By Erin Kester, Senior Consultant | July 18, 2024
A great company intranet is essential for an organization to host its most trusted information and news, fostering effective communication and easy access to critical resources. Microsoft 365 offers a versatile suite of features to create a great intranet experience based in an engaging presentation, up-to-date content, easy findability, and good structure and processes.
Refresh your intranet
If your intranet is out of date, visually tired, or doesn’t matching your organizational structure or needs, a refresh is key to re-establishing value for your employees. M365’s modern site features can provide a flexible and manageable platform employees can maintain directly. Whether you’re starting over from scratch or updating an existing intranet, it’s important to think for the long term to protect your intranet investment.
A well-designed intranet enhances collaboration
and productivity across your organization.
Engaging presentation delights the eye
Modern intranets need to be visually driven without being overwhelming. M365 helps address this with graphical page designs, templating, and theming to drive a consistent visual experience on desktop or mobile devices. Combine this with current content your employees want, and you have a great start.
Up-to-date content drives effective search
In a well-designed intranet, searchability is crucial. Search isn’t magic, though. A great search experience depends on well-ordered content that is kept current. To deliver precise results, the intranet has to contain only trusted, authoritative content so employees can trust the intranet as a valuable resource. Planning for ongoing content refresh is an important consideration for any vital intranet.
Navigation provides intuitive findability
Good navigation reflects how employees seek information. For some this reflects business units, while others will think more about themes or actions. Designing navigation that serves top-down and task-focused seekers will help your users find the information they need without unnecessary frustration.
Structure protects trusted content
The architecture of your intranet aligns to how your organization generates and publishes intranet content. While all employees may visit the intranet, it’s important to ensure content providers can control how updates and new intranet content are published. Accuracy drives trust, and trust drives engagement.
Good processes make it manageable
Consistent maintenance is critical to intranet health. Larger organizations may have a dedicated team maintaining the intranet. Smaller orgs might have an ad hoc group of content providers who work together to keep content up-to-date and relevant. In either model, clear processes for content creation and management keep your content reliable and drive employee value.
Take the Next Step
A well-designed intranet enhances collaboration and productivity across your organization. Pico Logic specializes in creating and supporting intranets tailored to your organization’s needs and maintenance approach. Our goal is to make your intranet an engaging, trusted, go-to resource for all employees. We offer a wide range of services for intranet efforts, from architecture and governance to design and build, as well as training and long-term support. Whether you’re setting up your first intranet or revitalizing your existing site, we’re here to help. Let’s work together to create a more connected and empowered workplace.