Is SharePoint and Microsoft 365 a good platform for an intranet?

Are you considering SharePoint to build your organisation's intranet? If you're already a Microsoft 365 customer, you have everything you need within your license to build a SharePoint intranet as your key internal communications platform. Subsequently, many businesses rely onSharePoint as their primary internal communication and collaboration platform.

However, is using SharePoint always the best option? With many other enterprise intranet solutions available, why do organisations still choose SharePoint? In this post, we're going to share SharePoint's benefits and some the disadvantages of using SharePoint for an intranet. As ever, the answer is always "it depends"!

SharePoint as an intranet platform

SharePoint has some useful capabilities for intranets:

  1. Content management foundation
    You can publish pages and articles and create content types you might need. Since the introduction of modern SharePoint the editing experience has improved greatly and most content editors can find their way around it.
  2. Site management, security and permissions
    Granular access controls allow administrators to manage who can view or edit content at various levels, ensuring data security.
  3. Search functionality
    SharePoint offers enterprise search capabilities to help find documents, people, and information across the intranet. Configuration allows for custom metadata and use of terms that can create appropriate search filters.
  4. Mobile ready
    SharePoint’s responsive design and mobile apps allow users to access intranet content from any device, anywhere.
  5. Variety of web parts
    Each SharePoint page has a variety of different web parts (widgets or building blocks) that tick the box for intranet content such as news, events, quick links and more.
  6. Mega menu
    SharePoint supports a global navigation with a mega menu that you typically find on most intranets, although there are some limitations.
  7. Personalisation
    SharePoint can support limited personalisation for your intranet, although only up to a point and level of granularity.

Key benefits of SharePoint

  1. You've already got it.
    If you've got Microsoft 365, you've got SharePoint. There's no procurement process to deal with. You just need to go and find someone in IT who can wrangle it correctly.
  2. Integration into the Microsoft 365 suite.
    It's there as a homepage, with the Office 365 waffle menu. It integrates with Microsoft Teams if you want that. It integrates with the Viva suite. It integrates with Copilot and Microsoft search. It integrates with Power Automate.
  3. Relatively easy for publishers to use.
    Modern SharePoint is pretty point and click. It has some strange little foibles, but in general your average business user can deal with it fine.
  4. All the security and compliance stuff is sorted.
    You know all of that stuff you don't want to think about like where the data is located, whether it is secure, what the data retention policy is for a certain type of document? Data Loss Prevention stuff? It's already been decided and is already working.
  5. There's an ecosystem of stuff that integrates
    There's a whole world of solutions that have been built to integrate with SharePoint, including some intranet products.

Disadvantages of SharePoint

  1. It has never really been an intranet product.
    Microsoft hasn't ever really seen internal communication like you probably do. It has historically been more of a collaboration tool and a document management system.
  2. It's not sexy or slick.
    Its user interface is pretty boring. It's not going to wow anyone. That sounds shallow, but intranet projects are also change projects and that is easier if the product has a little bit of magic.
  3. It's not on brand
    That dull user interface is also not going go be on-brand in the way your internal comms, brand team or leadership want.
  4. There's loads of intranetty gaps
    Yes, there are a lot of useful web parts but there are also some glaring gaps in key intranet functionality. Some of these are specific tools that aren't there, while others are features that fall way short of what you need. Internal comms tools, content governance features, analytics. These are just some of the areas where intranet managers can get frustrated with SharePoint's shortcomings.
  5. It evolves slowly.
    Internal Communicators are not the buyers of SharePoint. Your CTO signed on the dotted line for Microsoft 365 and they don't really care about intranets. That means that if you don't like the way something is, you can complain all you like, it won't get changed. It's like complaining about Word, Excel or the weather…
  6. It's not plug and play.
    "    If we've already got it, let's turn it on!" you say. Not so fast. It still needs to be assembled and configured and you still need to work out how you want it to work. There are lots of choices for you to make, rather than Microsoft saying, "This is how we think an intranet should be."
  7. There's no project team to help you.
    If you buy an intranet product, there is usually an implementation team that is going to help you with your project. They have done it before and know what works. If you pick SharePoint you are on your own working out how do things. And if you realise into the project that you need help from a SharePoint expert? Well, your project isn't free anymore is it?
  8. Custom development sucks.
    Say it does 80% of what you need, can you build the last 20%? Yes, but you need someone that can do it in your team, or you need to hire an agency that does it. And then? Design, build, test is all well and good, but it takes a long time, and now not only is your project not free anymore, you have created custom code that needs to be maintained: it will cost you money every year, and will need to be tested every time there is an upgrade.

