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.