If you want to get to a certain point on your intranet journey, you need to know where you’re starting from. Our intranet health check helps you assess that.
How good is your intranet? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Where are the areas for improvement? What are your priorities to help drive adoption and increase value?
Our new Intranet Health Check assessment tool provides an excellent way for internal communicators, IT directors and intranet managers to get a quick assessment of their intranet maturity across a number of key areas and point to where improvements might need to be made.
You can use the Intranet Health Check to decide on where to focus efforts to drive continual improvement, as a data input to consider a new intranet, or just as a way to help kick-start thinking about how to make your intranet better.
In this article we’re explore why it is critical to keep on improving your intranet, why assessing your intranet is important, how the Intranet Health Check works, and the ways you can use it to ensure your intranet keeps delivering value.
Why it’s essential to keep on improving your intranet
Intranets are never done. There is always more work to do. Employee needs and organisational requirements continually change, and intranets need to evolve accordingly to:
Mirror changes in the organisations such as restructures and acquisitions.
Support employees to help meet new and emerging challenges.
Reflect changes in the working practices and the use of technology.
Meet the evolving expectations of user and stakeholders in order to support employee experience and drive value.
Standing still with your intranet and not evolving or improving is never really an option. As the rest of the world moves on, it means your intranet will effectively fall behind, start to experience reduced adoption, and ultimately depreciate in value.
Intranets get better in different ways. Occasionally you might need to invest in an intranet product like Lightspeed365, but also often intranet teams sustain a programme of continual improvement with smaller, incremental changes. Over the years, we’ve also observed that continual improvement on the intranet tends to be the time when most value is added.
Thankfully, SharePoint intranets and products like Lightspeed365 are great at supporting continual improvement because:
Most intranets are launched as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with improvements planned on the roadmap.
Intranets are essentially modular in nature, so it is easy to add new features and content areas, so intranets lend themselves well for incremental changes.
Microsoft continues to invest in SharePoint and also Microsoft 365 which usually means there are opportunities to make a SharePoint intranet better and better.
Intranet products such as Lightspeed365 also continue to evolve with new features, which can then easily be deployed.
Central intranet teams and related support departments tend to be tightly resourced, so incremental improvements tend to be easier to support rather than “big bang” intranet implementations.
Continual improvement also provides the opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t over time.
Why assessing your intranet is an integral part of improvement
If you want to improve your intranet, it is essential to know where you are currently in terms of what works well, where there are gaps, which areas you’re less than mature in, where changes are need, and where there are opportunities to improve. If you want to get to a certain point on your intranet journey, you need to know where you’re starting from.
When it comes to improving your intranet, knowledge is power. You can’t improve an intranet based on assumptions, otherwise you might introduce features or prioritise changes that will add little value or have zero impact. Teams who successfully improve their intranet ensure they:
Have a good understanding of user needs and business stakeholder requirements and keep on top of these as they chang.
Understand current intranet pain points and how the intranet is being used.
Understand how their intranet stacks up in terms of maturity and might compare to a typical intranet in a comparable organisation.
Understand the “art of the possible” when it comes to what you can achieve with an intranet.
But keeping on top of all these areas can be challenging because:
Intranet teams often don’t have other examples of intranets to compare their own to, partly because other intranets are hidden behind the firewall.
Intranets cover a multitude of different areas so it can be difficult to assess performance over a number of different areas
Intranet teams and support functions are super-busy and there is not always the resourcing, bandwidth or headspace to do this successfully.
Intranet products and digital workplace continue to evolve at pace.
Everyone has a different view of what the intranet should do – and there can be a lot of noise and sometimes uniformed opinions across different stakeholders, making it harder to establish an objective view and clarity ging forward.
Recognising these issues, we created the Intranet Health Check in order to provide a quick, practical and informed way to assess your intranet maturity and its relative strengths and weaknesses. When combined with other data inputs such as a user survey, you can start to build up a strong picture of where you are with your intranet.
What areas do you need to assess an intranet on?
Intranets are very flexible in that they deliver value across a number of key areas and processes, so any assessment needs to take in these different areas of value. For example, it is possible for have an intranet that is excellent at supporting internal communications but has very poor mobile access or does little to support knowledge management.
The five key areas of that we asses in the Intranet Health Check are:
Communication
Supporting internal communications and the effective flow of information, keeping employees informed to drive operations, reduce risk, support organisational goals and more.
Employee engagement
Helping employees feel connected to their organisation and nurturing a positive organisational culture.
Self-service
Allowing employees to complete common tasks, get things done and get answers themselves, relieving pressure on busy IT and HR helpdesks and other busy support teams.
Mobile access
Enabling mobile access to the intranet, supporting better frontline communications and engagement, as well as hybrid and remote work.
Knowledge management
Supporting knowledge sharing, providing access to experts, supporting learning, providing access to materials to support customer service, and more.
How the Intranet Health Check Works
Lightspeed365’s Intranet Health Check is a self-assessment tool that provides insights into the performance and maturity of your intranet over five key intranet areas – Communication, Employee Engagement, Self-service, Mobile access and Knowledge management. All responses are completely confidential and will not be shared.
The assessment is derived from forty or so carefully curated questions relating to intranet features, adoption and management. We’ve designed the Intranet Health Check to be quick and easy to use, so most of the questions require either yes / no answers or choosing one out of three ratings. It should only take ten to fifteen minutes to complete.
Once you have completed the questions you will get an instant report showing how much your intranet scores out of 100 for each of the five key areas, plus some related commentary with useful insights. We will also email you a link the report which can be shared with others.
The Intranet Health Check is not designed to be a deeply scientific and hugely report into the positive and negative elements of every intranet platform, but more of a pragmatic, quick check into the health of your intranet that will provide real insights with minimal effort.
Six ways to use the Intranet Health Check
Use the results from the Intranet Health Check in the following ways:
1
Conversation starter
Kick off discussions or a brainstorm about the role and the future of your intranet. The results provide a great talking point
2
Strategy starting point
Use the Health Check as a useful data input to help work out the direction and plan for your intranet going forward.
3
Prioritise the roadmap
Use the results to consider the priorities for your roadmap for the short-, medium- and long-term.
4
Business case
Use the results as part of a business case for a new intranet solution or investment in new features.
5
Identify requirements
Use the results as a starting point to work out requirements for a new intranet solution.
6
Track progress
Track the success of your intranet over time or before and after an intranet implementation project by taking the Health Check at different points of time.
Ready to take the Intranet Health Check?
It’s free and will take you only fifteen minutes at most. If you’d like to discuss the Health Check or its results, then get in touch!
Intranets have now been around for thirty years, so the market for intranet software is now very mature. This means there are solutions to suit every budget and need, but it can feel a little overwhelming trying to figure out which product is the best fit for your organisation. In this post, we’re going to explore the merits of the Origami intranet product (previously called Origami Connect), and how Lightspeed365 provides a great Origami Connect alternative for organisations looking to get more from their SharePoint intranet.
The intranet software market is different to some other types of enterprise software because Microsoft SharePoint dominates intranet solutions. SharePoint is by far the most popular base technology for intranets. It is possible to use SharePoint Online straight out of the box to deliver your intranet, but often teams find it hard to set-up, costly to manage and that there are some major gaping holes in terms of functionality and features.
While some “in a box” intranet products are completely standalone, other solutions including Origami Connect and Lightspeed365 are designed to work alongside SharePoint. They increase the capabilities and ROI of your SharePoint intranet, usually by filling some of the gaps found in native SharePoint alone.
What is Origami (Origami Connect)?
Origami is a SharePoint add-on product that organisations with SharePoint intranets can use to extend the power of their SharePoint-based intranet. The product is provided by Sharemuch Holdings, a company registered in Canada.
What do Origami and Lightspeed365 have in common?
Origami and Lightspeed365 have some things in common:
They are both products that enhance SharePoint intranets by extending the number of features (web parts) available, allowing you to work with all the existing SharePoint web parts and functionality.
Both tick most of the security and compliance boxes relating to SharePoint intranets, with all data kept within your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Both products are designed to plug the gaps in SharePoint and provide extra functionality and missing features, as well as support more flexibility around intranet design.
Both Lightspeed365 and Origami are designed to provide a cost-effective approach that helps you to deliver an enterprise intranet at significantly less cost than a fuller intranet “in-a-box” product.
Seven reasons to consider Lightspeed365 as an alternative to Origami
However, there are several differences between the products and the companies behind them, and it is critically important to select the product that’s best for your requirements. Below we outline some of the differences between the products and why Lightspeed365 represents an excellent alternative to Origami, and for some teams may well be the preferred choice.
More tools for internal communicators
Internal communications teams are often the product owners of a SharePoint intranet. They are also frequently frustrated by the limitations of SharePoint out of the box in supporting flexible internal communications, so they turn to intranet products like Origami and Lightspeed365 to provide more features.
Both Origami and Lightspeed365 have a number of additional web parts for internal communicators that extend options for presenting news, for example. However, Lightspeed365 specialises in supporting internal comms teams, with a number of specific features that are consistently requested by communicators, including:
Push communications: The ability to send push notifications to specific Teams channels including on mobile devices, an essential feature to support frontline communications.
Branding tools: The branding customer enhances your intranet’s look and feel, allowing you more flexibility to deploy specific colours and fonts, so your intranet can be more on-brand.
Subscriptions: The ability for users to subscribe to different news topics to create a more relevant and personalised intranet experience.
Note that these three popular intranet features are available in Origami at the time of writing.
Lightspeed365 was built with Internal Comms teams in mind—no workaround required.
Popular employee-focused web parts that make a big difference
A successful intranet is firmly focused on the needs of users, and both Lightspeed365 and Origami have a number of features that are particularly popular with employees. These features can make a big difference to your intranet experience and provide a good foundation for adoption.
Origami has a number of additional engagement features including a “kudos” web part to promote shout-outs and also another to support discussion boards. At Lightspeed365 we believe these can be delivered successfully through Microsoft Viva Engage, and then embedded easily into a SharePoint page, so we try to focus on employee-focused web parts which will not duplicate core functionality.
For example:
Our highly popular Noticeboard feature allows employees to post classified adverts and announcements in a more fit-for-purpose format than Viva Engage.
Our accessibility tools enable employees to configure their display options around text-size, colour and contrast, to support a more inclusive and accessible intranet.
The App launcher is popular with employees as it gives them a useful daily work tool for accessing company apps and services
We focus on features your employees will actually use—no bloat, no duplication.
Deeper integration with the rest of the digital workplace
A SharePoint intranet provides excellent opportunities to integrate Microsoft 365 tools into the experience to drive value and adoption, creating a more integrated digital workplace. The features that come out of the box with SharePoint already support this, for example with Viva Engage web parts, but there are some limitations around flexibility. Lightspeed365 has two powerful features that provide deeper integration with a M365-powered digital workplace:
The Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard provides an opportunity to create a focused integrated dashboard, focused on task completion. Lightspeed365 comes with ready-built integrations and corresponding cards to give you a huge head start and minimise IT involvement.
Microsoft Teams integration allows you to access your intranet from a branded app that sits in your Microsoft Teams toolbar, offering easy employee access. The fact that the app can be branded makes a significant difference, above and beyond what is available with Viva Connections out of the box.