Signs that SharePoint might not be a good choice for you

  1. You are a large complex organisation.
    If your organisation has a simple organisation structure, with one HR department, one set of policies and one internal communications department SharePoint might be a good choice. But if you are all over the world, with different HR departments in each country or subsidiary, and different policies for different audiences SharePoint might not be the best intranet platform. You will quickly outstrip SharePoint's ability to cope with complexity. You will need better tools for personalisation to get the right content to the right people.
  2. You don't have any in-house SharePoint skills.
    SharePoint is like a box of Lego, it is up to you to build the right thing for you. If you have experienced SharePoint people in your organisation, that's great. Go for it. But otherwise, trying to do anything complicated gets really difficult very quickly.
  3. You have multilingual needs.
    If you have lots of different languages to manage, SharePoint does it, but makes it hard. If you need to track and manage the same news article, but with five different languages, localised by different teams on the ground, there are much better choices.
  4. You need good branding capabilities.
    SharePoint used to be able to be heavily branded, but it broke upgrade paths. Microsoft now what to push it as an application. If you are in a heavily branded industry, and you need to make the intranet a paragon of your internal brand, you'll need to look elsewhere.
  5. You need strong governance functionality.
    At Spark Trajectory we are all about governance. If you need to ensure that your content is on point, always up to date and need ways to keep an eye on your content publishers, SharePoint isn't a great choice. It assumes that the site owners are pretty autonomous and there are better choices if this is important to you. Ultimately SharePoint's inadequate governance controls makes scaling a devolved publishing model considerably harder.

Alternatives to SharePoint as an intranet

  1. SharePoint accelerators
    You can add commercial grade web parts to SharePoint to make it spicier. These come from lots of different suppliers, but they are tested, maintained and supported. These might be enough to push your decision one way or another. Examples are Content Formula's Lightspeed and Accelerator 365 from Reply.
  2. SharePoint in-a-box platforms
    There are a whole class of intranet product vendors that have built their whole offering on top of SharePoint. These provide more of a plug-and-play intranet concept as well as enhanced functionality, and implementation teams and customer success management to better ensure that the project and subsequent operation is a success. IT teams often like these tools because the underlying data stays on your Microsoft tenant so all that compliance goodness is in one place. Examples: Omnia Intranet; Involv; Mozzaik365
  3. SaaS intranet platform providers
    Then there are a whole lot of intranets that aren't SharePoint at all. These come with different price points and functionality and the market can be quite bewildering at times. Some are very aimed at internal communications, some are very much social solutions, some are mobile first and aimed at frontline workers. Some appear to be very expensive, but because you set them up and off you go, teams don't need to employ anyone additionally to build or maintain them. All of these sell to large organisations so have had to prove compliance and security again and again. Examples: Unily, Interact, Staffbase.

Each of these are very much addressing you as a market. They are more responsive to their customers' needs as a result and the functionality you find is almost certainly a better fit for internal communicators and intranet managers.

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Microsoft hasn't ever really seen internal communication like you probably do. It has historically been more of a collaboration tool and a document management system.

How to make the right choice

Great you say, let's go shopping. No stop! You're going to need to define requirements and agree them with your key stakeholders. Whether you take the plunge and use SharePoint, or you choose a commercial intranet product, you need to work out what is important for you. What sort of intranet do you need to create? What problems are you going to solve with it? How do your employees need to be able to use this in their working lives? What do your publishers need?

Before you throw yourself at the feet of the intranet product vendors, you are going to need the answers to these questions. How do you achieve this?

  1. There is the long answer: you need to have an intranet strategy (based on research) to know you are doing the right thing and,
  2. There is the shorter answer: you need to have a defined set of requirements to be able to compare your needs against their functionality.

No amount of product reviews will help you more than these two things. What works really well for one organisation, won't necessarily work for another.

