If you are investigating to set up an Intranet, you might be looking for the best base technology. In this article I’ll explain why SharePoint is a great choice.
Are you using Office 365?
If the answer is yes, look no further. SharePoint will be your most flexible option. Tools like Yammer, Teams, Stream, Forms… can all be integrated into it. Combining SharePoint with your 365 suite allows to create a fluid digital workplace experience. It’s recognizable for your employees and it helps to establish some governance.
What about Collaboration and Document Management?
SharePoint used to be the collaboration platform of choice for a lot of organizations. Today Microsoft Planner and Teams are becoming very popular. In SharePoint you’ll notice that Team Sites are still available, but thanks to the easy integration possibilities Teams and Yammer can be integrated so collaboration can continue to be part of your SharePoint Intranet. Furthermore, the robust Document Libraries capabilities that allow document sharing and distribution are still a very valuable part of the platform and they are easy to integrate.
Is budget important?
Every organization needs to take into account different factors. The composition or the components of your Intranet might be different and they might have an impact on your budget. Luckily, there are a lot of tools available, but in my experience, after evaluations, SharePoint often remains the preferred choice.
What about targeting?
Another reason why SharePoint is a good platform for your Intranet is the fact that it supports personalization and content targeting. Why do we mention this? A lot of organizations want to send targeted communications, think about employees who work on a different site, or employees who are in a specific function. Thanks to the simple integration with Azure Active Directory profiles, this is an efficient fix.
Do you count on scalability?
Companies can use SharePoint for their Intranets with 10 or 100.000 employees. The flexibility and the scalability of this platform is one of its main selling points. It can come in handy when organizations restructure or when their strategic priorities change over time.
Are updates important?
Customization is necessary for most projects and the software has changed a lot – for the better – on this point. The UI and the performance have been improved drastically and there is the ability to integrate with other Microsoft tools, increasingly without any help from developers. In other words, things have changed and this is promising for the future of the platform. Microsoft is also transparent about their roadmap for the future of the platform. We know they are also looking into promising integrations with Microsoft’s AI and Power BI possibilities.
