SharePoint is one of the most popular platforms for content management and collaboration. It’s used by over 200,000 organizations and 190 million people worldwide. Centred at the heart of Microsoft 365, it brings together many powerful capabilities and building blocks, so naturally most organizations are interested in using it as an intranet.
For many organizations, it has become the defacto standard for content collaboration and knowledge sharing. It is dead easy to spin up a team site, store content and collaborate. When it comes time to design a modern intranet experience for enterprise-wide communication and knowledge sharing, the answer isn’t so simple. We know companies want to leverage SharePoint for their intranet scenarios, but often struggle to build the right structure, optimize the user experience and create the right guardrails to ensure content stays up to date.
This is because SharePoint is not designed to be a ready-made enterprise intranet. Its primary purpose is to create team sites and store content. So, it’s not easy for most organizations to leverage all of the platform’s capabilities out of the box to build a great intranet. They’re often overwhelmed by its unlimited options. The result is often a messy, sprawling intranet landscape of departmental sites that’s hard for employees to use.
In short, SharePoint OOTB is a solid foundation to build on, but most organizations need to pair it with intranet packaged solution to make a truly great intranet.
In this post, we take an in-depth look at what SharePoint OOTB gets right, as well as some of its feature gaps, to see if the product measures up to your organization’s needs. You’ll also learn how GO Intranet works with SharePoint to create an intranet that helps employees find what they need, trust what they find and feel connected to the organization behind it.
What is a SharePoint intranet?
A SharePoint intranet is a website for your company built using Microsoft SharePoint that gives employees access to news, tools, resources, documents and more – all in one place. For many organizations, an intranet is a strategic investment that supports and strengthens employee productivity, collaboration and culture.
Why SharePoint is a popular intranet choice
Many organizations choose SharePoint for their intranet because it’s included with the Microsoft 365 suite, so they already have a license to use it. That also means their intranet will work well with Microsoft Teams, Copilot and more. Some other reasons organizations choose SharePoint are:
1. It’s where employees already are
Communicators struggle with getting the attention of the entire workforce. In many organizations, a significant percentage of employees work within Microsoft Teams and Office on a regular basis. By creating your intranet in SharePoint, you’ll be meeting users where they already are. If you create yet another place for your users to go that’s loosely connected, there’s a good chance you’ll lose their attention.
2. It’s AI-powered
Microsoft is all in on AI, and Copilot appears throughout the Microsoft 365 suite. Here are some current examples of how Microsoft is embedding AI in SharePoint:
- Chatbots and agents – Employees can get quick answers to their questions based on trusted knowledge from your intranet. You can define which data within your SharePoint sites the chatbots and agents can use.
- Generated content – You can use Copilot within SharePoint to create the first draft of your intranet content. SharePoint will use information from your Microsoft Teams meetings, email, your documents or other sources you choose to provide.
- Intranet page creation – Available only in preview for now, with this feature, SharePoint can build a SharePoint page using any document you provide.
- AI-generated FAQs – Copilot can create a FAQ within your SharePoint intranet based on a source document.
If your organization is using Copilot, you’ll want to have all your authoritative, trusted content in a place that it can access, and SharePoint is a great place for this.
3. It makes content and document management easier
SharePoint was originally designed as a document management platform. Quickly after, Microsoft added content management capabilities. After 25 years, SharePoint is still very strong in this area. With SharePoint, you can create templates, keep track of changes with versioning and build out approval workflows to keep important governance processes running smoothly.
4. Content authoring is easy
No, this isn’t a joke. The content authoring experience in the latest version of SharePoint is incredible. Microsoft created a new authoring experience from the ground up and they did a great job. It is flexible and user friendly. We’re still amazed at how quickly people get up to speed with the new interface.
5. Search is smarter
Much like the authoring experience refresh, modern SharePoint provides an entirely new search experience that includes intranet content, people profiles, collaboration sites, OneDrive content and even external repositories and knowledge bases like ServiceNow.
It leverages the Microsoft Graph and AI to present each employee with results that are most relevant to them and the results continually improve and are fine tuned over time based on your patterns of work and interactions.
We’ve moved a lot of clients from classic SharePoint to modern SharePoint, and the number one benefit we hear about (other than the improved content authoring experience) is how much better search is.
6. Microsoft is always innovating
Microsoft has been working at a dizzying pace to add new capabilities and features to Microsoft 365, including AI-driven capabilities such as Copilot. If you’re worried about selecting a platform that won’t become dated or obsolete, Microsoft is a good bet.