Note that Origami does not feature either of these features that support a more integrated digital workplace experience.
Out-of-the-box Viva Connections doesn’t cut it. Lightspeed365 closes the integration gap.
Intranet management tools
We’ve been working in close partnership with intranet teams for over two decades and the same pain points around managing intranets come up again and again. One major area where Lightspeed365 and Origami differ is that we have a number of dedicated tools which enable easier management and continual improvement of the intranet.
Site provisioning: This incredibly useful feature allows you to triage requests, create approval workflow and automatically provision SharePoint sites – as well as Teams and Viva Engage groups – to avoid site sprawl and effectively manage your intranet.
Admin centre: This feature enables you to fully manage all your Lightspeed365 features from a user-friendly dashboard that is embedded right within the intranet, but only visible to admins.
Intranet tour: This popular web part introduces the intranet to new users with a custom walk-through of features or introduces employees about updates – doing some of the heavy lifting to help promote the use of the intranet to new hires, as well as supporting overall adoption and continuous improvement.
Feedback: This feature helps collect user feedback to support improvement – unlike the three web parts mentioned above, a similar feature is available in Origami too.
No more SharePoint sprawl. Manage everything from a single intranet console.
Focus on findability and search
One of the key roles of an intranet is to help employees find that they need to get things done and stay informed. SharePoint and Microsoft search capabilities are advanced, but not perfect. Both Lightspeed365 and Origami recognise this and add some more capabilities to improve the search experience, with slightly different but overlapping capabilities. For example, Lightspeed365 has an advanced People Search web part that provides type-ahead capabilities to find colleagues from your employee directory.
Lightspeed365 also has a popular Floating Search web part that allows you to place a scoped search (with the parameters of the search defined) anywhere on any page, providing a prominent place to start searches from. Origami also has a similar web part to provide a more flexible search experience.
Type-ahead People Search. Scoped Search on every page. Done.
Backed by intranet knowhow and expertise
Selecting the right intranet product is not always just about meeting functional requirements. It is also essential to have the right vendor too. One of the strengths of Lightspeed365 is that is that it is created by Content Formula, an independent UK-based digital agency that has fully focused on the SharePoint and intranet space for nearly two decades.
With a long-term stable leadership team with deep business and technical knowledge, Lightspeed365 has been crafted by genuine intranet and SharePoint experts. We’ve lived and breathed SharePoint intranets for a LONG time and this is reflected in the product design and features, that are ruthlessly optimised around employee needs, user experience and reducing the pain associated with managing a SharePoint intranet.
Our stand-out track record with SharePoint intranets is also reflected in the appearance of Lightspeed365 as a leader in the ClearBox Intranet and Employee Experience Report, recognised by many as the definitive guide to intranet software. At the time of writing Origami has yet to feature in the ClearBox guide.
Built by Content Formula, SharePoint experts since 2005.
Implementation support and additional professional services
Every organisation and its employees have different needs – that’s why no two intranets are quite the same. The flexibility of SharePoint and the additional features (web parts) that come with a product like Lightspeed365 or Origami make a real difference. However, we know that there are often also additional challenges that can often be required with an intranet project:
A slight tweaking of a web part that needs custom development
Technical and administrative challenges that require in-depth knowledge of SharePoint
Support on migrating content from an existing legacy system
Unexpected last-minute challenges and hurdles
And more!
One of the strengths of Lightspeed365 is that we can provide additional implementation and professional services backed by decades of real-world intranet experience and deep technical knowledge, to implement the world-class intranet that your employees and stakeholders want to see. The global experience of Content Formula – the owners and creators of Lightspeed365 – in the SharePoint intranet space is recognised within the industry and professional intranet community.
Need more assistance than just installing the product? Our consultants are ready to help.
Organise a free demo
The intranet software market is mature with a lot of choice, and that’s great news for intranet teams. If you are looking at a product like Origami then you should definitely check out Lightspeed365, which in our view, has several advantages. Why not organise a demo and experience Lightspeed365 for yourself?
When you are using intranet metrics there are some best practices to keep in mind:
There’s generally an over-reliance on the use of adoption and usage metrics with intranets, but to drive improvement you’ll likely need to measure a range of different metrics.
Numbers only ever tell half the story. It’s imperative to mix quantitative and qualitative data gained from feedback about your intranet to get a better informed, 360-degree view of improvement, and also provide context for the numbers.
Reporting success is great, but really the most important driver for measurement should be improving your intranet.
Always act on what you measure, otherwise there is little value in measuring – generally having a regular, diarised process to make improvements based on your data is the way to go.
Initially measure to get a baseline set of numbers to track improvement, ideally before you launch a new intranet or new design, so you can compare the before and after.
As every intranet team knows, an intranet is never complete. Much of the value of the intranet is gained after it is launched and generated through continual improvement.
Thankfully intranets lend themselves very well to improvement because they are generally flexible, configurable and modular, so you can make changes and add content and features that make a difference, without having to completely change the intranet. SharePoint intranets in particular – and products like Lightspeed365 – also support improvement, with the easy ability to add a large library of different web parts (features).
Intranets are also measurable, so teams can take a data-driven approach to improvement. We are often asked what the best metrics to use for intranet improvement are? This is actually not as straightforward it seems because:
There are multiple ways to measure intranets relating to different areas, including adoption and usage, search, usability, content quality, engagement with content, productivity and time saved, performance and so on.
Different analytics packages and systems will allow you to measure some things effectively and not others.
In this post we’re going to explore 25 different types of metrics that you can use to track intranet success and drive improvement.
25 types of intranet metrics to consider
Ready to explore intranet metrics? Here’s our view of some of the ones you can use. And this list is not complete! We didn’t cover areas such as environmental footprint, readability of content and a raft of other measures.
Usage & Engagement Metrics
Understand how often people come to the intranet and how they interact with it.
Unique active users – daily, weekly, monthly
Adoption is an overused metric, but it is important. Many intranet teams like to record the number of unique, active users (with the criteria for “active” usually defined within your analytics package) who visit on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This might be expressed as a percentage of users across your workforce, or as a percentage of those who have access to the intranet.
Page views
Page views can show you the most visited pages of your site, including news items. (See also reaches.)
Time on page and site
The time on a page or on the site within a session can be an indication of rising interest and engagement. However, it can also indicate that people are taking too long to find things and, on some pages, you may actually want to reduce the time spent on a page. Usually, an increase or decrease in the time on page or site needs some qualitative information to fully understand the reasons for it.
Bounce rate
A bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave a single page without taking any action such as clicking on a link or interacting with content. It can be an indication of high or low engagement with a page, so a high bounce rate on your homepage might indicate people aren’t particularly engaging with your intranet overall. Again, a high or low bounce rate may require context and qualitative information to explain it.
Mobile usage
If you have an intranet which is optimised for mobile and you have a high frontline proportion of staff, you may be wanting to track the proportion of users accessing the intranet using mobile devices if your analytics package indicates this.
Content engagement – shares, likes, comments and ratings
Depending on the reactions available on your intranet, there are different ways to measure content engagement at the page level including the number of likes and comments and sometimes shares. Some packages also have opportunities to rate a page out of five, for example.
Content and messaging reach
Many intranet metrics are also internal comms metrics, so views of different messages mean you can track the reach of different pieces of intranet content and news. This can be harder to calculate when the same content is distributed across multiple channels.
Intranet newsletter open rates
A keyway to drive intranet traffic is through an email newsletter – often weekly – which arounds up key recent stories and provides links back to the individual stories. Many internal communicators will want to measure open rates for the newsletter as well as the click-throughs to different intranet stories.
Calls to action conversation rate
Different pages will have certain calls to action (CTAs) on them such as clicking through a link, completing a form or perhaps signing up for an event. Tracking the conversion rate for calls to action can provide insights into how to best present calls to action for greater success, as well as reflect on the success of the intranet compared to using other digital channels such as email.
User satisfaction scores
Many intranet teams choose to conduct user surveys about the intranet to gauge levels of satisfaction with it and the value it brings. Running a “before” and “after” survey before a major upgrade or running an annual satisfaction survey can help track success.
Net Promoter Score
The NPS is a very popular way to measure user satisfaction with a particular application and is derived from users providing a score between 0 and 10 based on the likelihood they would recommend an intranet to a colleague. As a metric, it’s by no means perfect, but its widely used and easy to work out.
Personalisation or subscription adoption
Most modern intranets have personalisation options, some of which might provide opportunities for users to personalise their experience. For example, Lightspeed365 features allow users to configure the apps including in their homepage apps launcher, as well as subscribe to topics of interest for news. Metrics can track the percentage of users who have actually gone out of their way to personalise their experience.
Content & Governance
Focus on quality, freshness, and how effectively your content is being produced and managed.
From first draft to governance check – track the full journey of your intranet content.
Content pipeline – published content
Depending on what you are trying to achieve with a new or improved intranet, some teams measure the volume of new content coming through and being published, particularly from a distributed or decentralised group of publishers. This might be a temporary measure if you have an initiative to introduce more evergreen, reference pages or a collection of “How Do I” instructional content. If you are encouraging distributed publishers or communicators to contribute news, then measurement might be ongoing, and part of your set of internal communications metrics.
User-generated content
Most intranets encourage user-generated content – this can come in many different forms including blogs, shout-outs to colleagues, even classified adverts which can be achieved through Lightspeed365’s Noticeboard feature. User-generated content helps to balance out more corporate content, drives adoption and underpins engagement, so measuring the volume of contributions over time can be useful.
Content governance – various metrics
You may be introducing some content governance which might be leading to a reduction in out-of-date pages or an increase in items being updated to certain standards. You may be looking increase the number of pages which are being reviewed by a certain date or reduce pages which don’t have a recognised owner. Whatever you are hoping to achieve, appropriate metrics can help you to track the progress.
Usability testing
Usability testing comes in different shapes and sizes, but it is an essential part of improving your intranet. You might be comparing two different content approaches (A/B testing), the success rate of your navigation, and so on. It’s often carried out when improving a particular aspect of your intranet and as part of a project, but the metrics can contribute to overall improvement.
System Usability Score SUS
The System Usability Score (SUS) is a popular measure that is used to score a user’s perception of their experience in using a system and is based on ten questions that use the Likert scale. The score then gives you a number out of 100. This could be used to track an improvement in perceptions of user experience before and after some design changes, for example.
Search success
Search and findability are a critical part of any intranet so measuring search success can also be important. There are a range of different search metrics that can be used, for example relating to search relevancy, search frequency, the number of searches with zero returns, and so on.
Performance & Technical Health
Monitor the intranet’s stability, speed, and accessibility.
Just like a heartbeat, your intranet’s performance needs constant monitoring.
Intranet performance: page load times
There are a number of intranet metrics that relate more to technical areas and focus on performance. Average page load times are particularly important, as a very slow intranet can impact adoption and also shed a light on patterns of usage. They may also differ across your network and can be down to local connectivity issues.
Intranet performance: uptime
The uptime of your intranet is also an important measure, although this is usually seldom an issue as outages should be highly unusual.
Accessibility
The accessibility of your intranet and its content is critical. There are number of paid-for and free tools which can help you measure levels of accessibility, sometimes in relation to the WCAG 2 standards.
