Forum Discussion
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.
as an MSP, internally we're always trying to push and use the latest thing because we need to understand how to then advise our clients.
Whilst we're a relatively small Org internally We've developed a hybrid approach that so far is working well.
- Central Promoted Team Site for surfacing News/Directions/Wiki. Great for a Central hub for directing people to the right resources
- Larger Projects are handled by Team Sites / Project Online
- Smaller Projects are handled by O365 Groups
- Groups around other topics are O365 Groups
- Obviously there are some historical team sites knocking about as well as we transition but they're easily surfaced with SharePoint.
How do people navigate and access? (we'll focus on web based user rather than Outlook etc)
- SharePoint Home to easily navigate to sites/groups they're part of
- Eagerly awaiting the aggregated News web part here.
- Our Promoted "Central Team Site" is also set as a Tile for the business Apps for central quick access to catch up on the latest that you're not already connected to.
- I imagine we'll also add the Aggregated news Web part here if it's available so that we can have one Central place for News
- Suggested Sites are great for highlighting sites/groups you may want to be part of based on colleague interactions.
Once people are comfortable with this "one way to access things in Heirarchical way" I Introduce them to things like OneDrive where they can access the sites/groups they're part of but with a focus specifically on files.
Because Teams are Private only at the moment we're yet to get any real traction with them currently.
Antony Taylor. This central promoted site, is that a modern one?
Mike Jansen It's currently a classic Site because we use a three column layout for more information on one page. We mocked up a modern site but until it supports more complex layout requirements it's a no-go.
As Ivan said the Promoted site is just that "Admin controlled links" thing and additionally an App in the app launcher so it's one click to it from anywhere.
Hi,
all valid bullet points. No real out of the box solution in sight at the moment.
As for O365 Groups, I currently don't see a viable option to use O365 in a "one department to many sharing scenario" because of the lacking read only rights. Thats why I would use a subsite of the default root site collection for every department (easy for me with only a handful departments - quite hard for large corporations).
Office 365 groups................... actually, you can have read only rights in the group now.
-Create a modern team site but make it "public" (create it via the Sharepoint dashboard)....
-Go Into permissions for the teamsite (you need to wait a few minutes)
-You will see "Owners" and 2 Groups for edit permissions. One of those groups is "Everyone except External Users" which by default is set to edit. You can change that to "Read"...
This adds a couple new possibilities
-Owners can do anything/edit/modify/delete and everyone else can ONLY read
-Owners can do anything, public users can READ, and members can EDIT
I don't have the "modern site permissions" UI yet, but I gave this a try with old UI sometime ago and there was a major roadblock for this implementation:
Users that are not direct "Members" of an Office 365, but have read permissions through "Everyone, except external Users" don't see the Group in left pane on "outlook on the web" and other applications, which makes it very hard to access the content of the group, without navigating to the sharepoint part of it manually.
Is this still the case?
