Forum Discussion
Intranet Internship Project
Hi all,
I'm currently studying Information Systems and as part of that I'm doing an internship. The company I'm doing the internship for is a medium sized electrical wholesale business with its own manufacturing division. The two companies recently upgraded to Office 365 Pro Plus and now want to implement an intranet. The businesses don't use an intranet at the moment and have only one IT person working for them. Therefore, the intranet should be easy to use and maintain for the content managers with as less involvement of the IT Manager as possible. The high level structure of the intranet is following
Homepage - Department Sites - Training Material - Manuals/ Forms/ Policies - team directory
The Homepage and Department sites should have a news feed, upcoming events, employee in focus. The department sites, the department specific forms and manuals and some other information which can be done through site pages. The intranet is not intended for collaboration and the updates will most likely only be one, or two a month.
So far in my research I came to the conclusion that to use Office 365 as the platform for the intranet SharePoint Online is an essential part.
Therefore, Question number 1:
Office 365 Pro Plus comes without SharePoint - can this subscription still be used to build an intranet? Since OneDrive uses SharePoint - can the Intranet be build through that?
The businesses don’t want to use an Intranet as a software subscription as this adds additional costs. The return on these costs won't be high enough to justify the expense as the intranet only will be used for news and main forms, policies and not incorporated in the daily business processes.
Researching Office 365 and SharePoint Online we came to the conclusion that the Out of the Box features of the platforms will suffice.
I have seen the new communication sites which are great. They are easy to setup and maintain, even for non technical staff. The communication sites are essentially what the businesses are looking for especially with the apps on mobile devices. However, I'm concerned about the navigation. Because the users are mostly non technical an overall consistent navigation is key for the user experience.
But if I understood it right the communication sites can’t be root sites and created subsites have the classic layout. If I create multiple communication sites for the departments, homepage and forms etc and interlink them I fear the user experience will get messy. If I understood it right the communication sites are more nice additions to existing intranets. Is that correct?
I guess basically, I'm hoping for Information and advice for the best way to piece the Intranet together. Should I use one publishing site collection to built the intranet on with the classic layout ad keep it simple with the out of the box features or try to use the communication sites but loose on the navigation?
Many thanks,
Daniel
3 Replies
You don't want to build an Intranet out of OneDrive--OneDrive is essentially a personal site, so it'd have to be tied to a particular user, which becomes a problem if that person leaves or would require creating a dummy account to handle the ownership. Even then, you wouldn't get any functionality aside from storage, so it'd basically be like asking your users to dive through a small web server.
As for getting SharePoint, you'll need to buy up in your organization--here are the plans you'll need for access.As for building the Intranet itself, I've experienced no issue without Communication sites--we started from a Team site, gutted most everything, turned on Modern Experience, enabled publishing, and added pieces to accommodate informational pages (Site Pages), training materials (document library), manuals/forms/policies (document library). We keep everything in a single site and stuck to out of the box components, and that's worked for an organization of 1,100. Your departments make sense to have sites for, depending on what you want to do with them, but not really anything else.
I added some snapshots of our own intranet--hope it helps.
- Thank you for the reply. It helps a lot.
I feared that would be the case with OneDrive but wanted confirmation from more experienced users.
As for your intranet advice I think your approach and design is very good and something to consider for my organisation. Good to hear you did it with the out of the box features for a company with over 1000 employees because I have no coding experience.
Cheers,
DanOne of the many benefits of SharePoint is the ability to provide very sophisticated solutions without requiring any code. The trick is to understand what all of the numerous features do and then combine them together to solve the business problems.
Here is a really good book on this topic, https://www.amazon.com/Essential-SharePoint-2013-Meaningful-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321884116/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8. It is focused on SP 2013 so it does not have all of the latest, greatest features in SPonline, but everything it covers is still applicable.