Intranet related queries
Keeping track of the intranet related queries which are logged is also a way to track issues an overall intranet performance. What you measure depends a little on how you log queries – either via the IT helpdesk or ticketing system, directly to the intranet team, via feedback to content owners etc., or a combination of all of these.
Business Impact Metrics
Go beyond usage to show the real-world effect on business operations and efficiency.
Real impact happens outside the intranet – in productivity, cost savings and efficiency.
Time saved
Intranets help drive efficiency. Some teams attempt to measure the time saved by an intranet, which can be shown as a way to demonstrate intranet value. This is quite difficult to track and in practice usually involves some guess work, but usually is derived through controlled testing relating to a particular task carried out (such as finding some HR information), users keeping diaries and recording their time, analysis of a particular business process, or estimates by users of time saved. Sometimes time saved will relate to the work specifically of intranet admins.
Reduced usage in a related system
Successful intranets can lead to efficiencies which then trigger the reduced usage of a related system. For example, more efficient internal communications should lead to fewer communications emails. Employee self-service information can also trigger fewer queries to the HR or IT helpdesk. Measuring these can be an effective way to track the real-world impact of intranets.
Reduced costs
Intranets can lead to reduced costs, for example the need for less resourcing due to improved processes or reduction in software costs due to the ability to sunset legacy tech or streamline the application landscape. Reducing costs is a great metric, when its genuinely reduced costs. However, estimating cost savings based on saved time is often unconvincing and does not really stand up to scrutiny.
Choose your intranet metrics wisely
Intranet metrics come in all shapes and sizes, and it is important to pick ones that you are going to act upon and areas that you are going to improve. You’ll also need to ensure you can measure them effectively based on the metrics package you have, and the information you have access to. Good luck on your intranet measurement journey!
You can’t control every page – so give your content owners the tools to get it right.
Well-designed SharePoint templates help your intranet stay usable, consistent, and on-brand—no matter who’s publishing. From HR policies to onboarding guides, these templates make it easy to create pages that look professional, follow best practice, and meet employee needs.
Intranet teams often struggle with how their SharePoint intranet should look and how to structure it effectively. Thankfully, there’s a wide variety of SharePoint templates available that can help. These include both SharePoint site templates and SharePoint page templates, each designed to support different intranet needs — from news and onboarding to directories and campaigns.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining an existing setup, SharePoint intranet templates give you a strong foundation, saving time, improving consistency, and helping content creators focus on what really matters. In this post, we’re going to:
explain what SharePoint templates are
explore the value of using SharePoint site and page templates in your intranet
share 10 of our favourite SharePoint intranet templates, all built using Lightspeed365
What is a SharePoint intranet template?
A SharePoint template is essentially a pre-determined SharePoint layout for a page or site that can be used as the starting point for creating a part of your page or site on your intranet.
SharePoint templates come in two main types:
SharePoint site templates that provide a shape of an overall site (a collection of pages that sit within your broader intranet)
SharePoint page templates that deliver a specific SharePoint page design.
There are a number of different SharePoint templates that can be deployed directly from Microsoft, which are explored in the Microsoft SharePoint lookbook. However, you can also create your own SharePoint intranet design templates to use internally within your organisation, for example, across your publishing or content creator community.
SharePoint site template examples
SharePoint intranet homepage site template
SharePoint employee engagement campaign site template
SharePoint knowledge base site template
SharePoint employee onboarding site template
SharePoint employee benefits site template
SharePoint intranet homepage site template
Make your intranet homepage a place employees return to—not just land on
Built with Lightspeed365: a dynamic, personalised homepage that brings news, tools, and updates together—without custom development.
The main homepage of an intranet is arguably the most important. It needs to provide the right blend of features and content that is appropriate for the organisation, but also for the employees. This normally means a mixture of content types and links, ideally tailored to the needs and interests of different employee groups and types. Additional personalisation options give additional control to the employees.
SharePoint employee engagement campaign site template
Spark real involvement, not just awareness
Built with Lightspeed365: launch campaign pages that actually get noticed. Add eye-catching layouts, social feeds, and targeted updates—all without relying on IT.
Intranets are the ideal place to launch and keep employees updated on company initiatives. These can range from innovation drives to embedding brand values or peer recognition. The aim is to create engaging pages full of content, discussions and ideas that will engage your people and make them feel that they are part of the initiative.
If no one sees the campaign, it never happened. Lightspeed365 helps your message cut through—visually, socially, and fast.
SharePoint knowledge base site template
Give employees fast, confident answers - without the email back-and-forth
Built with Lightspeed365: your single source of truth—visually clear, easy to navigate, and ready to go live in days.
Intranets are go-to places to access knowledge, establishing a single source of the truth. The Knowledge base SharePoint site template is an excellent way to present a collection of knowledge, such as a policy library, a list of “how do I” pages or even brand assets. While the top section provides details and context about the collection and also can highlight specific items within it, it’s the A-to-Z listing and search facility which often provides the most value.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
This SharePoint page template is flexible and it can present any collection of knowledge or controlled documents; it is useful for any function that needs to provide a set of resources that employees need to reference.
The scoped search and browse facility provides strong findability, so it is very useful in connecting employees to the resources they need.
Content owners love this SharePoint template because it allows them to easily present a collection of resources in a user-friendly way.
When employees waste time hunting for answers, your productivity dips. Lightspeed365 puts key info where people can actually find it.
SharePoint employee on-boarding site template
Give new starters everything they need to feel informed, welcomed, and ready to go.
Built with Lightspeed365: a warm, structured onboarding experience. No emails, no confusion, just everything in one place.
When new employees start working at an organisation, they often have a lot of questions about the way the organisation works, how it is structured and how to navigate its various knowledge areas. An onboarding area on the intranet is the ideal place for them to orient themselves and get answers to questions quickly. They can also be guided through common onboarding activities like registering for employee benefits and completing mandatory training.
First impressions matter. This template helps you make onboarding feel like a win - for new hires and comms teams alike.
SharePoint employee benefits site template
Turn your intranet into the go-to place for perks, support, and career growth
Built with Lightspeed365: an employee benefits hub that’s clear, inviting, and always up to date.
Employee benefits are typically of great interest to your people, so laying them out clearly on the intranet is a great way to add value to the platform and ensure you have frequent visitors. In some organisations, the benefits are financial or health-related, but others include career development opportunities.
If it’s buried in HR documents, no one’s using it. This benefits hub gets the visibility, and traffic, it deserves.
What about SharePoint page templates for your intranet?
SharePoint page templates are a little different to site templates, in that they are designed to be a single page and not a homepage of a site/section. Typically, they are found lower down in the information architecture/hierarchy.
Lightspeed365 allows you to create beautiful, flexible and high-value SharePoint pages (and therefore accompanying SharePoint templates!) that really do make a difference.
Below, we share six essential SharePoint page templates for an intranet. Note that these templates include both out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts, but also some Lightspeed365 features:
News article SharePoint page template
‘How do I?’ guide SharePoint page template
Department or location SharePoint page template
Employee directory SharePoint page template
Triage SharePoint page template
News article SharePoint page template
Make your stories unmissable—with layouts designed to engage, not just inform.
Internal communications is one of the fundamental jobs of an intranet. A news page will inevitably be one of the most used SharePoint page templates, helping to deliver and elevate news stories for your employees.
Built with Lightspeed365: news pages that look polished, drive clicks, and feel as professional as your external comms.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
Brings consistency to news items across different areas of the intranet, encouraging familiarity, engagement and adoption.
Encourages the use of headlines to break up a story, helping make it more digestible and supporting clarity of message.
Provides flexibility to add elements such as images and quotes to make a news item more inviting and engaging.
Ultimately, this SharePoint template will encourage views and increase the impact and success of news items, in turn supporting wider internal communications goals and employee engagement objectives.
You worked hard on the message - don’t let the page design let it down.
'How do I?’ guide SharePoint page template
Cut down questions. Speed up action. Keep everyone moving in the right direction.
The How Do I SharePoint template provides instructions for employees on how to complete a task and get things done. A task can be simple or have multiple steps. Typically, the How Do I template is used to explain simple tasks, such as how to log an IT support ticket or claim expenses, or something more complex like applying for paternity leave.
Built with Lightspeed365: clear, step-by-step guides your people will actually use—instead of emailing HR or IT.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
This SharePoint intranet template makes it easy for employees to follow each of the steps in completing a task and adds further detail with embedded documents, process diagrams and even forms to trigger workflow.
The template layout also includes a prominent contact display for users to get in touch if they have questions about the task or process.
Ultimately, this SharePoint design template helps employees to get things done quickly and efficiently, in turn supporting productivity and encouraging standardisation in terms of processes.
It also saves time for IT, HR and other internal helpdesks, meaning employees don’t need to contact them asking how to achieve a task.
When people don’t know how to do something, they do nothing, do it wrong or send another email. This page solves that.
Department or location SharePoint page template
Pages that connect, inform, and stay consistent.
Most intranets have information about different departments or locations, particularly in large, global and complex businesses. This department or location SharePoint template provides information and news about a particular department, function, region, country or office and can either be aimed at people based in that department/location, or the rest of the business and be about that department/location. (It’s usually not best to mix both these use cases.)
Built with Lightspeed365: give every department or location a polished and up-to-date home, without chasing every content owner.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
This versatile SharePoint page template provides useful targeted information about amenities and travel for both people located at a particular office or site, or those wanting to travel to it.
The template tends to provide a route to more detailed pages or sections, but can also provide news as well as links. It also includes key contacts at a particular location.
Because it is a template, it encourages and provides a consistent and complete set of information for each location, which is invariably extremely useful.
This SharePoint template has multiple benefits – helping support people who visit a site less frequently (more common in the age of hybrid working), supporting efficiency and productivity, and encouraging connections regardless of geography.
Consistency matters. This template helps every department and region present clear, reliable info—without reinventing the wheel.
Employee directory SharePoint page template
Help employees find the right person fast. Build connection and cut the wasted guesswork.
Intranets often help connect people to each other. The employee directory SharePoint template is an attractive and useful way to introduce members of a team or department to a wider audience, helping to encourage the right person to contact.
Built with Lightspeed365: a searchable, filterable people directory that makes connecting with colleagues easy—even in large or hybrid teams.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
This SharePoint template ensures people can view team details divided appropriately into different areas with contact details prominent, as well as the ability to click through to individual profiles.
The search box supports findability, while additional links to other resources to the right also provide additional context about the team.
The people directory template could be part of a wider SharePoint site template for a department, team or location page or areas.
This flexible SharePoint design page template helps to encourage connection across an organisation, but also establishes the right person to contact, helping people get things done and waste less time.
When people can’t find the right contact, work slows down. This template makes your org chart usable.
Triage SharePoint page template
Guide employees to the right content—without overwhelming them.
The Triage SharePoint page template provides a high-value design for your intranet. Some pages act as places to guide users to other important pieces of content based on their needs. The Triage template presents options on different pages in an attractive way, with images for each resource. These can then be arranged under different headings.
Built with Lightspeed365: turn complex information into clear next steps.
What value does this SharePoint template bring?
The Triage SharePoint design template is very versatile and can be used for initiatives, information resources on areas such as strategy, service hubs for HR or IT and more.
It provides a consistent and attractive way to guide users toward the resources they need, bringing structure and clarity to intranet content, while also increasing findability.
