Creating an intranet your employees will genuinely love to use is no small task. At our recent webinar, we discussed practical strategies to ensure your SharePoint intranet thrives – now and in the future. Here are the essential insights to guide you.
1. Start with SharePoint, but don't stop there
Microsoft SharePoint intranets provide a strong foundation to centralize your company’s communication and collaboration. However, when your organization grows beyond 100 employees, managing SharePoint out-of-the-box becomes challenging. Customization demands increase, resources become stretched, and the intranet can quickly become difficult to manage. This is precisely why most medium and large organizations turn to third-party intranet options like Involv Intranet to effectively optimize SharePoint.
2. Enhance your SharePoint Intranet with Involv
Rather than spending months customizing SharePoint, Involv provides you with a fully operational intranet from day one. It enhances the SharePoint experience, streamlines content creation, and includes 50+ custom web parts not available directly from Microsoft. These features make internal communication significantly easier and more effective.
Moreover, as Microsoft increasingly prioritizes AI and cloud technologies, intranet-specific enhancements may no longer be a primary focus. Organizations looking for superior functionality and improved user experiences often choose specialized third-party solutions like Involv.
3. Launching is just the beginning
Setting up your intranet is just the start. Continuous evolution is key to success. NatureScot, Scotland’s nature agency, implemented Involv as part of their digital transformation strategy. They adopted an iterative approach, launching with basic requirements and adding features in stages. This strategy allowed them to adapt the intranet to evolving business needs and maintain engagement.
4. Keep your intranet evergreen
Regular updates and fresh content are crucial for an effective intranet. Establishing a clear content plan ensures your intranet remains relevant, engaging and closely aligned with your business goals.
Involv simplifies content creation significantly compared to standard SharePoint or other third-party solutions:
- Skip the SharePoint hassle: Involv makes publishing fast and intuitive for News, Events, FAQs, and Jobs.
- One-click start: Quickly create content via the (+) icon right next to the web part.
- Unified admin panel: Manage all content in one easy-to-navigate admin interface.
- Built-in metadata: Easily add metadata while creating content, enhancing searchability and audience targeting.
- Feature key content: Effortlessly showcase important updates on the homepage or specific team pages.
- AI-powered assistance: Utilize Involv AI to effortlessly draft and refine content.
- Multi-channel publishing: Seamlessly push content to Teams, mobile apps and digital signage, ensuring your intranet reaches employees wherever they are.
These intuitive features ensure your intranet consistently delivers fresh and relevant content with minimal effort, driving engagement and effectiveness.
5. Personalize, personalize, personalize
Today’s employees expect hyper-personalized content. Tailor your intranet’s news, tools and features to individual roles and departments. Involv facilitates this through advanced audience targeting, content subscriptions and multilingual support.
Interactive elements like polls, discussion forums and social features aren’t just nice-to-haves – they’re essential for driving engagement and encouraging knowledge sharing.
6. User adoption makes or breaks your intranet
To enhance user adoption, it’s crucial to provide an intranet that’s intuitive and seamlessly integrates into daily workflows. Involv Intranet has been recognized for its ease of use, as highlighted by Stefaan Van Bossuyt, ICT Officer at Plan International Belgium:
“The great thing about the Involv intranet is the ease of use. It is a layer on top of SharePoint where we have not only a good document management system but also a good communication platform.”
7. Build your intranet together
The best intranets are co-created with input from their users. So involve your users early and often. Get input from teams across your organization, not just IT or management. Collaborative development builds a sense of ownership, ensuring your intranet truly meets the needs of those who use it daily.
HTI Group, a global leader in industrial technology, collaborated with Involv and partner Solvion to implement their new intranet. The project involved a core team and an extended project team with over 50 international members, ensuring diverse input and a solution tailored to the organization’s global operations.
Ready to create an engaging, effective and evergreen intranet? Start by leveraging SharePoint’s strengths, then boost your intranet’s impact with solutions like Involv. Remember, the most successful Microsoft intranets are those built and continuously improved with their users in mind.
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