Outdated intranets are a major roadblock for companies striving for success in today’s dynamic digital environment. These clunky, information-dumping platforms hinder productivity, collaboration, and ultimately, a company’s overall efficiency. These outdated systems often struggle with:

Low User Engagement

Outdated interfaces, lack of mobile accessibility, and irrelevant content often lead to disengagement. This results in employees resorting to workarounds or external platforms to find information and collaborate. A study by Nielsen Norman Group revealed that the average intranet user spends less than 60 seconds per visit on the platform. 

Reduced Productivity

Difficulty finding information, slow loading times, and cumbersome navigation can create delays and frustration, hindering employee productivity. A study by McKinsey & Company found that knowledge workers lose an average of 1.8 hours per week searching for information due to inefficient intranets. 

Hindered Collaboration

Outdated intranets often lack functionalities to facilitate smooth collaboration, like real-time document editing, project management tools, or effective communication channels. This can lead to information silos and hinder teamwork. A report by Frost & Sullivan estimates that poor collaboration due to inadequate communication platforms costs businesses up to $400,000 per employee annually. 

By modernizing their intranets, companies can overcome these challenges, foster a more engaged workforce, and create a collaborative environment that drives innovation and success. 

Imagine an intranet that’s functional and boosts productivity. Microsoft 365 makes it possible – here’s how.

5 ways Microsoft 365 can help modernize your company intranet with example

Now, let us discuss exactly how these 5 tips relate to the modern concepts that can gel well with Microsoft 365 technology for a modern intranet.

1. Utilize SharePoint Online for Your Intranet Sites

Firstly, to make the intranet modern, use SharePoint Online to create and host your intranet sites. It offers a collaborative and scalable platform with features like document management, version control, and seamless integration with other Microsoft 365 apps. Plus, modern SharePoint site templates can give your intranet a fresh and intuitive look. 

2. Tailor Your SharePoint Intranet with Modern Web Parts

Harness the power of modern web parts in SharePoint Online to craft attractive and interactive intranet pages. With options such as News, Quick Links, Yammer, and Events, you can effortlessly keep users engaged and up to date. These web parts are user-friendly and ensure your content stays dynamic and fresh.

3. Implement Microsoft Teams Integration

Connect Microsoft Teams with your intranet to boost collaboration and communication. Embed Teams channels, chats, and meetings right into your intranet pages. The best part is that it makes team discussions and collaboration smooth and accessible without switching platforms.

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4. Personalize the User Experience

Use Microsoft 365’s personalization features to customize the intranet experience for every user. With the Microsoft Graph, you can highlight personalized content recommendations—like important news, documents, or events—based on each user’s role and activities in the organization.

5. Optimize for Mobile and Accessibility

Make sure your intranet works well on mobile devices and meets accessibility standards. Microsoft 365 tools and templates are built to be responsive, so your intranet should be easy to use on different devices and accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. It’s a good idea to do usability testing to get feedback and make any necessary improvements.

Webinar: Build the Ultimate Intranet and Employee Experience with Microsoft 365, Viva and Search. Watch Now.

Conclusion

The ultimate intranet should deliver an amazing experience for everyone, no matter their location, device, or job. The first step? Understanding all these different “personas” so you can tailor the experience for each one. How does Netwoven do it? By talking to people in the business and getting to know them. 

A great digital employee experience boosts productivity, engagement, and job satisfaction. It takes time and resources to plan and implement it right.  

Netwoven has extensive experience working closely with Microsoft and its customers to deploy highly successful modern SharePoint intranets and digital employee experiences built on the Microsoft 365 platform. Please reach out to us for more information.

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One of the most common complaints we hear from employees when assessing existing corporate intranets is that “search sucks”. Often times this is a combination of using an outdated platform, having poor information architecture, and a lack of proper configuration of their search architecture. The Microsoft 365 platform provides a wide array of configuration options for searching contents throughout the entire tenant, alongside the internet and 3^rd party applications, but understanding all these settings can be a daunting task, even for a trained administrator. In this blog we are going to take a deeper look into the available search configuration options and how to utilize them to give your employees a better experience when trying to find content.  Let’s dive in! 

SharePoint Search vs Microsoft Search

SharePoint has been around seemingly since the dawn of time and so has the ability to search its trove of wonders. Before Microsoft 365, configuring search for SharePoint was a key component for anyone involved with planning, implementing, and administering a corporate intranet. Nowadays, with SharePoint Online being the backend for Teams, Viva Engage, and OneDrive, the ability to effectively search its contents becomes even more paramount. However, SharePoint Search configuration has been heavily documented over the years, so we are going to focus solely on “Microsoft Search”, which is Microsoft’s way of allowing people to be able to search not only SharePoint but also the whole world wide web as well as the contents of other third-party applications to which the user has access to.