The SharePoint template not only helps employees find what they need, but also encourages content owners to think about content structure and how they can satisfy common user needs and support user journeys.
At the bottom of the page, there is an opportunity to place an option for people who haven’t found what they are looking for.
Clarity beats clutter. This template helps you steer people to the right place - without making them guess.
What are the benefits of SharePoint site templates and SharePoint page templates?
SharePoint templates deliver value in a number of different ways.
Saving time
A SharePoint site template provides a significant starting point for creating a page or site, providing the right layout and web parts which can then be edited as appropriate. This can save large amounts of time and support the productivity of busy site editors and authors.
Inspiring ideas
SharePoint’s flexibility is a strength. However, having that much creativity can mean it is hard to know just exactly where to start, particularly for less experienced publishers. SharePoint templates provide an excellent source of inspiration for both seasoned intranet professionals and less confident users to achieve the ideal SharePoint layout.
Supporting your publishers
Using SharePoint intranet templates helps do some of the heavy lifting around SharePoint page design for your site admins, publishers and content creators who may not be professional communicators and are infrequent users of SharePoint. It gives them a starting point that also reflects your publishing standards and best practices.
Establishing consistency and content standards
Using SharePoint intranet templates helps to enforce publishing and content standards across your intranet, establishing consistency in the look and feel and ensuring everything is on-brand. It also provides consistency in layout across different sites and content types, making it easier for users to find what they are looking for on a particular page.
Make the best use of Lightspeed365 features
Many of our Lightspeed365 features increase the usability of native SharePoint, while also extending design and brand options. Many of the Lightspeed365 features have also been designed around key use cases. Using the right SharePoint intranet templates will ensure you’re making the best use of Lightspeed365’s rich library of additional web parts.
SharePoint homepage templates for your intranet
The most important page on your SharePoint intranet is the homepage. SharePoint intranet homepage templates can make a real difference in driving adoption and value. As these kinds of SharePoint templates can support intranet success, we’ve created a separate article with seven great SharePoint intranet site examples. This article includes several SharePoint homepage templates for your intranet – from the “balanced intranet homepage” to the “social hub intranet homepage.”
The power of the SharePoint templates
SharePoint page templates and SharePoint site templates help to ensure your site is consistent, on-brand, attractive, usable and accessible. If you want to see how you can use Lightspeed365 features in combination with SharePoint templates, then why not book a demo?
As an Internal Comms Manager, there’s nothing worse than pouring effort into your SharePoint intranet only to find no one’s reading the news or engaging with the tools you provide. You’re not alone.
Intranet adoption has long been a preoccupation of intranet teams who spend both time and effort in improving adoption. It’s often said that adoption is not necessarily a good measure of the impact or value of a SharePoint intranet. This is true up to a point, but adoption is important in helping to deliver and sustain the value of an intranet.
An intranet with good adoption means more internal communications with greater reach. It means more employees enjoying the productivity gains an intranet supports. Good adoption is also not just about the numbers of people using an intranet – it’s also about the way it is used. Conversely, an intranet with low adoption is in danger of not being taken seriously and is usually an indication of underlying issues.
There is no single magic ingredient to increasing intranet adoption. Usually, intranet teams need to focus on a range of activities and tactics, most of which are a reflection of the fundamentals of good intranet management covering areas such as governance. In this post we explore ten ways to improve adoption which almost always work.
What is intranet adoption?
Intranet adoption can be regarded as the level and pattern of usage of your intranet. It refers to not only the numbers and proportion of users that are interacting and engaging with your intranet and its content, but also the way they are using it.
Adoption covers areas such as number of visits, views of content, uptake of features, reactions to content, contributions of user-generated content and more. Good adoption is not just about maximising the numbers, but also ensuring the intranet is being used in a way that generates value.
Why is intranet adoption so important?
Up to 75% of employees report disengagement due to underperforming intranets.
Intranet teams often focus on adoption because generally the more people are using the intranet, then the more value it can generate in terms of supporting internal communications, delivering efficiencies, driving productivity, minimising risk and underpinning key organisational processes. Generally, if there is low adoption is usually means people are using email for communicating or adoption other systems, which may be less efficient and effective.
Intranet teams will also be keen to show adoption to show the success of the team and argue the business case for further investment.
Ten ways to improve intranet adoption
Let’s explore some of the ways that intranet teams can improve intranet usage.
Ensure the intranet helps employees to get things done
Intranets deliver a range of different capabilities and support a number of core processes, such as internal communications. News and messaging are an extremely important part of any intranet, but the real reason most employees visit an intranet is to be able to complete tasks and get things done. Getting the right balance between news content and reference content is essential to underpin adoption. There are several ways to ensure this happens:
Provide essential “how to” reference content on the intranet
Include easy access with links through to applications (see below for more on this)
Use specific integrations that help employees complete common tasks
Highlight these features and content on the homepage and in your navigation.
By making the intranet the essential place where employees get things done, you’ll not only drive good adoption but also increase the views of news too.
Lightspeed365 templates and integrations help you build action-oriented homepages, with launchers, how-to panels, and embedded tasks—no custom coding required.
Ensure the content is purposeful and up to date
The success of an intranet and its level of adoption will depend very much on its content. If employees regard content as not useful, neither authoritative nor up to date, then adoption will generally suffer. Most unsuccessful intranets have way too much out of date content that clogs up the search and generally erodes trust in the intranet as a useful and authoritative channel; many intranets that get replaced have reached this state.
Applying content governance to ensure that content has purpose, is up to date, findable and meets defined publication standards helps to support adoption. There are multiple ways to achieve this, including establishing clear ownership for each piece of content, using automation and workflow to ensure regular reviews of content, and establishing SharePoint intranet templates that help content owners create excellent pages.
Lightspeed365 gives content owners tools like pre-built templates, search tools, and usage analytics—making it easier for non-technical contributors to keep content fresh.
Avoid site sprawl
Another key aspect of intranet governance that supports good adoption is avoiding site sprawl. When you get too many pages and sites, an intranet gets cluttered and the experience can degrade rapidly with duplication of content, incomplete areas and more. Site sprawl that happens outside the intranet estate in terms of additional SharePoint sites or Team spaces that end up duplicating or being used for content sharing which should be on the intranet, also undermines intranet value.
The best way to avoid site sprawl is to have control over the site provisioning process so approval is required for any new site to avoid duplication or misuse. The Lightspeed365 Site Provisioning feature is an excellent way to avoid site sprawl, providing approval workflow and the automatic creation of any SharePoint site or intranet area, Teams space or Viva Engage group, as appropriate.
Site sprawl kills intranet usability. Lightspeed365 stops this at the source, with approval workflows that ensure every site or area has a clear purpose and owner.
Make your intranet accessible through Microsoft Teams
In Microsoft 365-powered digital workplaces, many employees spend much of their time working in Microsoft Teams. Making the intranet available through Teams where employees spend their working day is not only convenient for users but also helps drive adoption.
Making your intranet accessible through Teams can be carried out using Viva Connections. Even better, use the Lightspeed365 feature that helps you create a branded intranet app that sits within your Teams toolbar. If you’re using the Viva Connections dashboard, we also have custom cards that can integrate other platforms to support task completion.
Your users already live in Teams. With Lightspeed365, your intranet lives there too—branded, visible, and accessible in one click.
Make everything findable
One of the most common complaints about an intranet is that users cannot find anything or the search is not up to scratch. Having a strong search experience where people can find what they need quickly will drive trust in the intranet and support higher usage and adoption.
Improving search and making everything more findable usually involves multiple tactics from increased content governance to using metadata to improve search results and filtering options. Lightspeed365 features also actively supports better findability and an improved search experience, for example through:
A powerful people search and accompanying people directory
A popular “floating search” web part with attractive design options that can deploy a scoped search on any part of page
A site index that provides an invaluable directory of collaboration spaces.
Lightspeed365 makes finding people easy – by name, department, skill and more.
Use personalisation to drive relevance
Workforces in most organisations are highly diverse. They have different needs in terms of the content they that need and want to see. A modern intranet should always deliver a personalised experience, so content is relevant and valuable; personalisation is now a cornerstone for having decent intranet adoption. SharePoint’s ability to use Entra ID data and leverage Microsoft 365 groups provides many opportunities to drive a more personalised experience to ensure good adoption.
Lightspeed365 features can also enhance a more personalised experience to support adoption, for example by providing subscription options so users can subscribe to the updates that they want to view. The Welcome bar feature also delivers a friendly personalised message to a user and includes useful contextual extras such as the local weather forecast.
Why show everyone everything? Lightspeed365 lets users subscribe to the content they care about—meaning fewer ‘I didn’t see that’ complaints.
Drive a programme of continual improvement
Improving intranet adoption is often based on a programme of continual improvement with a series of iterative changes and enhancements spread over the year. When employees can see and sense that an intranet keeps on getting better and better, then they will continue to want to use it, especially if it is meeting their emerging needs.
SharePoint lends itself to a programme of continual improvement because it is modular in terms of it being easy to add a new content area, feature or integration. Lightspeed365 also supports continual improvement in a number of ways, including offering a new wide set of additional features (web parts) to continue to improve the intranet. The feedback feature also makes it easy for teams to gather input from users in order to identity and prioritise specific improvements.
Lightspeed365’s modular webparts and built-in feedback tools mean you can evolve your intranet every quarter without going back to IT.
Make the intranet homepage a personalised app launcher
One popular use of the intranet that almost always drives adoption is allowing the intranet to provide personalised bookmarks to key tools and applications, making it the entry point into the wider digital workplace. Believe us, making the intranet homepage a personalised app launcher really does work in driving adoption! Surprisingly, the ability to do this properly in SharePoint out of the box is missing.
Using the Lightspeed365 app launcher feature provides a convenient interface for employees to access the tools, apps and links they use every day. Users can personalise the apps they see, but intranet teams can also mandate certain apps to be included too.
Imagine an intranet homepage that knows what each employee needs to access and surfaces it instantly. That’s what Lightspeed365 delivers.
Ensure the site is modern, eye-catching and easy to use
Intranet design is another important component of successful intranet adoption. Having a clean, modern and uncluttered design that is attractive but also ensures the intranet is easy to use is much more likely to get employees to come and use it. An intranet that is overwhelming, confusing and looks out of date is simply less likely to attract users, even if the content is useful. An intranet also must be accessible to those with disabilities – up to one in four employees can have disabilities, some of which are not always visible.
Ensuring there is a good design which also aligns with your corporate branding and is accessible is not always easy to achieve. Modern SharePoint is quite effective but it not enough; there are compromises you make in terms brand alignment, user experience and accessibility. We designed Lightspeed365 to bridge those gaps in SharePoint with a range of different features that ensure your intranet looks great, is accessible and better aligns with your corporate brand in order to sustain strong adoption. These features include:
The accordion, helping to improve the layout of different pages.
The Section+, enabling to use enhanced imagery as background to create eye-catching pages.
Branding tools, to extend your range of styling options to stay on-brand and even support sub-brands.
Accessibility tools to drive usability and underpin inclusivity.
And more!
Align every intranet page with your brand—even sub-brands. Lightspeed365 extends SharePoint’s styling options and improves accessibility out of the box.
