Built-In Web Parts for Modern SharePoint Intranet
Read time: 6 minutes
The inception of the intranet initially restricted it to serving as a platform for top-down communication and file storage. However, as technology advanced, the intranet evolved, unlocking its potential for facilitating two-way communication, encompassing both top-down and bottom-up interactions. This transformation has proven instrumental in enhancing productivity; top-down communication aids in aligning employees with the organization’s overarching vision and mission, while bottom-up communication emerges as a powerful tool for fostering genuine employee engagement.
During the earlier phase, implementing an intranet involved considerable time and extensive requirement analysis, custom development, and related processes. However, the advent of the modern intranet integrated with Office 365 has revolutionized this landscape, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. With Office 365, intranet tasks are now executed swiftly and seamlessly. The platform offers a set of preinstalled, intuitive tools that enable the rapid creation of a fully functional intranet. This contemporary approach transforms the intranet into a highly efficient business tool, effectively supporting the realization of organizational objectives and strategies. It fosters collaboration, customization, centralized data storage, streamlined project management, and process automation, among other key functionalities.
In order to establish a distinguished position in the business landscape, every organization strategically defines goals and objectives, devising effective strategies to attain them. Comprehensive analysis plays a pivotal role in this process, offering a precise and insightful depiction of the organization’s current status in relation to its objectives and the direction it is headed. SharePoint’s latest feature showcases this information in a visually compelling manner within the View Formatting section, enhancing clarity and impact.
You can utilize the robust features provided by Microsoft 365 to craft a tailored intranet solution. These solutions empower users to establish a collaborative community, allowing members to actively contribute, share experiences, access centralized FAQs, and much more. To delve deeper into the specifics, let’s explore the components available on the SharePoint-powered intranet site.
Utilize SharePoint news feature to captivate and involve your audience effectively. This tool empowers you to craft compelling posts using infographics and a variety of rich formatting styles. Pay close attention to organizing and highlighting the news, as it significantly contributes to precise targeting and effortless discoverability. SharePoint proves invaluable for achieving these goals, offering innovative features like advanced filtering options and an appealing user interface that cater to your specific requirements. Access these features seamlessly through the SharePoint mobile app as well. The SharePoint News web part encompasses diverse intranet sections, listed below, to enhance the overall user experience:
Prior to dissemination, news articles undergo a crucial authorization process to ensure their accuracy. SharePoint employs a powerful feature known as Automated Approval, facilitated by integrating Power Automate with SharePoint Online. This integration automates the approval of news items submitted by end users, streamlining the verification and validation process.
Polls and surveys are valuable tools utilized by numerous organizations for a multitude of purposes, ranging from gathering feedback on specific products to conducting internal market research. They prove instrumental in engaging employees with your product and streamlining the feedback collection process. Online polls and feedback mechanisms, in particular, significantly reduce the logistical efforts needed to effectively implement such practices.
SharePoint does not come with a built-in web part specifically designed for surveys. However, Microsoft Forms seamlessly fulfills this need with minimal effort, making it a practical choice. Additionally, organizations can opt for alternative methods like using Yammer polls for conducting surveys, especially if Yammer is a central platform for communication within the organization. Users have the flexibility to create and integrate Yammer polls directly onto SharePoint pages through the Yammer web part, enhancing the survey experience.
When new employees join an organization, they often encounter a plethora of specialized terminology during their initial days or months. They diligently seek explanations for these specific terms. To address this challenge, the organization has implemented a comprehensive glossary system, serving as a dictionary of sorts. Among the available options, SharePoint lists stand out as the optimal choice for crafting an impressive glossary, utilizing view formatting to enhance its visual appeal. This innovative platform offers a range of customizable views and encourages active participation from users in contributing new terms and their corresponding meanings to the glossary. Any user seeking to contribute is promptly flagged for review by the system administrator, who oversees the approval process. Once approved, the contributed term and its meaning are seamlessly integrated into the glossary for everyone’s benefit.
For the regular announcements in the organization, the intranet offers a separate place on its site, i.e., the homepage.
The organization’s intranet provides a robust search functionality, allowing users to effortlessly locate specific items within a vast database. Despite the limitation of not being able to conduct broad searches in Modern SharePoint, this obstacle can be overcome by employing clever PowerShell scripts, effectively accomplishing the desired task of finding and accessing files among thousands of stored items.
If you intend to showcase videos on your intranet, Microsoft Stream stands out as the top choice, offering a user-friendly platform for video creation and sharing. However, it’s crucial to note that access to the videos requires a valid license. In case you lack the necessary license, an effective workaround involves storing the videos in the document library and presenting them on a SharePoint page. This can be achieved by leveraging the web part and effectively highlighting the content for easy viewing.
In certain scenarios within an organization, prompt notification to users is crucial to mitigate potential losses. These scenarios encompass situations like server maintenance, data center shutdowns, fire drills, and other urgent events. Effectively managing these instances necessitates a tailored approach involving coding expertise, specifically utilizing the SharePoint Framework. By harnessing the capabilities of SharePoint, one can craft custom solutions that ensure immediate alert displays upon user login, enhancing the overall response and preparedness for critical events.
The organization has the capability to empower intranet users to personalize their content, offering features like editing new posts, staying updated with the latest activities, and accessing various sites. Utilizing SharePoint Online Web Parts makes it seamless for users to enjoy this functionality without having to handle any coding. Moreover, this platform allows users to effortlessly integrate their own features. For example, users can easily create and showcase hyperlinks on the homepage to enhance their experience.
Microsoft has offered various features, such as content management, authoring, audience targeting, schedules management, etc. All these features are possible only because of Microsoft SharePoint.
If you are using SharePoint, you might need an innovative tool to perform certain things, such as backing up your SharePoint data, migrating data, etc. Kernel Migration for SharePoint can be the best fit for all your needs as it provides an all-in-one solution for SharePoint Migration. In addition, it also enables a user to keep the backup of their SharePoint data. This innovative tool can add multiple SharePoint sites for migration in one go. The features that make it unique. It also provides options for automatic migration, Tenant to Tenant Migration, Google Drive Data Migration, Bulk Migration, etc.
The preceding demonstration effectively illustrates how Microsoft SharePoint revitalizes the intranet through its impressive array of features. These features are vital for organizational growth, given that a significant portion of daily tasks within the organization are executed through the intranet. The platform offers a user-friendly interface, facilitating smooth task execution for users. Additionally, SharePoint’s reliability sets it apart from competitors, bolstering your organization’s distinctiveness and enhancing its competitive edge.