"Sounds complicated but I'm guessing YOUR pitch is next"

Damn straight. Spark Trajectory exists to help you make the right choice for you. We carry out research (for example using digital workplace user journeys), work with you to understand what intranet strategy is right given your goals and circumstances and then work out your requirements. We've got a very smart process called the Intranet Product Evaluation which is an objective way of choosing a platform (we are completely vendor neutral and take no payments from vendors).

Here are some pointers about how to go about it.

Requirements

Writing a list of requirements forces you to think about what you really need and what can be optional. They can be functional requirements (what the system does for users, publishers or administrators) or non-functional requirements defining the qualities and constraints as a system: such as performance, reliability, security, usability, scalability or maintainability.

For example some functional requirement questions might be:

  • Do you need a pixel perfect design to show off your brand, or would putting the logo in the corner and setting some colours be OK?
  • Do you need to publish information in different languages?
  • Do you need to use a lot of personalisation and show different content or navigation to different audiences?
  • Can you implement content governance controls to help the publishers keep everything up to date?

Some non-functional requirements questions might be:

  • What does your organisation require in terms of data residency?
  • Is the vendor trustworthy and have a clear roadmap where the customer's voice has a say?
  • Can you extend the service if it doesn't have the functionality you need with an API or some form of plug-in?
  • Will it cost the earth every year or is it cheap as chips and free thereafter?
  • Is it quick to implement?
  • What are suitable base technologies that everyone will be happy with (such as SharePoint add-on, SaaS product or integration with a particular existing service)?

In our Intranet Product Evaluation service we usually settle on about 40 requirements in total and have a short write up to say what we would ideally see in a product. Then we help the client come to an agreement about how important each requirement is. We use a simple MSCW rating: Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won't-have:

  • Must have: Critical to deliver as part of project. It will fail without it.
  • Should have: Important to deliver as part of project but not time critical.
  • Could have: Desirable but not necessary.
  • Won't have: Least critical, not appropriate or actively rejected

Then you have a systematic way of sorting through the huge variety of products that are out there. We use a Red, Amber, Green scale for that, plus a Blue for the Won't haves.

  • Green: Requirement is met comprehensively and any missing elements are minimal and would not impede operation or implementation.
  • Amber: Requirement is only partially met or may breach quality, effort or budgetary expectations. Missing elements may be possible to workaround, customise or be mitigated by additional products.
  • Red: Requirement is not met by the product and likely to adversely affect operation or strategic development.
  • Blue: Rating not evaluated because client requirement is "Won't have". Detail is included to ensure functionality is understood and is optional in operation.

Costs

We also try and collect indicative costs from each vendor. Many of these platforms are a substantial ongoing expense, others are more reasonable. Most costs break down into first year costs that include licenses, implementation fees and other professional service fees, as well as recurring license fees.

How does SharePoint usually perform in these evaluations?

Badly. And if we're working with a large multinational, then very badly. We do a long-list of eight products, including SharePoint and evaluate first against the Must-haves and Should-haves. SharePoint usually comes last. We have had SharePoint come second to last because we also evaluated a common content management framework at the client's request. This usually upsets IT team members in project teams, but the data doesn't lie.

Where SharePoint APPEARS to perform well is cost. It is always a green and clients always say that Cost is a Must-have (oddly enough). But we know that the headline price doesn't include the true costs of what you need to do to get a SharePoint intranet up and running. There are lots of hidden costs in the time that it will take to get the project over the line and then there are lots of hidden costs in extra training, management and governance that will be required, compared to a more fully featured and fit-for-purpose intranet product.

The bottom line

SharePoint might work for you as an intranet. It works for loads of organisations, but you need to have a solid strategy and you need to know what you are doing.

If you are a large and complex organisation, it might not work. In these cases commercial intranet products, while seemingly expensive, will save time and money in the long run, and give a markedly smoother experience for all your employees.

Whatever, you need to have your story straight before you speak to vendors because otherwise:

  1. There are dozens of vendors
  2. They'll (very nicely) eat you for lunch.

Spark Trajectory can help you get that story straight and filter the field down to a reasonable number.

We know that the headline price doesn't include the true costs of what you need to do to get a SharePoint intranet up and running. There are lots of hidden costs in the time that it will take to get the project over the line and then there are lots of hidden costs in extra training, management and governance that will be required compared to a more fully featured and fit-for-purpose intranet product.