Common SharePoint challenges and solutions
As you can see, there are a ton of reasons why SharePoint provides a solid foundation for your intranet. But unfortunately, many communicators have a different experience. It’s not always clear how to put all the pieces together to create a cohesive and engaging experience and there are significant intranet feature gaps. Ultimately, communicators are told by IT that they have a great platform, but they don’t know how to make it work.
Here are some of the challenges communicators have with SharePoint OOTB:
- Design options are limited and have a distinct "SharePoint look."
- Content targeting is a challenge without clean data in Entra, and users can’t select what content they’re interested in seeing.
- It's missing essential features that help drive intranet engagement with your employees.
- Analytics provide basic data only, often capped at 90 days.
- It doesn’t provide intranet owners with the tools they need to maintain a consistent intranet experience.
Alternatives to SharePoint OOTB
So what can you do?
We recommend paring SharePoint with an intranet packaged solution that bridges its gaps. We've spent years designing and delivering custom SharePoint intranets that delight users and drive real business value. Over time, we've learned that a creative combination of native features coupled together with some strategic purpose-built features can significantly improve usability, platform adoption and value to employees.
That’s why we built GO – a proven, enterprise grade packaged intranet solution designed to extend SharePoint Online, not replace it. GO builds on Microsoft 365’s native capabilities to support content authors, improve how news and knowledge are experienced and help organizations create intranets that feel intentional rather than cookie-cutter.
Let’s look at how GO Intranet boosts SharePoint to help you create a great intranet.
Modern design
GO’s design system extends the Microsoft Fluent UI design system, which means that GO components can co-exist with both out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts and third-party web parts that are designed for modern SharePoint. This empowers us to create intranets that are beautiful, easy-to-use, flexible and reflect your brand, which has been a challenge with heavily branded SharePoint intranets.
Personalized communications
GO features preference-driven news, announcements and events. This means that you can target communications to users based on their role, location and other criteria, and users can select what they're interested in reading.
Productivity
GO Intranet features a Springboard, a toolbar that appears on every page of their intranet, that gives employees quick and easy access to notifications, quick links, apps, a people finder, user preferences and more. You can also choose to add integrations from apps like Workday, ServiceNow or Copilot, so employees can access everything from benefits information and IT tickets to a custom chatbot, all from their intranet.
A robust People Finder outshines the OOTB search experience. This fully configurable feature allows you to show any info available in Entra, so it’s easy to find a colleague.
GO provides your employees with a single place to find policies, procedures, guidelines, forms, templates and other important resources. GO aggregates items stored in disparate libraries, providing a single unified interface that enables employees to search or browse by topic, type or any other desired criteria. Employees can view policy updates, new and recently updated items and pin the most important items for quick access.
Connection and engagement
GO Intranet provides robust features proven to increase traffic to your intranet. GO’s bulletin board, peer-to-peer recognition module and user-submitted photo gallery feature advanced options for engagement that go above and beyond the OOTB experience. For example, employees can recognize their peers using pre-set attributes, like your organization’s values, and add their own comments. Recognition appears prominently on the intranet’s homepage, where employees can like or comment. They can also click through to see all recognition they’ve sent or received, which can be used in performance reviews to show the impact they’ve had in the organization.
Events is another standout. With SharePoint OOTB, communicators often need to use a third-party event management platform, like Eventbrite. GO provides that functionality, so there’s no need for add-ons. Communicators can create dynamic event pages and manage registration, waitlists and pre-event questionnaires, all within their intranet.
Intranet management
Creating pages in SharePoint OOTB can be confusing, especially for content authors who may be updating intranet pages on top of their regular role.
GO Intranet makes it easy. Content authors can click on the “Add Content” content accelerator from the Springboard, choose the type of page they want to create, and then populate the components on the page template. Helper text explains the different areas and components within the template to guide authors through page creation process.
Communicators can use GO’s content lifecycle management to define content owners and set review dates to make sure intranet content is kept fresh and up to date.
Analytics
GO Intranet goes beyond SharePoint’s basic analytics to help communicators truly understand how their content is performing. Helm Insights, which comes free with every GO subscription, allows communicators to dig more deeply into data around reach and social engagement for their news posts and compare performance over time.
Articles are processed through Azure machine learning to help them understand if the content they’re creating is accessible for their audience.
Choose an intranet packaged solution
SharePoint OOTB can be the foundation for a great intranet, but it’s not a ready-to-use solution. It’s missing many of the features communicators want and organizations need to drive employee engagement. We recommend pairing SharePoint with an intranet package solution like GO Intranet to create a truly great intranet.
If you’d like to learn more about GO Intranet, book a demo or watch our on-demand video: You don’t have to break up with SharePoint to have a great intranet.
