Modernize Your Intranet with Microsoft Office 365

Technology is moving at a fast pace and companies need to make sure they are enhancing and upgrading their systems and solutions periodically, including their intranet. The intranet or digital workplace can become inefficient, hard to use, and obsolete if it is not updated and maintained. Despite this, many companies have old and clunky intranets because of the perceived heavy lift of updating and modernizing their intranet. Little do companies know, implementing a modern intranet can be easy and cost-effective with Microsoft 365.

A static intranet that pushes one-way information and has no real-time communication capabilities is outdated. These days, people thrive on up-to-date information and collaboration, instant connections with people and data, and sharing of insights and expertise across teams and locations. Employees want to be able to contribute to the digital workplace and expect to quickly find the information and tools they need to get work done.

If your current intranet solution is old and clunky and, actually slows down productivity, now is the time for Microsoft workplace modernization. Let’s understand why a modern intranet on Microsoft 365 is the way to go.

What Microsoft 365 can do for your intranet?

Microsoft 365 offers many applications and tools that can enhance your intranet and offer capabilities to make it more useable, robust, and feature-rich. Along with being on the cloud, having a user friendly and uniform interface across the tools, having an outstanding track record for up times, and providing multiple layers of security, an intranet on Microsoft 365 comes with the following advantages which are necessary if you want a state-of-the-art, modern digital workplace solution which will meet the diverse needs of your employees and will stay relevant for a long time to come.

A modern intranet on Microsoft 365 provides:

Dynamic Content

If your intranet offers static content and you think just because you provide it, your employees will be drawn to it; you are mistaken.

With an intranet on Microsoft 365, you can take advantage of SharePoint’s easy publishing tools and make them available to your users so they can share their team or departmental news, upload event photographs, and share interesting videos. This takes away control of content from a few, and allows staff to get creative by making the content interesting, interactive and engaging, with polls, and like and comment features – which are possible with integration with Yammer.

Robust Search

Employees spend way too much time looking for information, whether it is an email, a document, or a news article.

People are getting used to being offered relevant information instead of looking for it. On Netflix and Amazon, for example, you see a list of recommended movies and items respectively, depending on what you’ve watched or purchased in the past.

So why shouldn’t your intranet do the same? Microsoft 365 uses the office graph to do just that. A graph is a tool that supports Microsoft 365 search functions. It tracks content interaction, using machine learning to draw links between people, content, and activity within an organization.

Graph’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities pull up more relevant and useful content when a user search. The search results could include people profiles, news, and videos along with documents and discussions.

Mobile Access

Your digital workplace tool must offer mobile access because if it doesn’t, your employees will find other methods to give them the mobility they require.

With the shift in work culture, people need anywhere anytime access to their email, documents, and contacts. If your intranet doesn’t provide this access, they will use other apps and tools, which may not have the security layers provided by Microsoft. This could turn out to be counterproductive in the long run.

With Microsoft 365 intranet, all the tools are in the cloud. Your staff members can author documents, publish content, route their forms for approvals, track their tasks, update calendars, get reminders, and much more; from their mobile devices.

Fresh, new interface

A tired, old-looking intranet from circa 2000 is not going to help you boost productivity and drive employee engagement. If your current intranet is met with disapproving looks and complaints, it’s time you change that.

With Microsoft 365 you have many options to create a modern intranet. There is a myriad of ready-to-go offerings built on SharePoint and Microsoft 365 that you can take advantage of. These solutions give you a fresh, consistent, updated look along with a lot of functionality that your employees can start exploring and using immediately.

Apart from providing communication and collaboration tools, a turnkey solution also provides employees with consolidated views of news, documents, tasks, and discussions relevant to them, so they can get work done more easily.

Include Analytics

All your intranet upgrades will go to waste if you don’t put in place tools that can measure and monitor employee engagement, user adoption, productivity increase, etc. Power BI and PowerApps can be used to help with collecting and analyzing various types of data.

Using PowerApps, you can build mobile apps which your staff can use on-the-go, to add, update or view information that sits in a SharePoint list or an Excel sheet. It doesn’t require programming experience and users can easily create and publish apps. With PowerBI your data come to life with stunning visuals like graphs and charts. Power BI is a “self-service” suite and has user-friendly tools which allow you to connect to your data and create highly interactive visualizations and reports which can be saved or published and shared with others.

Personalized Information

A digital workplace shouldn’t offer a one-size-fits-all experience. Instead, it should be able to provide relevant and personalized information to every individual in your company. Thanks to artificial intelligence, many intranet solutions are finding new ways to surface timely and useful content within the context of the worker at the moment.

With Microsoft 365 intranet, it is possible to display the employee’s projects, tasks, and reminders, forms they need to approve and notifications they’ve received, news about their department, and changes to policies that affect them.

What a modern intranet looks like?

An intranet is not just a static site that functions as a document repository and internal news channel. The intranet has evolved (and continues to evolve) with the changes in work culture and the needs of the business.

The modern intranet is where employees can log in at any time, irrespective of their physical location. They can get information like updates to corporate or departmental policies, recruits, training materials, etc. They can track their tasks, set up reminders, attend meetings, author documents, store contact information, and update project deliverables. They can also communicate with other users via different channels – instant messaging, discussions, email, and phone/video conferencing to brainstorm ideas, get feedback, solve problems collectively.

The modern intranet is a central hub buzzing with activity. It is where users come to be productive and meet their goals. It is where work is accomplished.

If you are on Microsoft 365 and want to consolidate all your business processes under one roof, or you are looking for a turnkey solution that can enhance your current intranet offering, we can help. Please email us at bizinfo@bizportals.com and our representative will get in touch with you.