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Effective tips to plan out your SharePoint Intranet

The latest Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as one of the most popular Intranet service providers. It has very interesting features which attract corporates to use the platform as their company intranet without a second thought. At Beyond Key, we have excelled in developing SharePoint-based intranets for several companies and it has brought tremendous improvement in employee engagement, project documentation, and storage as well as an effective communication tool.

Intranet is a basic need for all industry types and functional roles as it is a great help when it comes to digital asset organization. It has emerged as a very powerful tool for modern-day businesses to empower employees, boost communication, improve collaboration within teams and streamline all the day-to-day processes. In short, it has become the central repository for all the key information that staff needs to get the job done.

Let us understand first of all WHY companies need an intranet for their daily tasks and where it can become handy.

  • If you feel that your employees are disengaged from each other. They need a common social platform where they can visit every day to chat and solve their issues mutually.
  • If you are looking for a free digital space to store your important project documents and files and make them accessible to employees whenever they need them.
  • If your teams are scattered and email is not conducive to keep up with the speed and agility of your industry.
  • If you have multiple projects going on and you want a centralized dashboard to track the progress of them.
  • If you have multiple offices/ development centers in different geographic locations with no centralized communication platform.
  • If you want to create an internal news space to share all the important things going on in your organization and boost employee morale and productivity.
  • If you are looking for ways to collect data and run reports, to do things like track customers or manage HR functions.
These are some of the basic problems which your modern-day intranet can easily take care of.
Next, we are sharing below some essential tips in case you are planning an Intranet tool in your business.

1. Selection of an Intranet provider

There are a number of factors that can influence your decision to select intranet software that fits best for your business. Analyze the immediate needs and requirements of your team to set up goals to be achieved from the software. Get the budget in place. Review multiple vendors who have the possibility to give you quick deployment, flexible quotes and amazing add-ons to add value to your intranet. Do not rush in for such decisions. A careful think through beforehand will surely help you overcome several problems.

2. Effective launch and training

There needs to be a Launch Plan (from Orientation to Training to content generation to go LIVE). Launching a new company intranet is as sophisticated as a new product launch happening in your company. Give high value to it. Plan it effectively and think through various aspects of it. It’s just not letting your employees know about the new piece of software which they would be using daily. It’s building up emotional connection with it where they become super excited about using it to ease out their difficult tasks. Try to gather as much information or requirements of your organization as well as employees, to assess what would help the employee ‘Reach’ the intranet, ‘Use’ the information available, ‘Revisit’ the Intranet often.

Effective tips to plan out your SharePoint Intranet

3. Friendly Home page

Remember, it’s difficult for your employees to adjust to any new intranet. Keep the home page simple but highly intuitive. Employees tend to use the intranet if they get a quick navigation to daily tasks like meeting calendars, important news and happenings of the company at one place, project management tools, and other social sites access. The selection of ingredients that built up your home page is equally important here. Mantra for effective usage of the intranet is use a clean user interface with minimal design and with all important applications on the home page.

4. Company brand association

At a basic level, your company intranet must have a strong brand, a sense of identity that distinguishes it from the other public website or general information sources within the organization. There should be a single look-and-feel that encompasses the entire intranet. This includes a standard page layout, colors, and navigation. It’s important that you carry the company logo and theme colors into the intranet pages but not necessarily copy them. Some companies play with the color themes with changes in seasons or moods, sometimes with festive times as well. This tends to give a freshness to the daily moods of the users also.

Effective tips to plan out your SharePoint Intranet

5. Careful Selection of add-ins and workflows to build intranet

The next important thing which you need to take care of is the selection of readily available Add-ins or Apps or Web-parts which build up an effective and productive intranet for your company. These help in getting a head-start by immediately deploying the Add-ins (instead of recreating each feature/functionality everything yourself). Make sure each of your departments has something in the Intranet that brings them closer to collaboration and communication. Over the past decade, Beyond Key has successfully developed a lot of add-ins and workflows which can become serious ingredients for your company’s internet and across each functional area as well.

6. Timely review of intranet acceptance and productivity – Analytics

Things just don’t end up after setting up the intranet. They begin with it. Revisit the acceptance rate of the new social tool with your employees after using it. Check the difficult edges reported by your team and work on improvisation. If things are going smoothly, you can think of how to keep the progress moving. If you’re not meeting your goals, however, this is the time to consider how you can improve upon your intranet utilization.

Effective tips to plan out your SharePoint Intranet

7. Regular upgradation

Our observation- SharePoint intranets that have not been updated lesser than a week tend to lose connection with users. So, continuously update, improve and refresh the content as well as the look and feel of the intranet. Add Information that remains relevant and usable for a long time. Keep adding pages on Company’s updated approach, achievements, and happenings. Appointing a SharePoint manager can surely help you better organize and update SharePoint content to keep it evergreen.

Our Solutions
For recruitment functions our Employee Hiring and Employee Onboarding add-ins has been of great help for several companies using it. HRs also love to work with Employee Directory add-in as it is an awesome repository tool for whole company staff across multiple location offices. Knowledge Management provides the ability to each department to share information and enhance the knowledge base on specific projects. This develops the knowledge bank of the company for years to go on. News Ticker allows management, HR, and all the other departments to share crucial project news, happenings with each other. Search Analytics provides capabilities of search in SharePoint by performing dynamic keyword-based queries leading to complete database management. For seamless customer support and logging bugs in any new or existing system, one can blindly rely on our Help Desk and Bug Tracker workflow respectively. Other important components which your company intranet must include are Events Timeline, Task management, Employee Spotlight, Birthday Reminders, Chat Boards, and so on.

Ask for help!

Hopefully, we have been successful in explaining to you how to set up your own customized intranet without being a technical minefield. Contact us at Beyond Key for a free consultation on your intranet requirements.

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