Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online Intranet - A new approach? What are your thoughts?
In the old days (=now) most intranets are hierarchy based. The question is, is this still the way to go? Recently there have been a lot of changes is the O365/SharePoint (online) area: - Modern...
In general, I dont see any "flaws" in your approach if you have to build the solution right now. The only hangups I would have are (1) what is coming for modern publishing sites and (2) whats coming for converting existing site collections into modern
I am not a fan of the "every site goes into one big bucket on the same level and users can fish out the sites they need". We've always relied on custom enterprise navigation to make the intranet make sense (which doesn't look to be an option anymore)
I am generally planning to redo our intranet like this:
Root Home Page (hopefully modernized publishing whatever that ends up looking like)
- Each department/operating company has an informational site under the root where we will force layout and content
- Key strategic informational sites will reside as subsites under the root level
- Each department/operating company has a modern team site (collection) where they can build out what they want
- Formal workgroups, organizational groups, and project teams will be O365 groups and have a dedicated SP Site (tied to the Group)
- Document Management and Business App solutions will be dedicated SharePoint sites and site collections (kinda the 'old school' way of building SharePoint stuff)
- We'll use SharePoint home for general search for Sites
- We'll use custom webparts on the Intranet home page to focus on Site's I'm Following for quick access
- We'll use a "Key Links Page" that is like a 1 page directory of corporate controlled/recommended content (we do this already but this might become our intranet home page since we are losing custom navigation...)
- We'll use the "Custom App Icons" in the waffle menu for some key quick links to resources (no matter if you are in SP, Group, OWA, etc)
I am not a fan of the "every site goes into one big bucket on the same level and users can fish out the sites they need". We've always relied on custom enterprise navigation to make the intranet make sense (which doesn't look to be an option anymore)
I am generally planning to redo our intranet like this:
Root Home Page (hopefully modernized publishing whatever that ends up looking like)
- Each department/operating company has an informational site under the root where we will force layout and content
- Key strategic informational sites will reside as subsites under the root level
- Each department/operating company has a modern team site (collection) where they can build out what they want
- Formal workgroups, organizational groups, and project teams will be O365 groups and have a dedicated SP Site (tied to the Group)
- Document Management and Business App solutions will be dedicated SharePoint sites and site collections (kinda the 'old school' way of building SharePoint stuff)
- We'll use SharePoint home for general search for Sites
- We'll use custom webparts on the Intranet home page to focus on Site's I'm Following for quick access
- We'll use a "Key Links Page" that is like a 1 page directory of corporate controlled/recommended content (we do this already but this might become our intranet home page since we are losing custom navigation...)
- We'll use the "Custom App Icons" in the waffle menu for some key quick links to resources (no matter if you are in SP, Group, OWA, etc)
- Hi
On the department/unit level, when you give the ability to create as many subsites as they need, wouldn't that impact the governance and site directory?
Isn't better to implement a site provisioning form where they request a subsite and it gets routed to the department champion for example.
The reason I'm asking is cz we are moving around 5000 sites to SP online and the challenging part is to build a site directory easy to navigate (logical or physical-haven't decided yet) and establish a governance with limited depth of 5 levels for example with metadata to display site info on the site level.
Appreciate your thoughts!! Hi Brent Ellis,
That "information" site might indeed be a good addition to my approach. I think I will make that a modern page, as I prefer that layout. But that might be a personal thing ;-)
