Read time: 6 minutes
When the concept of the intranet was introduced, it was limited to top-down communication and file storage. But the growth in the technology raised the intranet’s potential and made it efficient for two-way communication purposes, i.e., top-down and bottom-up communication. These two communication types play a vital role in improving productivity, as top-down communication helps to align employees with the organization’s vision and mission. In contrast, bottom-up can be seen as an effective approach for real employee engagement.
In the earlier phase, the intranet took time to perform the actions and needed elaborate requirement study, custom development, etc. The modern intranet that comes with Office 365 has completely changed the current scenario as it executes tasks in a more efficient manner. For this, Microsoft Office 365 includes a set of preinstalled built-in tools to build a functional intranet instantly. You can consider it an efficient business tool that helps implement your organization’s goals and strategies and facilitates collaboration, personalization, central repository, project management, automation, etc.
To build a reputed position in the business, each organization sets goals, objectives, and strategies which help them to achieve its target. For this, the analysis is quite important as it provides a clear picture of the organization, like how far we are from the target and where we are heading. The latest feature of SharePoint depicts this detailed information in a more impressive way under the View Formatting area.
You can leverage the features offered by the Microsoft 365 to develop a customized intranet solution. These solutions enable users to create a community where the included members can contribute, share their experiences, centralized FAQs, and many more. To know in detail, let’s understand the items available on the intranet site offered by SharePoint.
Organizational News
You can use the news feature offered by SharePoint to engage the audience. This SharePoint feature helps you build an eye-catching post using infographics and rich formatting styles. But you need to focus on the arrangement and featuring of news as it plays a vital role in better targeting and easy findability. For achieving this, SharePoint can be seen as beneficial as its innovative features, such as filtering and appealing user interface, may fulfill all your desired needs. You can also access the same features via SharePoint mobile app. The web part of the SharePoint News includes the various intranet sections that are listed below:
- Company News: It includes the news posted by the organization’s authorized person.
- News from Departments: It includes the news posted on an organization’s departmental site, which is represented in the Top Story View form. This view includes a title and the description entered by the organization’s authorized person.
- News from different categories: The SharePoint enables a user to categorize the news based on various attributes such as Guest user-submitted news, policy news, etc. You can decentralize these categories into separate individual sites and perform integration into the home page of the main intranet.
Automated approval process
Before publishing any news, it is required to authorize the news to confirm whether it is correct or not. SharePoint accomplishes this task using its impressive feature, i.e., Automated approval performed by integrating Power Automate with SharePoint Online. It automates the approval process of the news items posted by the end users.
Polls and Surveys
Polls and surveys are used by many organizations for various purposes, such as getting feedback on a specific product, implementing internal market research, and so on. It seems beneficial for engaging employees with your product. The online polls/feedback reduces the efforts required to practice practically.
SharePoint does not include any inbuilt web part to implement surveys. Therefore, Microsoft Forms performs this task with minimal effort. You can also have other options, such as Yammer polls, to conduct a survey. This option is preferred when an organization uses Yammer for communication purposes. The user can also create the Yammer polls on the SharePoint page and use the Yammer web part.
Glossary – Dictionary
When new employees join an organization, they may juggle the jargon in the first few days or months. They try to find the explanation for such specific terms. To resolve this problem, the glossary has become a part of the organization’s operations, including a collection of terms that work like a dictionary. The SharePoint lists are the most prominent option for creating a glossary with an impressive look and feel using the view formatting. This innovative platform includes various views and allows users to contribute to the glossary, where they can give new terms and their meanings. The admin will be notified with the details when any user request to contribute to the glossary. After following the approval process, it will be published in the glossary.
For the regular announcements in the organization, the intranet offers a separate place on its site, i.e., the homepage.
Organization-wide Search
To search any item in the organization, the intranet offers a comprehensive search feature where you get your desired file from thousands of items stored in the database. Note that you can’t perform a wide search in Modern SharePoint as it does not allow it, but the same task can be performed by using the smart PowerShell scripts.
Videos
If you want to present the videos on the intranet, Microsoft Stream is the most preferred choice by which you can create and share videos. But you wouldn’t be able to access videos if you don’t have its license. To resolve this problem, we can store the videos on the document library and display them on the SharePoint page via highlighting the web part.
Organizational Alerts
Some situations might occur in the organization where the users need to be alerted within a short time to prevent any loss, such as server maintenance, data center shutdown, fire drill, etc. It requires some coding and should be performed via customized solutions of SharePoint Framework. By using the SharePoint features, you can develop solutions where the alert will be shown as soon as the user logs in.
Personalized Content
The organization can allow intranet users to personalize their content, with facilities such as editing new posts, viewing the latest activities, visiting sites, etc. You will not require to deal with the code to take benefit of this feature; the SharePoint Online Web Parts can achieve it. In addition, it also enables users to add their features to it. For instance, user can create their hyperlinks and list them on the homepage.
Microsoft has offered various features, such as content management, authoring, audience targeting, schedules management, etc. All these features are possible only because of Microsoft SharePoint.
Kernel Migration for SharePoint
If you are using SharePoint, you might need an innovative tool to perform certain things, such as backing up your SharePoint data, migrating data, etc. Kernel Migration for SharePoint can be the best fit for all your needs as it provides an all-in-one solution for SharePoint data migration. In addition, it also enables a user to keep the backup of their SharePoint data. This innovative tool can add multiple SharePoint sites for migration in one go. The features that make it unique. It also provides options for automatic migration, Tenant to Tenant Migration, Google Drive Data Migration, Bulk Migration, etc.
Conclusion
The above demonstration clearly defines how Microsoft SharePoint renovates the intranet by using its impressive features. These features are necessary for the organization’s growth as most of the organization’s everyday tasks are performed on the intranet. The users also get the simple user interface of the site where they can perform their tasks without finding any difficulty. It also seems reliable as it helps to stand your organization out from the crowd.
