Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online Intranet - A new approach? What are your thoughts?
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.
You can pretty much make it anything you want, be it "modern" or even a customized sharepoint product from any partner. "Central promoted site" pretty much means "Intranet" for most companies, or single Site Collection that contains 1-to-many communiation (end users can only read the published content) and data.
- We did this using a custom mega menu in the past, which put the "central promoted site" at the users fingertips on every page / every site in SharePoint. We are going to have to revert to the user now GOING to a physical site to access the central promoted content, until/unless better customization solutions get announced anytime soon.
