Top 5 Advantages of SharePoint Intranet

Your organization's intranet must be able to meet the modern workplace's demands for enhanced collaboration, personalisation, and adaptability. We describe how the SharePoint intranet is advantageous in a distributed company.

SharePoint is a cutting-edge intranet platform that may help any business improve employee communication and output. SharePoint, as an intranet, is a crucial component of Microsoft's 365 productivity suite, as it provides vital intranet functions including file and document management. To further enhance corporate operations and reporting, it can be integrated with other Microsoft products like Teams, OneDrive, Planner, and Yammer, as well as automation and AI technologies like Power Automate and Power BI.

Your digital workplace should revolve around your intranet. You should consider how to address numerous difficulties relating to collaboration, document management, knowledge sharing, and security as your organisation expands. Additionally, your intranet must expand along with it.

We will go over the advantages of using a SharePoint intranet, significant instances of platform capabilities, and best practises for your intranet solutions in this blog.

SharePoint intranet—what is it?

An adaptable collaboration tool that aids organisations in achieving their goals is a SharePoint intranet.

• Educate and involve people by making it easy for them to see and discuss content together in a safe environment, as well as to make and receive connections with one another.
• Work together on a project and store your files in a central location with the help of SharePoint tools like team sites, Lists, and document libraries.
• Expand knowledge by personalizing, communicating, and managing shared organizational news and content.

You can build an intranet using a variety of building components provided by SharePoint, including:

• Share information using a range of templates and web components on communication sites or SharePoint team sites.
• Home site: A home site is a communication website that you designate as your organization's intranet main page.
• Hub sites—Group linked websites and teams to centralize content management, news, and search.
• Use the news web component in SharePoint to post noteworthy or fascinating news items, announcements, person updates, status updates, and more.
• Connect with individuals around your company with Yammer.
• Create personalised quizzes, questionnaires, surveys, registrations, and more using forms.
• Meetings, events, and lessons can be broadcast live or on demand.

Also Read: How To Get A SharePoint Certification: A Know-how Guide

5 Advantages of SharePoint's Modern Intranet

1. Smart content management

The larger the company, the greater the volume and speed at which documents are generated. It's not easy to 'organically' check in on everyone's progress when they're spread out across time zones and languages.

SharePoint streamlines several processes. Sharing documents centrally ensures that everyone in the office has access to the most recent versions.

If you want your documents to be easily accessible, you need to identify the right people to maintain them.

With a state-of-the-art intranet like SharePoint, you have complete control over which sorts of documents can be created in your organisation, which template employees must use, which folders documents are stored in, which users have access to them, and which employees can remove them. You may keep sensitive documents safe on the SharePoint intranet site while still having quick access to them when you need them. SharePoint's collaborative nature and the access settings established by IT administrators make it easy to make rapid changes to documents.

2. SharePoint Online makes managing people simple.

If your organisation has twenty employees, finding co-workers should be simple. But, Finding the perfect person to work with you on a team project among 500 people, though, might be challenging. Determining who is responsible for what is one of a company's growth pains, particularly in a remote workplace where employee collaboration might be a little more difficult.

Finding people in Microsoft Teams might be challenging. The "home site" for an organization's intranet can be any communication website that has been designated as such. On high-impact projects, knowing who to contact can enhance collaboration and productivity.

You may quickly and effectively refine your search by using SharePoint to discover team members with particular responsibilities and talents. An organizational chart describing the team members and their responsibilities can be made. An employee's profile can include their name, title, contact information, department, and manager.

As employees come on board and depart the organization, you as an IT professional will be able to add and remove members. The SharePoint intranet's site templates can be used to design an onboarding process for new users.

3. Data security and compliance

The majority of today's large organizations are limited by strict laws that govern how they must manage client and business data. Keeping track of everyone's compliance with local laws when there are thousands of employees spread across numerous nations can be exceedingly challenging.

In SharePoint, user and group permissions can be managed to limit who has access to and what they can do with particular documents. For instance, a company can determine that some records are only accessible to members of the Human Resources department. By adding permissions, you can increase security by making certain files and folders inaccessible to outsiders.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be set up. It follows that you and your end users must offer several sign-in options, which is one of the simplest methods to secure your company. To configure MFA:

1. Access the Microsoft 365 Control Panel.

2. To access the Azure Active Directory Admin Centre, select Show All and then make your selection.

3. Choose Azure Active Directory, then click Properties, then Manage Security.

4. Choose Yes and then Save from the Enable Security defaults menu.

By having people log out while not in use, you may also protect your data. In contrast, conducting an IP-based session will produce a setting akin to being in the workplace, particularly if all of your staff work remotely.

Also Read: SharePoint Easy Guide for Beginners

Links exchanged with non-authenticated users on the SharePoint intranet can also have an expiration date. To provide a deadline for Anyone linkages throughout the company:

1. First, on the SharePoint administration portal, open Policies, and then click Sharing.

2. Under "Choose expiration and permissions options for Anyone links," choose the checkbox that reads "These links must expire within these many days."

3. In the box, enter the number of days, and then click Save.

4. Intranet sites convey corporate identity well.

In this era of scattered work, large organizations frequently struggle to sustain their corporate culture and sense of community. Employees who joined an organisation when it was smaller, for instance, may begin to feel the "growing pains" of a larger workforce and are more likely to leave.

Therefore, it is critical to establish a consistent corporate brand that holds strong as the organization expands in order to support long-term business goals and process development.

Companies that utilize SharePoint are able to establish a stronger corporate identity thanks to its configurable interface and the sharing of company news and messages from the landing page. Even if team members are geographically separated, sharing business news helps strengthen a company's bond.

5. Workflows improve project management

The majority of employees base their daily operations on workflows. Even though most employees have specialised tasks they execute alone, most organisations are built around workflows—the act of obtaining a task before passing it on to the next person. However, the frequent breakdown of workflows is a big source of misery for businesses. Colleagues as a result make errors or forget to complete their particular jobs in the chain.

Particularly when enhanced with an add-in like Nintex workflows, SharePoint is helpful in this regard. By automating the entire process—sending reminder emails to the people who need to carry out a certain step and ensuring they do all their responsibilities on time—users may increase productivity and workflow compliance.