Looking to get your SharePoint intranet off the ground quickly? You’re not the only one. Today, integrating remote and hybrid teams, along with attracting Millennial and Gen Z talent, is crucial for businesses. With nearly half of the workforce operating remotely or in a hybrid mode, and younger employees expecting seamless, collaborative technology as a standard, the push for a new intranet is strong.

An intranet serves as the essential hub for your digital workplace, connecting all elements and people. It’s a digital centre where employees find necessary tools, information and resources, streamlining tasks and minimising time spent searching for data.

A well-designed intranet can enhance the employee experience by up to 20 percent by recognising achievements, sharing success stories, and facilitating a two-way communication stream between employees and management.

Personalized content delivery and relevant updates make the intranet a key tool for boosting productivity by up to 25 percent, as it ensures employees receive information tailored to their role and department, reducing inbox clutter.

The advantages of launching an intranet include easy access to information on any device, with advanced search capabilities that cut down on the estimated 1.8 hours employees lose daily searching for information.

Launch your SharePoint intranet with a six phase-approach

To deploy your SharePoint intranet quickly, we’ve shared a six-phase approach. How quickly you can go depends on the complexity of your needs and your preparation.

Planning & Requirements:

Decide what you want to achieve with your intranet. Talk to people from different parts of your company to understand their needs, expectations and requirements. Make a detailed plan with tasks and deadlines.

Setup & Basic Configuration:
If you have SharePoint Online, you can start with a pre-templated intranet experience such as Fresh Ready, built on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. Set up the basic structure and decide who can see what.

Design & Customise:
Make the intranet look like it’s part of your company branding. Add important features and make sure it works well on mobile devices; for example, connect it to Microsoft Teams so your employees can access the intranet via the Teams mobile app through Viva Connections.

Migrate Content & Install 3rd Party Integrations:
Begin by uploading essential content like company policies and documents to the intranet and integrate with other Microsoft 365 or 3rd-party tools for a seamless experience, with the option to add or refine content over time.

Test, Train & Launch:
Test the intranet to find any problems. Train your employees on how to use it. Then, launch it to everyone, ask actively for feedback and be ready to apply adjustments as you go.

Post-launch iteration:
Keep improving the intranet based on your business needs and employees’ feedback.

For more details and help on planning your SharePoint intranet roll-out, download the Building a business case for a new intranet eBook from our Fresh colleagues, which is packed with useful tips.

Delivering a basic intranet with Fresh

Launching an intranet quickly becomes easier when done together. Mirus can help set up your SharePoint intranet with Fresh Ready, an intranet-in-a-box solution from our parent’s company Advania. Fresh Ready is a package that gets a basic intranet running in about 30 minutes, without scripts.

Fresh Ready comes with all the basic features you need, like an intranet landing page, comms tools, people function, department sites, tools, quick links, search, a news feed and much more. Fresh Ready is flexible and allows your intranet to grow as your requirements and needs grow too. You can add more advanced features later, like analytics and AI.

Get in touch now to find out how we can work with you at every step, giving expert advice and support to make sure your intranet meets your needs.