Forum Discussion
When to use O365 Groups - is the Intranet dead?
We had this discussion a couple of months back on RE:Office 365, and the conclusion our panel came to was that the intranet still very much has its place - however is diminished due to Groups.
Now that we know that Communication Sites are coming to O365 as well this continues to change the game.
The "intranet" is a function - not a technology. So saying that the intranet is dead because of O365 Groups is incorrect, as organisations still need a place to share information with everyone else. We can't rely on Delve for everything.
Thank you for posting the video. Very interesting discussion about intranets. Nine months ago we went through an intranet scoping phase, and the result was going to be a $250k intranet project which we just could not stomach. It seemed like overkill for 150 person organization. The idea of Groups being formed for teams in an organic way makes sense, and then use a less robust intranet for the "source of truth" type documents. However, your point in the panel discussion about managing the "source of truth" is where I'm stuck now, and what prompted my post. A marketing team working together in a Group for a campaign, is going to create and collaborate on documents for that campaign. With the Intranet "source of truth", they are going to have to remember to copy the final versions from their Group, to the intranet for all to consume. Then any changes will be difficult to manage in both spots.
Geoffrey Bronner, I think you’re right that for groups like IT, I’m probably overthinking it. We can create separate content areas depending on the function. For instance, I can create a Group for private IT docs, and Sharepoint Site with a library for IT training docs for general consumption (I’m still not sure if I would create a site collection or a subsite on the main, but I can experiment). It is the cross functional teams like marketing that will have documents in multiple locations that worries me.
- Salvatore BiscariJun 19, 2017Silver Contributor
You could instantiate a link to the Group document into the Intranet.
In such a way, all updates to the document will automatically be visible in the Intranet without any additional effort...
- Eric_HJun 19, 2017Iron Contributor
I'm not sure this would be feasible for lots of documents. Permissions would need to be modified for access outside of the group, plus the Group members would have to understand how to post the links to the documents instead of the documents themselves. Thats why I had considered webparts to consume the public content on an "intranet" page, but permissions are still a problem, and content query templates are a pain! It doesn't seem that MS is designing things to consume Group content from other Site collections - For instance, the new Library web part for modern sites can't search other site collections/groups.
- Salvatore BiscariJun 19, 2017Silver Contributor
Perhaps permissions are not so difficult to set up...
If the Group is public, then "Everyone except external users" is already member of the Group.
If the Group is private, then it is enough to share the document with "Everyone except external users".
Also, you can easily find Link as a choice under New...