If you’ve already dabbled in SharePoint search configuration in the past, you may have noticed a new section in your Site Settings for Microsoft Search. 

The main difference between SharePoint Search and Microsoft Search is simply the scope. A lot of the same functionality that exists in the site collection level search configurations is also available in the Microsoft Search configurations, but you can only use one or the other, and the settings that get used are based on the scope of the search that is available to the user on the page that they are currently searching from. 

To put it simply, any SharePoint Online site that is configured to have a “site” or “hub” scope for the search box will use the site collection search settings, while sites configured to have a “tenant” scope will be using the Microsoft Search settings. The most commonly used configuration options (in SharePoint search terms) are result sources, result types, and query rules (search schema is too, but the same settings are used for both SharePoint and Microsoft search). In Microsoft search terms, result sources are called “Content Sources”, query rules are configured as “Answers” (more on this later), and result types are still called “Result Types”. Microsoft search is configured in the M365 Admin Portal whereas SharePoint search is configured within SharePoint, in the site settings menu. 

Lastly, Microsoft search results are also leveraged on Bing.com and new windows or tabs in Microsoft Edge. 

As SharePoint search configuration has been documented heavily and, in much detail, we will focus the rest of this blog on Microsoft Search. The key thing to remember is that if you scope your site’s search box (through PowerShell) to “Hub” or “Site”, then the settings for SharePoint search will be used, whereas using the “Tenant” scope will use the settings for Microsoft search. You can change the scope settings for any site by running the following PowerShell and replacing “scope” with either Tenant, Hub, Site, or Default.

$SiteURL = “https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/sites/SomeSite” 

 Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Interactive 

Set-PnPSearchSettings -SearchScope scope 

Free Download: Microsoft 365 Modern Intranet & Employee Experience Look Book

Configuring Microsoft Search  

The configuration options for Microsoft Search can be found under the Search & Intelligence area within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. You can access this by going to https://admin.microsoft.com and logging in with a Global Admin, Search Administrator, or Knowledge Administrator account, clicking on Settings in the left nav, then Search & Intelligence. 

We’ll go through the configurations in order. 

Microsoft 365 Modern Intranet & Employee Experience Look Book

In this look book, you’ll see examples of how Netwoven has created layouts and solutions for clients to enhance employee experiences with a modern intranet on Microsoft 365. Download now!

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Insights

The Insights tab gives you (somewhat) detailed analytics about all of the different search facets that we will be configuring for Microsoft Search. Make sure you’ve got the slider for “New usage analytics” turned on in order to view data with additional filters. 

Our focus in this blog is to discuss configuration options, so we’ll save the analytics for another day. The descriptions are pretty self-explanatory, and it definitely makes sense to keep a constant eye on query and user analytics to find out exactly what your users are searching for and how often they are finding it. 

Get to know Deep Dive into Microsoft Search Part-2

Get to know Deep Dive into Microsoft Search Part-3

Conclusion

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface so get your claws ready for the rest of this blog series. Microsoft Search is the new and super-powerful way to bring the whole world (well, the internet and everything work-related that your users have access to) right to your employees’ door (monitor). Search doesn’t have to suck, and Microsoft Search can make sure it doesn’t, but it needs some configuration. Tune in to part 2 of our Deep Dive where we will review everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Answers in Microsoft Search.

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• Viva Insights: Provides data-driven insights and recommendations to help employees improve their productivity and well-being.
• Viva Learning: Offers a range of learning resources, including access to online courses, to help employees develop new skills.
• Viva Topics: Allows employees to discover and define common corporate terms and processes, while highlighting the people with knowledge about these interests and areas of expertise.
• Viva Connections: Provides a range of resources to help employees stay connected, including social networking features, company news and updates, and access to company resources.
• There is an ever-growing list of Microsoft Viva workloads (Goals, Sales, Engage, Amplify and more)

Microsoft Viva is designed to help companies create a more connected, engaged workforce, and to support employee well-being and development. That being said, the buck doesn’t stop by turning Viva on. Experience what our existing clients have, through partnering with the Viva experts at Netwoven to ensure your employee experience initiative lands with the impact you expect it to!

Get started with our free workshop! You’ll walk away with a roadmap for potential workstreams, dependencies, and next steps along with an adoption framework to help you implement the Viva solution that best fits your needs.

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