The function of an intranet has developed over time; rather than just a basic platform to share news, most modern organisations understand it’s purpose as an online hub, a place where leaders and employees communicate, share news and information relevant to their teams, and facilitate collaboration. And yes, this is all possible with a SharePoint intranet.
As intranet experts, we love helping our clients discover the right platform for their company’s intranet; and at the moment, it’s hard to name a better option than Microsoft SharePoint. A current industry leader in intranet solutions, SharePoint is an intelligent platform that has a wide range of customisable features and functionalities.
So, if you’re still researching which intranet platform will best suit your organisation, your quest ends here. In this article, we’ll highlight 5 benefits of using Microsoft SharePoint for your company intranet.
It’s not enough for intranets to just serve a functional purpose – they should also look good and be enjoyable to navigate through. SharePoint offers a variety of tools and features that can help you create visually appealing content on your company’s intranet. Here are some ways SharePoint makes it easy:
SharePoint offers a range of modern site templates that are designed to look good and be easy to use. These templates include pre-built layouts, colours, fonts, and graphics that you can use to quickly create a professional-looking intranet site.
If you want to create a unique look and feel for your intranet, SharePoint allows you to create custom themes that can be applied across your entire site. You can choose your own colours, fonts, and images to create a branded experience that reflects the tone of your organisation.
SharePoint provides a range of page designs that you can use to create different types of content. These designs include pre-built sections and web parts that make it easy to create attractive pages without any coding knowledge.
SharePoint offers a wide range of customisable web parts that can be used to add different types of content to your intranet pages. These web parts include text boxes, image galleries, video players, news feeds, and more.
SharePoint has outstanding content approval built-in, meaning that important content on intranet sites is reviewed and approved by the appropriate people before they are published.
For example, let’s say a team member on an intranet site creates a new document, makes changes to an existing document, or adds new content to a page. With approval version control enabled, they can start an approval workflow or use the built-in content approval feature to submit the changes for review before they become visible to others on the intranet site. The workflow sends a notification to one or more approvers, who can review the changes and either approve or reject them. If the changes are approved, they become visible to others on the intranet site. If the changes are rejected, the team member is notified and can make further changes before resubmitting the content for approval.
This can help to ensure that the content on your intranet site is accurate, up-to-date, and meets any regulatory or compliance requirements. It can also help to maintain the quality of the content and prevent mistakes or errors from being published to the site.
Mobile accessibility for intranets can help to boost employee productivity and engagement by allowing them to stay connected with the company and their colleagues even when they’re out of the office. For this reason, SharePoint intranets are mobile and tablet-ready from the moment you get started. They’re designed to suit the modern ‘out of office’ work life; layouts are responsive, meaning that it automatically adjusts the layout and formatting of your site to fit the screen size of the device being used. This makes it easy to create content that looks great on desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
SharePoint offers seamless integration with other Microsoft products, providing a unified and cohesive user experience. This integration eliminates the need for multiple disparate systems and ensures that users have access to all the tools they need from a single platform.
Teams is a collaboration platform that allows users to chat, share files, and work together on projects. SharePoint can be integrated with Teams to allow users to access SharePoint sites, documents, and lists directly from Teams.
SharePoint can integrate with the Office Suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, allowing users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents directly from SharePoint.
PowerApps is a low-code application development platform that allows users to create custom business applications. Through SharePoint, PowerApps allow users to create custom forms and applications that integrate with lists and libraries in your intranet.
Power BI is a business analytics platform that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports. When linked to your intranet, users can embed Power BI reports and dashboards directly into SharePoint pages.
Viva Engage is a social networking platform for businesses. SharePoint can be integrated with Viva Engage to allow users to share content and collaborate with colleagues on SharePoint sites.
In a SharePoint intranet, the integration of access control with granular permissions allows administrators to control access to content and functionality within the intranet at a very detailed level. An administrator can set permissions at the site level to control who has access to the entire intranet, and then set more granular permissions at the list or library level to control who can view, edit, or delete specific content within those areas.
Similarly, administrators can create custom security groups that reflect the unique needs of their organisation, and then assign those groups specific permissions to access content or functionality within the intranet.
SharePoint also supports inheritance of permissions, which means that permissions set at a higher level, such as the intranet site level, can be inherited by objects beneath them in the hierarchy, such as lists, libraries, or specific pages. This helps to simplify permission management and ensure consistency across the intranet.
At the same time, SharePoint supports breaking inheritance, which allows administrators to customise permissions for individual objects without affecting the permissions of objects higher up in the hierarchy. This allows for greater flexibility in managing permissions and helps ensure that users have access to the content and functionality they need to do their jobs, while also maintaining appropriate levels of security and control.
As you can see, there are several reasons why SharePoint is dominating the intranet space! And as a team of Microsoft experts, we love helping organisations of all sizes to create custom SharePoint intranets that meet the needs of their entire workforce.
When you’re ready to start your SharePoint journey , we’ll be here to help.