Keep on working on adoption
Achieving good intranet adoption is never a given and is often an ongoing process. Creating the foundations of a powerful intranet provides the opportunity to drive excellent levels of adoption and value, but you still need to keep up the effort and let people know about the intranet and its benefits.
There are multiple ways to do this including ongoing change management and communications, leveraging local champions to act as ambassadors, using competitions and initiatives to invite participation, and ensuring intranet use and awareness is part of onboarding for new employees. Using these techniques should help you to improve and sustain great adoption on your SharePoint intranet.
Improving SharePoint intranet adoption
Improving the adoption of your intranet requires a lot of different tactics. We’ve covered some of the major ones in this article, so give them a try! An intranet solution such as Lightspeed365 can also make a significant difference in driving adoption. Why not arrange a free demo to see how it can help?
Lightspeed365 was built to solve these exact challenges—boosting SharePoint intranet adoption by making it more engaging, usable, and manageable.
SharePoint is an amazing platform that is both very flexible and scalable and can help your organisation and employees achieve multiple goals, including delivering a strong intranet. However, SharePoint can also be complicated, and its sheer versatility and flexibility means that it is easy to fall into traps that mean you’re not using SharePoint to its full potential.
In this post we’re going to explore twelve SharePoint best practices that help you get the best value out of SharePoint, particularly in terms of using it as an intranet. Of course, there are many other SharePoint best practices to follow, and some will be more relevant to particular organisations. Note that in this article we’re following more best practices on the business side of using SharePoint rather than the technical side.
Twelve SharePoint best practices for 2025
Here’s our view of 12 key SharePoint best practices to follow!
Brand your SharePoint site or intranet to your organisational needs
Many SharePoint sites look similar with a relatively standard look and feel. However, a SharePoint intranet sometimes doesn’t meet the full branding requirements that organisations need or expect. In our view, a SharePoint intranet and its sites are important sources of information, and a central intranet team should be able to brand them how they want.
A SharePoint intranet is an official corporate channel so internal communications or the core intranet team might want to:
emphasise this by applying appropriate corporate branding
provide a particular look and feel to ensure there is a continuity of experience across other digital channels
apply different designs to a number of sites in more complex organisations that cover a range of brands, so there are effectively a number of separate intranets or sub-sites.
SharePoint comes with some flexibility on branding, with options increasing with the release of the “SharePoint brand center” functionality. Using templates from the SharePoint lookbook can also help teams to explore the art of the possible with design.
If branding flexibility is still not quite to your needs or is difficult to implement, using Lightspeed365’s popular Branding customiser feature provides a simple way to customise your SharePoint design and theme options by extending what you can do with your corporate font and colour palette. Many of the other Lightspeed365 features also have configurable design options that extend beyond what can be achieved out of the box.
Integrate SharePoint with other Microsoft 365 tools
One of the most powerful aspects of SharePoint is its seamless integration with other tools across the Microsoft 365 suite. This means you can access data and interact with tools through web parts without having to leave SharePoint. For an intranet, this has several advantages in:
Providing a more integrated, consistent and frictionless digital employee experience.
Helping employees to get things done more quickly.
Encouraging better adoption of Microsoft 365 tools.
Increasing the ROI of Microsoft 365.
In particular, just using web parts that are out of box you can embed:
Viva Engage conversations.
Viva Connections feed and dashboard.
Group calendars.
Microsoft Forms.
Microsoft PowerApps with custom functionality created within your organisation.
Power BI reports
Stream (Classic) videos.
Make your SharePoint intranet feel less corporate and more personal
Many organisations have SharePoint intranets that aim to be an essential resource to help employees get things done, stay informed. find what they need and feel engaged. However, many SharePoint intranets can feel too corporate and formal, which can ultimately impact adoption and value.
There are lots of ways to make your SharePoint intranet less corporate and more personal, helping to support engagement and adoption. For example:
Using imagery which shows real photos of your employees (with their consent), rather than bland stock photography or silly AI-generated pictures.
Having a feed of people-centred stories that feature inspiring and positive stories about employees both in and outside work.
Surfacing user-generated content on the homepage, for example using a Viva Engage web part that surfaces discussions and conversations – this is available out of the box with SharePoint.
Adding a personalised greeting to the intranet homepage that names the user accessing the intranet, not only making the homepage feel more welcome, but also reminding users it is a personalised experience – this is available with Lightspeed365.
Adding personalisation to the homepage not only so content is targeted and relevant to the individual but also features such as the ability to add personalised links to tools (again available with Lightspeed365).
Make your SharePoint intranet available through Microsoft Teams
Today many employees spend much of their working day in and out of Microsoft Teams. It’s the place they communicate, collaborate, access documents and more. It also makes sense for your SharePoint intranet to be available within Microsoft Teams – not only is this convenient for users, but it is also helps bring the intranet into the flow of work and supports adoption.
Given the ubiquity of Teams, it’s surprising that not all organisations choose to make their SharePoint intranets available within Teams. The usual way to achieve this is through using Viva Connections which is included in subscriptions. There are also additional ways that intranet content can be surfaced within Teams, for example through the Viva Connections dashboard.
Put SharePoint site approval processes in place to avoid site sprawl
SharePoint site sprawl is a major issue for many organisations. Because it is so easy to create a SharePoint communication or team site, inevitably:
many sites get set up and then don’t ever get used
get abandoned after limited use or a site owner leaves
are duplicates of sites already set up that have similar aims already set up.
The result of this is far too many SharePoint sites that take up more space, are hard for admins and IT teams to manage, cause confusion for users and makes it difficult for users to search for what they need. A similar process happens with the creation of Microsoft Teams spaces and Viva Engage groups.
A good practice is to ensure there is a proper approval process in place for creating a new SharePoint site. The request can then get reviewed to ensure the space is being set up for the right purpose, is not a duplicate and has proper ownership.
This is not available out of the box with SharePoint and is best done through using a request form with approval workflow which can be sent to the right people. With Lightspeed365 there is also a powerful site provisioning feature which has a form which guides the requestor through the right type of site to request (SharePoint, Teams or Viva Engage) and then triggers the necessary approval workflow and then even automatic site provisioning, making the entire process far more efficient.
Reduce the need for SharePoint customisation through configuration or alternative web parts
SharePoint is an exceptionally flexible platform where you can build multiple different sites and pages that support communication, collaboration, business processes and more. This is partly down to the numerous web parts that can be arranged on every single page. Despite its enormous flexibility and scalability, sometimes SharePoint or one of its constituent web parts doesn’t quite do what organisations want, in terms of the way it looks, or what it can deliver. There may also be some missing functionality in terms of what is available out of the box; this is certainly the case, including some popular features of modern intranets.
When this happens, there can be a temptation to use customisation to tweak an existing web part or build a new one from scratch. Most IT functions try to avoid customisation as far as possible because it is costly and also creates technical debt; it can become increasingly complicated with upgrades.
One good practice with SharePoint for organisations who want to avoid customisation is to look to other options to deliver what they need:
Many of SharePoint’s web parts are surprisingly configurable and some very versatile, and there are always options to explore here, so it’s always important to see if configuration provides an alternative path.
SharePoint’s wide set of native features, variety of options and seamless integration with other Microsoft 365 tools means there is often more than one way to achieve the same result – for example SharePoint Lists are remarkable versatile, so turning to alternative web part options may be answer.
There are a variety of different products that can integrate seamlessly into SharePoint that can bridge the gaps and provide the extra design or functionality a business needs, avoiding the need for customisation or development. This is exactly what Lightspeed365 delivers – a rich set of additional web parts and features that fill all the main gaps within SharePoint to give you the ability to deliver a world-class intranet, that are also maintained by the Lightspeed365 team.
Investigating all three of these options can reduce the need for costly customisation that you may regret later down the line.
Plan for effective SharePoint site lifecycle management
As well as putting in a SharePoint approval process in place you also need to have effective ongoing lifecycle management in place to prevent site sprawl and avoid a cluttered SharePoint environment.
This can be achieved in several ways, including:
Establishing clear policies for when SharePoint sites or pages need to be retired, archived, or removed, ensuring that content owners understand and agree to these criteria.
Ensure your policies are aligned with any security, regulatory or legal obligations, for example how long you need to keep data.
Review usage at regular intervals to identify abandoned or redundant sites or pages.
Where possible automate reporting to help monitor your environment.
Ensure there are named owners for each site who understand their commitment to keeping their SharePoint pages up to date.
If a site or page owner leaves the organization or moves to a new role, always appoint a replacement owner – not doing this is a key reason for why sites get abandoned.
Keeping site sprawl under control helps to ensure you can maintain good findability across your SharePoint environment.
Define the right metadata strategy
Good findability is essential for any intranet and SharePoint environment. However, it is often an area where many teams struggle, resulting in employees complaining that they can’t find the items they need.
There are multiple elements that contribute to strong findability including a good navigation, effective governance to reduce site sprawl, content management practices so that content is up to date, and more.
Having an effective metadata strategy is also critical and underpins findability. This involves:
Defining the metadata that needs to be associated with an item covering areas such as content type, owner, any associated groups or divisions within your organisation, project and so on.
Using the right custom terms (through SharePoint managed properties) for each type of data, helping to support filtering within search.
Matching terms to organisational taxonomies where appropriate.
Defining which metadata should be mandatory and non-mandatory.
Using automation where feasible to define and add metadata, for example automatically tagging an item with a division or function name based on the person creating the item.
Following all these can help to improve search and also encourages good information management.
Work to improve SharePoint search
SharePoint’s search capabilities are powerful, but there is always room for improvement. A best practice is to actively work to improve search by having an intentional process in place that seeks to make incremental improvements based on data.
Improving SharePoint search needs a muti-pronged approach taking in elements such as:
Reviewing search analytics to make informed decisions and to target improvements,
Revisiting the use of metadata and SharePoint managed properties to improve search performance and enable custom filters
Enforcing site and content governance to reduce unnecessary noise in search
Getting user feedback on search to identify particular issues
Depending on the products you use, there may also be improvements you can make to the SharePoint search experience by introducing new features. For example, within Lightspeed365 additional search and findability features include:
A flexible, floating search facility that can be placed anywhere on any page and configured to search particular content.
A powerful people search that makes finding people easy via multiple criteria including name, department and skills.
A versatile Site Index feature that provides a searchable index of collaboration spaces covering Teams, Viva Engage and more.
Ensure strong governance around SharePoint external collaboration to prevent oversharing
One of the most valuable elements of SharePoint beyond the use for an intranet is the ability to use it for external collaboration. This can be exceptionally useful when working with third parties on projects.
However. external collaboration does come with some risks in staff inadvertently oversharing sensitive documents and information beyond the firewall. You also want to ensure that people with external access have robust security in place. For all these reasons, organisations in regulated industries sometimes disable external collaboration.
If you are using external collaboration, then it is good practice to have robust governance in place:
Limit external collaboration to only where it is needed.
Have a strict approval process in place to enable it on a particular SharePoint site.
Insist that those accessing information have multi-factor authentication turned on.
Regularly review guest access to mitigate against the risk of content being overshared.
Ensure that any SharePoint sites with external access are clearly identified to users to lessen the risk of oversharing
Use sensitivity labels on SharePoint items again to reduce oversharing.
Use platforms like Microsoft Purview to support governance over external collaboration.
