SharePoint Online Intranet - A new approach? What are your thoughts?

You know where I stand on this (see the discussion I started about global navigation and lack thereof in Microsoft's roadmap).

I think the reality is that you are going to get a lot of pushback.  People are used to having information fed to them and having specific ways of getting to things (global nav) and finding what's out there. 

Here are the biggest challenges I see (and I've thought about this often) --

• How do you tell people about new sites?  Will a news area suffice? 
• What about sites that aren't new that people haven't look at?  Those won't be in the "news" area and might not show up on the SharePoint home page.
• How do people look around and discover new sites and information?  With a global nav, you can build out a site structure which enables people to look at what else is out there (if you build it right).    How do you replicate this? 
• Search is AWESOME when people NEED something and are actively looking.  But again, how do you enable people to look around, see what's new, what's cool, what might be useful that they don't know about?
• Groups and Teamsites.......... be sure to think about how permissions play a role here.  Groups only give a member EDIT rights.  What about read only?  If every departments gets a teamsite, what do you with information shared between departments?  You can't just hand out edit permissions to everyone just because you want to show information.  I realize you can lock down files in Groups/Teamsites to some degree.  My point is, plan for sites that primarily team oriented and sites that are more built for showing files/folders for reference.

I think with this type of structure (or lack thereof) the Intranet/portal team needs to have a plan in place to continual draw people to new and different "stuff" that's out there.  I don't see that as a negative but something to plan in.  With most "classic" intranets there is a news section but I think you need to do more for people to highlight what's happening and what is around the intranet.

Some ideas --

• Ads............. no joke.  Intranet "ads" or something similar that highlights different areas and places (since there's no global navigation
• A plan to constantly update and highlight different areas and places, even if it's redundant from year to year (you're going to get new employees who didn't know about certain sections, or missed it the first time around).
• A "did you know you could do this" type of section -- similar to ads or news... but possibly a different possible take on delivering the info above

None of this is easy.......... the above are just things I have on my list and some challenges I see.  I've been mulling this all around for quite some time and my biggest concern is showing people what's out there if they don't know about it.

I was debating all this myself internally and I assume Microsoft will make the following changes sometime next year:

• Add a "news headlines" element to the SharePoint Waffle Landing Page that aggregates all news pages from all the sites that you have access to or are following
  • similiar to the News Tab in the iOS SharePoint App
• Introduce the modern Publishing Pages features.
  • It'll be interesting to see how they enhance the current modern pages, since in theory (and pratically) you are already publishing (modern) pages and news

We'll probably go this route:

• reconfigure the current sharepoint root site collection to "modern", and find some appropriate name for it
  • add modern subsites for departments and branches that host content that was previously shared in a dedicated Intranet. Stuff that one departments offers to all users or specific locked down document library for a subset of users
    • separate subsites are needed in order for the SharePoint News features to show up as "from department XYZ". (Question: how do I prevent subsites from opening in another tab?)
  • push this default root site collection to all users somehow
  • Future Iteration: make the root site collection some how personalized instead of generic
• O365 Groups (+Sites) for all other stuff (internal department stuff, projects, interest groups and so on ...)
• Custom Site Collections for future larger projects/apps and publish those as Waffle Icons in the O365 Launcher.

This is the direction I'm leaning toward too. I see this approach as the best way to leverage all the recent investments from MS.

User lands on the designated Intranet Homepage (hopefully a Modern Publishing Site this time next year!) to get their quick glance at important and new organisational information. Where applicable, curated informational pages live here from the rest of the organisation.

Once our user has decided "I need to get something done", they head for SharePoint Home from the app launcher. I really like the way this works out of the box, hopefully our user should see the site they need right there at the top of the page.

My only customisation needs/wants for SharePoint Home, is to perhaps define which site sits at the top left, in position A1. Maybe have that first tile as the top promoted site, with frequent sitting to the right. I'd like to have that control as this space is a bit noisier than the feature sites list.

Custom app tiles are great for the things traditionally added to a quick links or resources menu, we're adding to these all the time. Works especially well with the new personalisation options in the app launcher.

The only thing i do beyond that, is to use the cutom clickable logo in the Office 365 suite bar as a link back to my designated intranet homepage. Gives users a nice anchor point to quickly dive back to the intranet from anywhere, when they need it.