As organizations grow and scale, they face several challenges relating to document management, knowledge sharing, employee collaboration, storing employee details, and other critical operations. To manage all these vital processes, SharePoint is an undeniable choice for most enterprises. In this blog, we will learn how SharePoint intranets help organizations in critical operations.
What is SharePoint intranet, and How does it help businesses?
Organizations can store, organize, and manage files, documents, and other information to make informed decisions using SharePoint. It provides a central location for employees to view, access, and collaborate on content securely. Due to its ease of integration with multiple tools, many businesses use SharePoint for their workspace.
SharePoint was launched by Microsoft in 2001. Being an integral part of Office 365, it offers inbuilt functionalities and features that give a great digital workplace experience for organizations. With its integration into Microsoft Team’s businesses can reap intranet solutions by collaborating on documents, holding real-time meetings, keeping tasks organized, and helping them streamline processes.
Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service for the fifth year in a row, it further underscores the value of its services, driving increased interest from businesses.
New Features in SharePoint Intranets
Microsoft has rolled out new features for SharePoint. Below are the latest updates on SharePoint Intranets for 2024, along with SharePoint intranet examples.
Simpler Authoring
SharePoint has made web content creation easier and simpler to produce professional content on the intranet. Recently, the company has introduced Copilot in SharePoint to help authors write more compiling content. With the help of this feature, users can interact with the content on site that can also be shared to other Microsoft 365 apps.
Similarly, by leveraging Microsoft Graphs and large language models, Copilot helps authors create desired pages or sites. With this feature, authors can also create a starter site and import essential information that aligns automatically with the organization’s brand.
Recently, in June, the company also added real-time coauthoring in SharePoint to make more collaborative authoring than before. The company also plans to add section-level line commenting later this year to help editors make comments, track issues, and provide feedback within the new post or a page. Copilot in SharePoint also helps authors create a beautiful layout design that goes well with their content.
Create Compelling Content
Appealing sites are a foundation to modern intranets and employees also expect the same high standards of design internally as they see various sites across the web today. To make this possible Office 365 has come up with a feature SharePoint Brand Center. This feature enables users to customize fonts within the site or page. The company is also working on the logos, colors, and design elements to create a complete brand experience within the intranet.
For better compiling content, Office 365 has recently launched a section backgrounds feature. This feature lets authors choose from a set of curated background visuals for page sections. It also allows them to upload their own image and choose image shapes. Recently in June, the company had makeovers on the content pane to help authors layout great content for their pages such as sections, videos, images, and web pages.
The authors can use Office 365 tools such as Clipchamp and Microsoft Stream for editing, managing, and viewing videos. Using Microsoft Clipchamp, the business premium plan customers and enterprises can also create subtitles with the help of a subtitle generator and AI voiceover generator feature.
Similarly, to help authors with video content Microsoft has also made the availability of Video pages feature in SharePoint. This feature comes with a set of beautiful templates that make video content shine than ever before. A top requested feature, Trim is also added to trim the length of videos directly in the Stream app. This feature allows authors to add hyperlink and text callouts at specific video stamps.
Flexible platform
Organizations need intranet solutions customized according to their situations. SPFx framework and SharePoint’s UX extensibility represent one of the best tools to meet these needs. The recently released feature Graph API for SharePoint Pages allows developers to interact with SharePoint news posts and pages, offering capabilities such as getting, publishing, listing, editing, and deleting.
Office 365 also added a Bot Framework powered Viva Connections extensibility feature to enable authors to extend Microsoft Teams bot framework integrations into Viva Connections easily. SharePoint has also rolled out a new feature SharePoint Embedded introducing a new concept File Storage Containers. This feature is isolated logically from the author’s main SharePoint Online content including SharePoint features.
Enhancing Deeper engagement
SharePoint intranet has always been at the top in helping businesses reach target audiences. Previously, the News in Outlook feature was designed to help SharePoint news posts reach the targeted audiences in email. Now, the company is expanding its capabilities to make email-ready news a default experience for all SharePoint news posts.
Also, it integrates a video page template feature for seamless video content play in email. In April, the company launched Copilot deployment kit as a part of pre-built campaign for Viva Amplify to help communicators drive awareness on usage of AI and Copilot.
SharePoint Premium
SharePoint continues to be the world’s largest cloud content management platform. It feature delivers new ways to engage with the content, protecting and managing it throughout its lifecycle. With the new SharePoint Premium, users can now disable/enable Structured, Unstructured, and Prebuilt Document Processing individually. These capabilities help users extract information and classify files automatically that work best for unstructured documents such as contracts and letters.
Viva Answers Found within Microsoft Search
Generally, answers content appears in Viva Engage search with this new feature Answers in Viva, answers content will also appear in Microsoft search results such as SharePoint.com, Office.com, and Bing at Work searches. If you didn’t find the information you are looking for, you will be asked to try posting your question into Answers in Viva.
The users will also receive the Answer digest that collects relevant questions that recipients might be able to answer in one interactive email. This capability is available to all the Employee Communications and Communities (C&C) and Viva suite licensed users.
Through this feature, every community member can leverage the intelligence of their organization to connect with experts, find answers, solve problems, and share insights. This feature can be used within private and public communities allowing customers to separate sensitive information saved in Answers.
What’s Next?
The integration of machine learning and AI with SharePoint intranets is already making waves in business productivity. Features like intelligent search, personalized content recommendations, and automatic transcription are thriving and expected to flourish more in the future.
Looking forward, the integration of ML and AI in Office 365 and SharePoint will likely increase, providing more personalized features. We can expect advancements in SharePoint intranets, data analysis, content management, information discovery, and other areas.
Looking to see all these features in action, talk to our experts today.
