate content
- Irrelevant and outdated document
- Confusion over other versions of a document
- Unable to gather information and search for big data amounts
The Relevance of a SharePoint Intranet Content Strategy
Over time, intranets have organically grown to thousands of content pages. Thus, it’s critical to build and easily find the needed data. A SharePoint consultant would tell you that the SharePoint intranet content strategy offers guidance on how to build and deliver content to your intranet users and helps in the workflow and collaboration process.
The same as any strategy, this requires a great understanding of users and the goals that you want to achieve as well.
How to Create an Efficient Intranet Portal with SharePoint
- Understand current business goals and major stakeholders
The most successful intranets not only look good, but they are also focused primarily on helping people to get the work and often on engagement promotion. All companies have critical strategic goals, which drive investments and behavior.
If you want to make certain that your intranet is successful, and receives the right funding, then you should make sure that it’s aligned with the goals. The goals furthermore could help put a priority on intranet initiatives. You should also check out a recent survey of employee satisfaction data.
- Taking governance into consideration
If you receive complaints from users that search is unsuccessful due to so many irrelevant contents, this could mean a governance issue. Before thinking about a new intranet project, consider how you would govern the content and architecture.
You would want to take into consideration the following:
- Who is accountable and responsible for site content
- Who could provision new sites and when
- Does intranet content be retained based on retention policies or classified on the basis of sensitivity?
- Do you want all the websites to adhere to the same pattern so users could easily find the major content?
- Review the existing intranet
Your intranet at present could be composed of websites from various organization groups, like IT, engineering, HR, and so on. The first step to planning your new intranet is to do an inventory of your existing websites, meet the owners, and determine the business goals they have in mind for new sites.
Monitor the location of content, and the amount of content required to move when making a new site. Take a look at your current content to comprehend if it’s current or needs updates before moving it.
- Understanding of the Audience
A great place to think of a new intranet is to take into account what it will be in place. What would people accomplish? How do they begin the day? Consider an exercise in imagination, which is a cover story to engage your major stakeholders.
Your goal would be to broadly think of the ideal future via imagining a cover story regarding the new intranet, including sidebars, user quotes, and headlines. Furthermore, it could be helpful to create persons for your major users.
- Identifying initiatives
Using the gathered information during research, work with your stakeholders to determine the initiatives that reflect the priorities of your company, and any barriers that could exist when you implement them as well. Although you may implement solutions ultimately to address all the initiatives identified, putting the priority on the project to do first helps achieve success and user engagement early, and as efficiently as possible.
Review every initiative identified for these criteria:
- How many people would use it?
- Is it able to resolve an issue?
- Is it possible to make it at a reasonable time?
- What’s the ROI?
Analyze each initiative for user positive effect, in terms of ease of implementation. An ideal first project could be a high impact initiative, which could be made with minimum customization.
- Selecting solution components
SharePoint provides various building blocks, which you could use to build an intranet.
Hub sites – a wonderful place for organizing teams and related sites, news, centralized search, and content management.
Communication sites – this could be used for sharing projects, news, statues, and other information via the many templates and web parts.
Forms – use forms to make surveys, custom quizzes, registrations, questionnaires, and so on.
Homesite – A communication website that could be set as your company’s landing page.
SharePoint news – the news web part must be used for posing interesting or critical stories, announcements, updates, and so on.
Stream – use this to deliver on-demand and live events, training, and meetings.
For all scenarios that you have decided to create, opt for components that you would have to use to meet the business objectives of the website. Consider building a quick prototype, and grant major stakeholders access.
Conclusion
Intranet portals exist to help in supporting the strategy of an organization and to build value for the employees. Your job would be to align the portal with this strategy.
Writer’s Note
Neel johns is a Technology Analyst at Tatvasoft Australia – A leading Sharepoint development services in Australia, She has been working alongside SharePoint consultants and years in a Technological domain. Her research through various fields focuses extensively on digital interaction narratives.
https://www.bridgingpointsmedia.com/content-marketing-strategy-guide-for-businesses/