Use feedback and data to drive continual improvement of your SharePoint intranet
An intranet is never done. Every intranet manager will tell you that there are always improvements and changes to make. One of the advantages of a SharePoint intranet is that it is highly flexible so you can keep on making incremental changes that result in a process of continual improvement.
The best way to drive continual improvement is through a data-driven approach that is informed by user feedback and analytics. Knowing what works and what’s doesn’t is critical to make the right real-world decisions to improve SharePoint. You can:
Use SharePoint analytics and other data from packages like Microsoft Clarity, or any other analytics package.
Gain data from user testing.
Get complementary data from other areas such as IT help desk calls.
Create a feedback form on the intranet for users to make suggestions and request improvements.
Get focused feedback from groups of users and stakeholders, for example through workshops or in more focused testing.
Use surveys to gain wider input from the business.
Work with local champions to provide feedback from their relevant sections of the business.
And more!
Leverage digital and intranet champions to launch and improve a SharePoint intranet
Intranets and digital workplaces tend to be managed by small central teams. This can make rolling out new features to a large workforce challenging. A great SharePoint best practice is to use a network of voluntary digital or intranet champions from right across the organisation to:
Promote a SharePoint intranet and any ongoing improvements to their local office, team or function, with the additional context of how that local area works.
Answer any questions from local users and stakeholders.
Provide ongoing feedback from local users back to the central team helping drive improvement
Participate in user testing.
And more!
Using digital champions is particularly important in launching a new intranet but can also continue to be of high value after launch and beyond.
Following SharePoint best practices
SharePoint is highly flexible – you can do so much with it. Follow these best practices to help drive business value and adoption, achieve an excellent intranet, and set yourself up for longer-term success. If you’d like to discuss any of these SharePoint best practices or any others, and the contribution that Lightspeed365 can make, then get in touch!
Modern SharePoint is an extremely flexible tool that can meet multiple use cases to support communication and collaboration inside an organisation. This means intranet teams and site owners have a lot of choice in how they structure and design individual sites and pages.
Recognising this, Microsoft has created the SharePoint Lookbook, a collection of site templates and designs that can be viewed and then actually deployed on to your SharePoint tenant. The Lookbook is an extremely useful resource that both provides inspiration and a way to give teams a head start in setting up a site.
The Lookbook can help you get the best out of SharePoint, although sometimes this is still not enough for teams who want more flexibility and control over how their site looks in order for it to be fully compliant.
In this post we’re going to explore what the SharePoint Lookbook is, why it is useful, the kind of templates it contains, what to consider when using it, and how to use the Lookbook in conjunction with Lightspeed365 features.
How is SharePoint so flexible?
One of the strengths of SharePoint is its flexibility and versatility to support multiple use cases, usually as part of a wider intranet. A strategy page for leadership communications, a departmental site for the sales function, a site for onboarding employees, a place for your volunteering community to come together. All these and more can be achieved using modern SharePoint.
One of the reasons for this flexibility is the ability to add, arrange and configure multiple web parts – the basic “building blocks” of SharePoint – on any given site and page. This means you can have multiple combinations on a page to create different experiences that meet various needs. It also gives intranet teams and individual site owners a lot of choice in how they design and structure individual sites, which are either standalone or sit within a wider intranet structure.
This flexibility can leave some teams wondering what the best structure and design is for their site. This is where the SharePoint Lookbook can act as a useful resource for both reference and deployment.
What is the SharePoint Lookbook?
The SharePoint Lookbook is a publicly available site provided by Microsoft that can be reached at https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-look-book/. As Microsoft itself describes it, it provides an opportunity to “create beautiful, fast sites and pages” and “get inspired with these designs or add them to your tenant to start building your next stunning site with them.”
What’s in the SharePoint Lookbook?
Within the Lookbook there is a:
A gallery of SharePoint templates covering major use cases and scenarios.
Information about the design of each template including site features, web parts used, and content included.
A call to action for administrators with the correct permissions to deploy a Lookbook template to their tenant.
Which communication site templates are available in the SharePoint Lookbook?
The SharePoint Lookbook has downloadable templates that cover both communication and team sites. The following use cases are covered for communication sites:
Brand Central (brand assets)
Crisis management
Department
Event
Human resources (HR information)
Leadership connection
Learning central
New employee onboarding
Organisation home (cross over with intranet homepage)
Showcase (for a product, event etc.)
Standard communication
Volunteer centre.
Which team site templates for collaboration are available in the SharePoint Lookbook?
There are also several team site templates that cover some useful collaboration scenarios:
Event planning
IT Help Desk
Project management
Retail management team
Training course
Training design team.
You will almost certainly find some templates more useful than others, depending on your needs. But they all provide a starting point and also a great way to kickstart a few ideas.
What are the benefits of using a SharePoint Lookbook template?
Using templates from the SharePoint Lookbook has a number of benefits:
Providing inspiration: The Lookbook provides tangible and achievable examples of site designs across multiple use cases and scenarios; it’s a great starting point to stimulate ideas.
Increasing speed to market: Site owners can get a huge head start in providing a template that can be deployed in minutes and then modified to suit your needs, reducing the time needed to get a site up and running.
Supporting new and busy site owners: Some site owners who are not trained communicators can lack confidence in using SharePoint or can be very time-stretched; the head start provided by a Lookbook theme provides confidence and resourcing.
Encouraging good use cases and adoption: Lookbook templates reflect good practices and showcase the best of what SharePoint has to offer; this can help encourage good use of SharePoint, in turn leading to good adoption and high value use cases.
No costs involved: The use of the SharePoint Lookbook is completely free so does not come at any additional cost on top of your normal Microsoft 365 subscription.
Four challenges associated with using SharePoint Lookbook templates
However, there are some considerations in using the SharePoint Lookbook and its templates.
1.A template is not a finished site
A Lookbook template is not going to be complete. It will likely need more work on it to truly optimise it to meet a particular business need within your organisation. For example, it might be missing a particular web part. However, site owners might consider a site “complete” because it is a Microsoft template and therefore reflecting best practices. It is likely that content owners still need additional guidance and support from the central intranet or communications team to complete a site.
2.Still needs to fit in with your Information Architecture and security
A deployed template site also needs to fit into your existing Information Architecture and align with your security policies, so any site generated from the Lookbook will need further configuration.
3.A template might bypass governance processes
Many intranet, communication and digital workplace teams want to establish governance about the use of SharePoint sites to deliver business value, minimise duplication, ensure adherence to standards and support alignment with a content strategy.
Automatically deploying a template on your tenant could bypass provisioning and other governance processes, particularly if your IT function carries out SharePoint administration duties but has a different view on site creation to the intranet team. For example, it can encourage the creation of a lot of standalone sites that lead to site sprawl and associated problems such as poor findability.
4.Not aligning with custom branding
Some organisations want to establish specific designs for their digital workplace or intranet that better align with their brand standards. In these cases, the SharePoint Lookbook templates may not align with the look and feel that the brand team are after. In these cases, an organisation may choose to deploy custom branding or use a product like Lightspeed 365 that provides more control over the look and feel of SharePoint. Some organisations may even need to introduce custom branding across multiple sub-brands.
How Lightspeed 365 features extend the power of SharePoint
Lightspeed365 features are designed to complement SharePoint and extend its ROI. You get access to a whole additional library of features (web parts) that:
Complete some of the inherent and frustrating gaps in SharePoint that you need to deliver a world-class intranet or communication hub.
Provides more flexibility in the look and feel so you can actually align with your brand standards – even across multiple sub-brands if required.
Delivers additional control and governance required to support a global intranet.
Can I use the SharePoint Lookbook with Lightspeed 365?
The answer is yes! Because Lightspeed365 extends the power of SharePoint, it can also extend the power of the SharePoint templates in the Lookbook but help you overcome some of key challenges around brand flexibility and template governance.
How can I extend the power of Lookbook templates?
Lightspeed365 can extend the power of Lookbook templates in a number of ways.
Providing branding tools to support brand flexibility
Our branding tools allow teams to deploy customer brand elements including colours and fonts, while specifying where these should be applied. Teams can define a main corporate brand and multiple sub-brands and themes if they wish, not only to align with your brand portfolio, but even to identify different sections of your intranet, for example.
Develop your own templates
Lightspeed365 allows you to create your own page templates – albeit with much greater flexibility than the Lookbook. In creating these you could leverage a Lookbook template as the starting point and then add more Lightspeed365 features to get the exact look and feel you want. You can also use some of Lightspeed365’s own site templates that come bundled with the product for popular use cases such as community or project sites.
In creating your own templates, you can use the extended, combined library of SharePoint and Lightspeed365 web parts to create a range of modern and striking designs.
Greater control
Using Lightspeed365 templates also enables you to execute stronger control to ensure different areas of the site inherent the right theme rather than allowing different content owners to implement different templates. You’ll avoid the messy, inconsistent and non-brand compliant jumble of SharePoint sites that can rapidly evolve.
For those accessing Premium Lightspeed365 features, there is even more control using the site provisioning tool that can triage requests for new sites, create approval workflow and even assign appropriate templates.
Getting the best out of the SharePoint Lookbook
In our view the SharePoint Lookbook is an excellent resource that used properly can help save time, and encourage the best use of SharePoint, but there are limitations.
Using an additional product like Lightspeed365 can make all the difference to extend brand flexibility, extend your control over templates, and help you to create fantastic looking intranets.
Need help? Get in touch!
If you’d like to discuss how Lightspeed365 can be used in conjunction with the SharePoint Lookbook, or how you can extend your design options in SharePoint, then get in touch!
SharePoint is the leading base technology for intranets. It is a highly flexible and scalable platform that delivers many intranet features straight out of the box, but also has a highly mature ecosystem of additional products that means you can deliver a truly world-class SharePoint intranet.
One of the best qualities of SharePoint is the ability to deliver different types of intranets that suit a wide range of organisational and employee needs. A small organisation with 100 people and a global corporation with 50,000 people can both have a successful SharePoint intranet. It also supports multiple sectors – a retailer with a young, frontline workforce or a legal firm with lawyers who need access to knowledge. Both might use a SharePoint intranet.
In this post we’re going to explore ten different SharePoint site examples to use in 2024 which demonstrate the versatility and flexibility of the platform. From a dashboard intranet for fast-moving businesses to a knowledge base ideal for regulated industries to a SharePoint intranet more focused on building community and engagement.
Web parts are one of the core elements of SharePoint and therefore of any intranet built on SharePoint. They are the basic building blocks that make up the different sites within SharePoint; every page can be broken down into a series of different web parts. If you are creating an intranet based on SharePoint or even just contributing content to it, it really helps to have an understanding of what web parts are and the kind of web parts that you can deploy to deliver your overall content and experience.
In this article we’re going to take a deep dive into SharePoint web parts. We’re going to cover what they are, the different kinds of SharePoint web parts there are, what a custom web part is and the kind of value that custom web parts can bring to a SharePoint Internet.
What are webparts in SharePoint?
Web parts can be defined as the basic components of SharePoint. Microsoft themselves describe them as “the building blocks of your page” with the ability to “add text, images, files, video, dynamic content and more.”
Web parts are a significant part of the editing experience in SharePoint. Web parts can be arranged in different ways on a page. Content editors in SharePoint modern can also add new web parts, selecting from a number of web parts that come as standard with the platform.
