How do we plan a SharePoint intranet people actually use?

Key facts

• Intranets fail most often from stale content and unclear ownership, not from technology.
• A home site, hub sites and communication sites give a flat, flexible SharePoint structure.
• Audience targeting shows news, links and navigation to the groups they matter to.
• Viva Connections brings the intranet into Teams, where many employees already work.
• Every page and site needs a named owner and a review date.

Start with goals and top tasks

Ask employees and managers what they look for most often. Common answers are policies and forms, benefits and HR information, IT help, company news, team contacts and how-to guides. Rank these tasks and design for the top ten.

Set two or three measurable goals, such as fewer HR and IT emails asking where something is, or a target share of employees visiting weekly. Goals keep scope in check and give you a way to judge success.

Design the structure

Modern SharePoint uses a flat structure: individual sites joined into hubs, rather than deep subsites. This lets content move between hubs as the organization changes.

Navigation, search and findability

Keep top-level navigation to a handful of task-based labels that employees recognize. Use plain words rather than department names where possible. Test navigation with a few employees using card sorting or simple find-this tasks before launch.

Search matters as much as navigation. Use clear page titles, consistent metadata on documents, and search bookmarks or acronyms for common terms. Remove duplicate and outdated copies of key documents so search returns the right version, which also improves results from Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Content, news and ownership

Launch with less content that is accurate, rather than migrating everything. Every page should have a named owner and a review date. Use page templates so pages look consistent and authors start quickly.

• Use SharePoint news for announcements, posted from hub and department sites.
• Target news, navigation links and web parts to audiences such as location or department.
• Set a review cycle, for example every six or twelve months, and archive what is not updated.
• Train a small group of content owners rather than giving everyone edit rights.

Bring it to where people work

Many employees live in Teams and Outlook, not in a browser. Viva Connections brings the intranet home site, news and a dashboard of cards into Teams, and is especially useful for frontline workers on mobile devices. Promote news through Teams and email digests, and set the home site as the landing page people see.

Launch and improve

Launch with a short campaign: leadership messages, a few useful quick links, and a feedback channel. Then use site usage analytics to see which pages are visited and which searches return poor results. Review quarterly, fix the top issues and remove content nobody uses. A smaller intranet that is trusted beats a large one that is not.

How Accred Consulting approaches it

Accred Consulting plans intranets with business owners, not just IT. Discovery covers top tasks, audiences, current content and who will own it. The proposal sets scope, fixed price and timeline. The US-based specialists assigned to your engagement design the home site, hubs and navigation, set up audience targeting, templates and Viva Connections, and define ownership and review rules. In one engagement for about 240 users, about 1.8 TB was assessed and organized into 11 governed sites in 9 weeks. Handover includes documentation and training for content owners.

Track record: 475+ client projects, 2,000+ migration workstreams and 210,000+ users migrated by a US-based team. Company facts · Case studies

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