According to Gartner Survey Study for Most Used Intranet 2021, Microsoft SharePoint is the most widely used intranet platform. Moreover, the value of SharePoint as an Intranet portal has been further increased due to the latest ecosystem of cloud apps introduced by MS Office 365, and the amplified trend of using cloud-based data and apps across business enterprises.
Microsoft presented a whole new paradigm in 2016 for SharePoint Sites i.e., Communication Sites and Modern Team Sites. Modern Team Sites are offered as a complete makeover of renowned class team sites, that are famous for being focused on delivering news to the readers in a more engaging format. Additionally, there is a recently introduced concept of hub sites, which basically connects aggregate news and different sites together. This means that the modern sites can now be promoted to a hub site and they can serve as a portal for a collection of other sites.
Microsoft recently announced in MS SharePoint Conference (#SPC18) that, the modern SharePoint sites have reached a better and improved level of maturity, resulting to be the cherry-on-top for intranet services along with the innovative Office 365 apps. Here, we have listed the top 12 ways that you can use to customize your SharePoint intranet and deliver a highly intuitive experience to your users. Below mentioned are the top 12 features that can help you customize and increase the impact of your SharePoint intranet portal while delivering top value for employees and business organizations.
1. New Hub-Site Layout
SharePoint intranet offers new design capabilities for news in hub-sites, e.g. carousel sliders. This allows you to add multiple pieces of news in the layout without overburdening it.
2. Personalization of Content Along with Page Metadata
This was a long-waited feature. Now, news articles in modern SharePoint pages are pages, and metadata at the page level provides customization for effective news distribution in a personalized way to suit your organization.
3. Multi-Sourced News
Microsoft SharePoint allows you to select and pull data from different content sources to create new for your SharePoint sites.
4. Organizational News Feature
You can promote your news article as ‘organizational news’ while seeing the news being pushed to the news feed’s top and achieving a more engaging layout for display.
5. Weather Parts
Microsoft SharePoint for the very first time offered weather web parts. When working inside large building and infrastructure, not everyone has the change to sit by the window and keep a check on the weather. So, this feature of weather gives you the facility and convenience to stay updated with their weather forecast, and plan to leave work or plan their week ahead accordingly.
6. @Mentions in MS Office 365
When you add any comment to a Word Document or writer a news article, you will be able to mention it to other people working in your organization by using the @mentions feature. By typing ‘@’ which is followed by the user name, that person get a notification through email, so that they can get look at the document. This feature improves document collaboration possibilities in Microsoft Office 365, and it also creates a frivolous workflow for task assignment.
Upgraded Yammer Web-Parts
Yammer is considered to be written off by Microsoft for a long time. However, Yammer still plays a very important role in the MS Office 365 ecosystem, and it is very well proved by these web-parts. The modern interface of Yammer is tweaked to drive better user engagement and social feed interaction such as @mentions, and likes etc.
Image Web-Part
With the new image web-parts, your content authors can now easily edit and improvise images on SharePoint intranet e.g. adding hyperlinks or text overlays.
List Makeover
Once you will use the new list creating experience of SharePoint, you will not even recognize it! Microsoft has completely make over the list creation experience for SharePoint and encumbered it with a more intuitive menu, updated its lists templates and even improve the ability to create new lists originating from Excel file.
Revitalized Listing Experience
For SharePoint lists, it does not stop there. Lists in SharePoint have now got a new column type i.e. ‘Location’ that works great with the maps web part and also with the map visualization in MS Power BI. Additionally, who do frequent editing in lists would be happy to know that the ‘in-place editing’ feature has been revived in modern SharePoint design. Not only this, but you can also enjoy built-in task assignments for MS Planner App in Office 365.
Revamp of SharePoint Mobile App
An insight button is the last update for lists, which enable data analytics from Power BI on the list data. This is great feature which makes reporting on data list extremely easy; click the insight button, create a Power BI report and then quickly publish it with a few clicks in SharePoint.
New Listing Analytics
SharePoint mobile application has undergone a ‘paradigm shift’ and it has dropped few tabs from the user interface. New features focus on keeping you informed through News tab, while keeping you connected to document, people and sites through AI-infused ‘Find’ option.
Conclusion
New features of Office 365 and SharePoint raise the standards once again and make the platform better than before. But the question arise that is this a perfect platform? The new and updated features set offers amazing options and tools to reinforce team engagement and bolster internal communication. However, mixing them and personalizing the entire intranet experience to meet your unique business requirements.
If you prioritize your workplace experience, but also concerned with implementation time, then SharePoint is a ready-to-go intranet platform that has proven to be more successful option. If you are looking for an expert advice, then Code Creators Inc. is the market leader in SharePoint implementations. Click here to connect.