Web parts can display SharePoint content but can also integrate feeds from other Microsoft 365 tools including Viva Engage / Yammer and Viva Connections. Each web part also has extensive configuration options around elements such as what to display or link to, how items are sorted or filtered, and how they are displayed. The combination of the sheer number of web parts and configuration options is one of the factors which enables SharePoint to be a highly flexible tool that can be used across multiple use cases.
What kind of SharePoint web parts are there?
There are currently around fifty SharePoint web parts that are available out of the box. These include everything from the ability to format calls to action or featuring a Power BI report to embedding a video or even a world clock. There isn’t enough space here to go into all the web parts that are available, but some of the most popular include:
Connectors: provides options to bring in different feeds from external services based on the connectors available.
Document library: displays a SharePoint document library.
Events: displays upcoming events with the ability to click through for more information for each event.
File viewer: the ability to embed a file such as a Word or PDF document to read within a page.
Hero: displays up to five items at the top of a page, usually on a home or landing page.
Highlighted content: a flexible web part that displays a dynamically generated list of content based on its type such as documents, videos or images, and other salient criteria.
List: displays a SharePoint list, again another very flexible way to display and manage information.
Microsoft Forms: embeds a Microsoft Form, and can be used for forms, polls and surveys.
News: displays news items with different formatting options.
People: displays details of a selected group of people, such as a team or key contacts, with links to individual profiles.
Quick links: the ability to display quick links to other pages, apps, external sites and more.
Yammer (Viva Engage): embed a personalised Viva Engage / Yammer feed on a page, for example to support a community.
Standard SharePoint web parts and gaps in functionality
Despite the high number of web parts and the ability to configure them, in practice there are still some gaps in functionality and features that can be particularly frustrating for intranet teams and internal communicators who want to deploy a high value SharePoint intranet or site with strong adoption.
Sometimes these “gaps” relate to branding and design options around the look and feel of a web part being limited or not quite right. At other times, it might be that there simply isn’t a web part available out of the box that delivers particular functionality. For example, a popular intranet feature that is not available in SharePoint out of the box is the ability for users to add their own personal links to frequently used apps that can then be displayed on an intranet home page.
Sometimes there also might be no web part available that delivers content from a different external system or application, where there might need to be an integration, and there is no current connector.
What are custom SharePoint web parts?
When there is gap in functionality, organisations have the option to deploy a custom web part. A custom web part is one that has either been custom developed from scratch or has been modified from a standard SharePoint web part. A custom SharePoint web part therefore can be considered to be any web part that is not supplied by Microsoft as standard and has involved some degree of additional coding. Custom web parts are often designed to give you functionality and features that is very specifically suited to delivering a great intranet experience.
Custom web parts tend to fall into two types:
Those developed specifically for the needs of an individual organisation.
Those provided more generically by intranet software vendors that fil the gaps in SharePoint.
Here at Content Formula, we produce both types, regularly creating specific custom web parts as part of an intranet build, but also now delivering a standard set of custom web parts as part of our Lightspeed 365.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of custom SharePoint web parts?
Custom web parts both have advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, they complement SharePoint and complete the gaps, adding value by:
Enabling “classic” intranet features that have been overlooked by Microsoft in SharePoint when its used straight out of the box.
Supporting richer options for internal communicators.
Delivering more engaging and flexible design options.
Supporting additional integrations not supported by out-of-the-box connectors that drive a more connected digital workplace experience.
Supporting specific business processes and automation, helping raise productivity and efficiency
The disadvantages of custom web parts include the additional cost involved. If you choose to develop your own individual custom web parts then this will involve development resources and effort; however, if you choose to purchase customised web parts that have already been developed by a vendor, they will be considerably cheaper than developing your own, following the usual rules around “buy vs build”.
The other disadvantage comes with customisation in general. Most IT functions want to limit custom development as much as possible because they create technical debt, makes upgrades harder and can require ongoing management. However, buying additional custom web parts from a vendor that are completely managed removes this issue.
How Lightspeed 365 adds most of the SharePoint web parts you need
Content Formula’s Lightspeed365 is a product from Content Formula that adds many of the custom web parts that you need for your intranet, effectively extending the value of SharePoint, and filling many of the gaps in functionality. Lightspeed 365’s web parts are based on the work we’ve done across hundreds of projects over the years. These are easily added to your tenant and can then be added by your content editors just like all the other standard SharePoint web parts.
Because intranet and internal communication teams now have a more complete set of web parts to support a SharePoint Online intranet, it can prove to be highly cost effective, because it reduces the need to purchase a more expensive “in-a-box” intranet solution.
Manually create and configure a navigable structure of the site’s pages or sections.
Requires HTML coding knowledge to build the links.
vs
Table of contents
Automatically recognizes headings on the page to create chapter links, with customizable templates for the look and feel.
Turn on the floating mode to follow users down the page and open closed sections.
User friendly, straight forward and dynamic.
Content roll-up
News
Curates and displays news posts from your site or the entire organization.
Configurable layouts include grid, list, and carousel.
Supports audience targeting.
Lacks configuration options e.g. Date published.
vs
News feed
Offers an enhanced presentation of news on the homepage.
Multiple configuration options including ability to increase legibility of headlines.
Site tags to show where content resides
Social & Communication
People
Highlights selected individuals, showing their profile picture, job title, and contact information.
People must be selected/added manually
vs
People search
Allows users to search for colleagues using additional filters like skills, language and much more using Microsoft Entra ID content.
People directory
A visually appealing search module enhancing the discoverability of personnel without leaving the page.
Display teams by department or location without the need to manually configure the page.
Search
Microsoft search
The standard search box covers a wide scope of content and sends users to a search results page.
Can be scoped to ‘current site’ or ‘hub site’ only
vs
Floating search
Place a search box anywhere on the page, which encourages finding specific content related to smaller topics like HR.
Navigation
Quick links
Provides a visually appealing way to link to internal or external resources.
Supports custom icons, images, and layout styles.
It also supports audience targeting, enhancing the user experience and site navigation.
vs
Card links
Enhances on-page navigation by giving publishers a range of options beyond the standard Quick Links.
With a selection of templates and configuration choices, Card Links allows for a tailored presentation of links.
Want to know more about SharePoint web parts? Get in touch!
Web parts are one of the elements that make SharePoint such a valuable and flexible platform. If you want to know more about using web parts, or want more information on our Lightspeed365 offering, then get in touch!
A modern homepage can re-energize your communications and get employees involved. Do you want to focus on engaged employees? Or an informed workforce?
It all starts with the homepage. These 10 real-world SharePoint intranet examples show how great design – and the right components – can turn your homepage into a hub employees actually want to visit.
The good news is that SharePoint intranets (and their homepages) are extremely flexible so organisations can invariably build an intranet that reflects their particular needs. One of the reasons for this is the sheer number of web parts that are available within SharePoint Online, straight out of the box.
Web parts are essentially building blocks with different functionality and features that can be combined together into multiple ways to build an intranet homepage. However, SharePoint does not have enough web parts to meet all modern intranet needs, which is why we built Lightspeed365, a set of additional web parts and features that enable you to build an even richer experience and wider variety of different homepages. You can achieve the intranet that your organisation needs, and that your users want.
We’re often asked about the kind of SharePoint intranet homepage experiences that be built using both SharePoint Online web parts and Lightspeed365. With so many different possibilities, there are a very wide variety of intranets to suit every need.
In this post we’re going to show you seven real world examples of very different SharePoint homepages that we have built and have a particular function or focus. You can use this post to help you get thinking about what your perfect homepage might look like.
Here’s ten SharePoint intranet site homepages that use both web parts and Lightspeed365 features.
The balanced intranet homepage
Serves news, tasks, tools in one place.
Lightspeed365 has layouts just like this ready-to-go: just add your content and launch in days.
Your intranet should keep people informed and help them get work done. A balanced intranet homepage provides an overview to reflect these multiple activities with a different web parts and features – supporting internal communications, improving productivity, driving collaboration and helping employees complete tasks. Large, global and complex businesses tend to adopt this kind of balanced homepage, helping a diverse workforce to stay informed, get things done, be engaged and find what they need.
In this example:
A personalised greeting helps make the intranet feel less corporate, and also indicates it is a personalised experience.
The news is displayed prominently to support internal communications, with an alert at the top for immediate operational or urgent messages.
The My Apps area provides a personalised launch pad to key apps and tools, to help employees complete their day-to-day work and drive productivity.
Tasks are highlighted in the dashboard section to help employees get things done, in this case leveraging the Viva Connection dashboard feature.
A middle panel provides a personalised overview of key tasks that employees need to complete, including relating to individual and team learning, as well as policies that must be read. Typically a feature like this could involve integrations with SharePoint-based solutions including policy management software such as Xoralia, or a Learning Management System like Learn365 from Zensai.
A “My news” area presents personalised news relevant to the individual, which is important for intranet adoption and valuable in highly diverse workforces.
Collaboration, discussion and dialogue is supported by the “Engage” panel which highlights activity within Viva Engage groups.
Employees seeing real-time news updates and tasks has been shown to double page views and time spent on the intranet.
The knowledge collection intranet homepage
Make knowledge easy to find, share, and trust - without overwhelming your users.
Built with Lightspeed365: a smart, searchable homepage that connects employees to the knowledge they need—personalised, filterable, and easy to maintain.
Intranets have proved to be adept at housing valuable reference information, the “one source of truth”. This means intranets are often a key channel in supporting knowledge management and can act as an effective knowledge base for corporate or organisational knowledge. Typically, this kind of approach might be adopted by a professional services, consulting or engineering firm. A knowledge collection intranet homepage encourages findability through search but also in encouraging links to resources.
In this example:
A prominent search box allows and encourages users to search for documents and through knowledge collections, with the potential ability to filter items on areas such as project type and country, using metadata based on the company’s taxonomy. There’s a link to a more advanced search for convenience.
A “go to” section provides links to key knowledge collections or resources by topic, providing an opportunity to discover knowledge items or to find what someone needs through browsing.
A significant proportion of the homepage is dedicated to personalised access to knowledge, including collections of knowledge, previous searches, personalised recommendations of knowledge (potentially based on role, preferences and previous searches), as well as curated sets of resources.
Calls to action encourage users to add knowledge to the collection as well as share useful feedback for improvement.
If people can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. This homepage makes sure knowledge gets used—not buried.
The daily work intranet homepage
Turn your homepage into a daily launchpad, not just a noticeboard.
Built with Lightspeed365: a personalised dashboard that brings tasks, tools, and updates together—so employees start every day in the right place.
Intranets can act as a central point for employees to keep on top of all their daily work and support them in their role. In this “daily work” intranet, the homepage acts more as a dashboard, providing access to project sites and workspaces where employees carry out their day-to-day, as well as helping employees keeping on top of their priority tasks. In this way, the intranet becomes a dynamic channel that supports employee productivity.
In this example:
There is a custom-built system status web part giving RAG (Red Amber Green) status updates on key software platforms, with the ability to drill into more detail.
A personalised feed from Viva Engage surfaces the latest conversations that are going across different working groups or communities.
A personalised “My Workspaces” area links through to the SharePoint team sites or even Microsoft Teams spaces where collaborative work is carried out on different projects.
