How to Plan and Implement The Best Intranet For Your Team Needs with Office 365 & SharePoint Online
If your organization has already invested in Office 365, it makes financial sense to maximize its potential to solve the common challenges around communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
As well as providing your organization with familiar tools (such as Outlook for email and Microsoft Office programs for document creation like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), Office 365 comes with a bag of tools and additional resources that, if implemented correctly, can form the foundation for an effective and intelligent intranet platform.
If you are considering Office 365 as an intranet solution, below are a few applications that you and your team will want to be familiar with:
SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is an all-important tool for an Office365 intranet, helping organizations share and collaborate with internal employees and external partners, contractors, and customers on any device. With SharePoint Online, your digital workplace gains access to internal communication sites, document libraries, and other information from anywhere in the world – at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.
Primary function of the SharePoint Online application in the modern intranet structure includes:
– Content Management
– Document Management and Collaboration
– Easily Limit/Grant Access To Content
– News Posts
Team Sites
SharePoint Team Sites allow you to quickly create code-free sites for different user groups within SharePoint and Office 365 that look great on any device. Team Sites are constructed to be fully customized to your teams’ needs as they collaborate on project, share documents and communicate. Documents, videos, images, site activities, social media feeds, and more can be added in a couple of clicks. It also gives the ability to add ‘highlighted content’ (which will automatically and dynamically populate in that area of the page). The home page of a SharePoint Online gives you instant visibility into site activity and important documents, while providing a great way to communicate, connect with others, and share ideas.
Primary function of the Team Sites in the successful intranet plan includes:
– Project Team Collaboration and Sharing Spaces
– Customizable Workspaces
– Employee Engagement
For more details on SharePoint and Office 365 check out the Top 5 Integration Features of Office 365 and SharePoint Online here and learn about SharePoint Hub Sites here.
Microsoft Teams
Similar to Slack, Microsoft Teams has a focus on a chat-based workspace, with social feeds and email chains taking center stage. Its overall goal is to bring together people, conversations, and content, helping to create a more open digital environment that makes work visible, integrated, and accessible. You can easily embed and collaborate over Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, and other Office files. You also get built-in video/voice calling features, so your colleagues can easily arrange meetings remotely. There is also a screen sharing option that makes collaboration easy. Here’s what Microsoft says about MS Teams.
Primary Function of Microsoft Teams in a company intranet plan includes:
– Main communication hub for day to day productivity
– More effective collaboration
– Supports Team Sites with Channel specific coms
Final Thought
If you properly implement SharePoint, it will transform your company’s productivity. Employees will be more efficient, you’ll have better access to your company’s data, and you’ll be able to better report on key metrics. HingePoint’s custom SharePoint solutions have helped many companies struggling with unorganized data and manual, multi-step processes. Those same customers have transitioned into a more organized, productive organization through automated workflows and easy-to-search information.
Our experienced team can design and implement a custom intranet for your organization using Office 365 and SharePoint.
Contact us today to learn more »
Once it’s clear what these services bring to the table, it’s time to start putting them together to provide your users with a seamless intranet solution. Office 365 and SharePoint Online provide an incredible level of extensibility that allow for solutions which leverage the best of what Office 365 has to offer.
We have guru developers and architects that have ALL the Microsoft certifications. Create your own Web Parts, .Net, Office365 APIs, SharePoint Online, and integrate them with Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory (AD), and SQL Server.