When the homepage becomes the place work starts, your intranet stops being ignored.
The social hub intranet homepage
Surface real voices and interactions that drive engagement and connection.
Built with Lightspeed365: Viva Engage conversations, comments, and likes—all pulled into the homepage.
Some “social” intranets are more focused on supporting community and connection between employees, facilitating conversations, dialogue, interaction and even collaboration. A social intranet hub homepage helps to surface both internal and external conversations, bringing together discussions, updates. and events. It also seeks to help employees feel more connected to a brand. Typically, a social hub intranet might be used by companies where employee engagement is high on the agenda, for example in a media or retail company.
In this example:
The intranet page has a distinctive look and feel and uses highly attractive imagery, aligning with the organisation’s brand and helping employees to connect to it.
Events are also prominently displayed, encouraging registrations, and again stressing participation.
News and promoted content is presented in an eye-catching way in the hero.
Internal conversations from Viva Engage, the company’s social collaboration platform of choice, are highlighted within the “Conversations” section. The feed can be targeted to different groups for relevance.
Updates from the company’s external social channels are also relayed, providing information on how the organisation goes to market and interacts with customers.
Press and media updates are also given, again providing a balance to internal and external social media feeds.
Employee voice doesn’t live in Teams chat—it belongs on the homepage too.
The subject hub intranet homepage or landing page
Focus attention and drive engagement around key topics, initiatives, or themes.
Built with Lightspeed365: a structured hub for campaigns, themes, or knowledge areas—designed to drive visibility and clarity.
In practice intranets tend to be made up of a number of different sites, often maintained by the relevant teams and groups within an organisation, all tied together by an overall homepage, navigation and search. Sometimes sites within a wide intranet can be dedicated to a particular department and team, while others act as a place to access resources on a particular topic. This screenshot shows a potential subject or topic hub – in this case about patient wellbeing.
In this example:
A visually striking carousel links through to headline content, prominent reference information and major updates about the subject in question.
Featured resources including story updates and knowledge collections on the topic, with indicators of the number of likes and comments to reflect their popularity.
A noticeboard feature presents the latest subject-specific quick updates, aggregated from different sites across the intranet. The most viewed and downloaded items are also displayed, to drive engagement.
“Show more” and “View more” buttons allow the user to view more content, ensuring the initial homepage experience remains focused and uncluttered.
When you need everyone to focus on strategic imperatives—this is the page that gets it done.
The GTD (Getting things done) intranet homepage
Put HR, IT, and internal services at employees’ fingertips.
Built with Lightspeed365: triage-style navigation that gets people to the help they need, fast.
A key function of a good intranet is to help employees get things done efficiently and in the right way, supporting productivity and saving time. The GTD intranet homepage focuses on task completion, making the intranet the go-to place to complete simple tasks, and also a valuable asset that supports increased productivity.
In this example:
A welcome bar at the top includes a link to an intranet tour which automatically loads when an employee first visits the intranet, and walks users through the main intranet features and the information that can be found.
The homepage leverages the Viva Connections dashboard to deliver a common tasks panel to highlight common tasks such as logging an IT ticket, and to highlight key activity; integrations with common enterprise systems often means that employees don’t actually need to visit these applications if just needed to view data or perform simple transactions.
A searchable database of “How Do I” information provides succinct information on how to get things done across a wide variety of topics, helping to streamline and standardise processes and supporting productivity.
“How Do I” information is also targeted based on an employee’s profile, so for example a person sees the right process information based on their location.
Personalised links to relevant pages also mean employees can reach the apps, sites or pages they frequently need to access or refer to in getting things done.
A handy people search allows a quick search of employee profiles to help contact the right person which is often necessary for task completion.
Other features such as news and events also ensure the intranet continues to keep people informed and supports engagement too.
Stop making people guess where to go. Let the homepage guide them.
The News Centre intranet homepage
Give comms teams a flexible space to plan, publish, and measure their content.
Built with Lightspeed365: a central hub for campaigns, updates, targeting, and feedback.
Keeping employees informed and supporting internal communications is one of the most important roles for an intranet; in fact, many intranets are owned by the internal comms function. The News Centre intranet homepage keeps employees informed by providing news updates from right across the organisation – often personalised to different groups. The News Centre intranet has particular value in larger global businesses with multiple locations and diverse workforces.
In this example:
The header displays local weather, the stock price but also the local time across a number of key locations – this is not only useful in helping contact colleagues in a different time zone, but also makes the page feel a little like a global newsroom where there is always something happening.
There is major news from across markets with also a primary news item. In the layout on this page there are more news items than on homepages which tend to be dominated by a carousel, and where items can sometimes get lost.
Engagement data such as views, comments and reactions indicate the most popular items.
A separate feed of London news is personalised to the location of the user based on their profile or their preferences – this could potentially say New York, Frankfurt, Mumbai or elsewhere.
A special area for operational announcements is also shown under the news – again this might be for an item such as an unexpected IT outage and could be targeted, for example saying that there will be fire alarm for a particular office.
The news centre is also balanced by more “How to” and operational-related content in the lower half of the homepage, including a database of “I need to” information on how to complete key tasks, as well as links to apps and resources.
An intranet homepage built for enterprise comms across all functions and locations.
The community hub
Showcase your culture, amplify stories, and help employees feel seen.
Built with Lightspeed365: a vibrant homepage that celebrates people, not just processes.
Tailored for the media or marketing sectors, this SharePoint site example integrates external and internal social feeds. The large news carousel and social media feeds make it a vibrant SharePoint website example that actively engages users.
A large news carousel at the top gives plenty of room for rich imagery and showcasing the company’s brand and products.
A stock price widget is neatly integrated inside of the news carousel to as not to constrain impact of the look-and-feel.
The events feed is a standard SharePoint feature, but brought to life by the playful iconography and colour selection.
A large proportion of the homepage is then given to a feed of content from the companies external social media feeds – making a point that what the organisation says to those outside is just as relevant to those inside.
People connect with people—this homepage makes that the point.
The field worker
Give frontline teams fast, mobile access to tools, comms, and updates—wherever they are.
Built with Lightspeed365: a mobile-optimised homepage with role-based access to apps, info, and search—tailored for frontline use.
Optimised for use in the field with tablets and smartphones, this SharePoint intranet design is practical and accessible, making it perfect for industries like construction or field services.
The icon based app launcher dominates the homepage experience, but avoids being cumbersome by including a contextual quick search feature – similar to that found on smartphones.
The apps and services presented to the employee are targeted based on their role.
Employees can also customise the launcher, just as they would customise the homescreen on their phone or tablet.
Not every employee works at a desk—this homepage makes sure they’re not left out.
The dashboard
Bring together real-time updates, tools, and tasks in one focused, high-utility homepage.
Built with Lightspeed365: a dynamic homepage with milestones, search tools, and personal task lists—designed for fast-moving teams.
A real-time information hub featuring tools like countdown clocks and milestone trackers. This SharePoint intranet example is ideal for fast-paced environments, providing quick access to essential functions and tools.
More traditional fare of global news and personalised quick links are still a feature.
But as we go down the page we see personalisation features like the welcome bar.
And various search tools which not only cover colleagues and ‘how do I’ guidance, but also a ‘parts finder’ – something more specific to the needs of this particular organisation.
A milestones dashboard gives a snapshot of where the company sits with current deliveries.
And a task list acts as a mini to-do for each employee, nestled conveniently alongside the other information.
When everything’s changing fast, this homepage keeps people on track.
Building the right intranet homepage for you
We hope these examples have given you a bit of inspiration! The combination of SharePoint web parts available out of the box and additional Lightspeed365 web parts means that you can build the right homepage that meets your organisational needs and culture, and highlights the main functions of your intranet.
If you’d like to discuss your intranet project or how Lightspeed365 intranet could add value to your intranet, then get in touch!
Want to improve the visual appeal and layout of the news on your SharePoint intranet to improve engagement and adoption?
By downloading Lightspeed365’s free intranet web part you can extend your design options and enhance the presentation of your news feed to improve usability, boost the visibility of news and increase views.
And it’s 100% free with zero costs and obligations.
What is Lightspeed365?
Lighstpeed365 helps organisations to drive adoption and get maximum business value from their SharePoint intranet by building additional features for users, content editors and internal communicators. These help to take your intranet to the next level and provide a satisfying and richer employee experience.
SharePoint is a brilliant platform to build an intranet on. However, when you just use SharePoint Online straight out of the box for your intranet there are several gaps in functionality and missing features. A SharePoint intranet can also lack the flexibility in design that many intranet teams are after.
That’s where the additional features (web parts) from Lightspeed365 come in – helping fill the critical gaps that occur when intranet teams and internal communicators use SharePoint out of the box.
About Lightspeed365’s news web part
A key job of any intranet is to keep employees informed.
The news feed on a SharePoint intranet homepage or on an individual landing page is one of the most important and most widely used intranet features, helping to deliver targeted internal communications from right across the organisation.
The news feed web part that comes out of the box with SharePoint is useful, offering:
The ability to curate and display news form one stie or from multiple sites
Some layout options including grid, list and carousel formats
Audience targeting based on Entra ID profiles
But beyond this, this native SharePoint web part usually falls short of what internal communications and intranet teams need to truly drive engagement with news and get high number of views.
They often tell us that they are frustrated by the lack of design options and feel the web part doesn’t meet needs and expectations.
Lightspeed365’s free news web part significantly extends your options around presenting news, offering:
Ways to enhance the presentation of news.
Many additional configuration options such as the ability to increase the legibility of headlines, add the date published and more.
The ability to add site tags to show where a news item resides.
Modern website-like styling
By downloading the web part, you’re effectively upgrading your intranet news experience.
Why are you running this promotion?
We’re on a mission to improve the world’s SharePoint intranets. This promotion provides the opportunity for intranet teams to experience the difference that Lightspeed365 web parts can make in improving your SharePoint intranet.
Of course, we’d love to gain some new Lightspeed365 customers from the promotion, but we’re also intranet nerds that love making a difference.
Is the Lightspeed365 news feed web part really free? Where’s the catch?!
Yes, you can download the web part for free with no upfront or hidden costs. And we don’t ask you to complete a dodgy form demanding the details for your credit card details.
So there really is no catch at all or any other future obligation.
How can I download and install the web part?
It’s super-easy for an intranet administrator with the correct rights to download and then deploy the Lightspeed365 news feed web part. It will only take a few minutes.
Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer support for downloading or installing the web part.
How does the web part work?
Once you download and install the web part it will just appear in the normal SharePoint editing experience as one of many different web parts your intranet team or content editors can add to a page. They can also configure the web part as they would like any other, using the web part settings that appear in the right hand panel within the SharePoint editing experience.
Will Lightspeed365 update the news feed web part?
We won’t update this webpart regularly like our paid products. However, we may release a new free version sometime in the future which you can, of course, upgrade to if you’d like.
Do you have any other Lightspeed365 features that can boost intranet adoption and value?
Yes! We have a huge range of features (web parts) as part of the Lightspeed365 offering that:
improve the way you can present content and communications
add the must-have functionality you need for a world-class intranet
provide additional services on top
extends the ROI of SharePoint by plugging the gaps
ultimately drives usage of and engagement with your intranet
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