12 Ways to Customize Your Modern SharePoint Intranet

January 10, 2023 Joshua Ramirez

Microsoft SharePoint is by far the most extensively used intranet platform, per the Gartner Survey Study for the Most Used Intranet 2021. The recent ecosystem of cloud apps proposed by MS Office 365, as well as the new trend of using cloud-based apps and data across business enterprises, have further increased the value of SharePoint as an intranet portal.

Microsoft introduced Modern Team Sites and Communication Sites in 2016, which represent a completely new paradigm for SharePoint Sites. Modern team sites are available as a total overhaul of well-known class sites, which are highly regarded for being centered on delivering news to readers in a more interactive and stimulating format. The idea of hub sites, which connects various websites and aggregated news, was also just recently introduced. As a result, contemporary websites can now be made into hub sites and act as a portal for a network of other websites.

Table of Contents

1. Fresh Hub-Site Design

For news in hub sites, the SharePoint intranet provides new design options, such as carousel sliders. This enables you to incorporate several pieces of news without overwhelming the layout.

2. Content Customization & Page Metadata

This is the feature that SharePoint users yearn for a very long. Modern SharePoint pages now contain news articles as pages, and metadata at the page level, which enables customization for efficient news distribution in a manner unique to your organization.

3. Multiple News Sources

You can choose and collect information from various content sources to build new SharePoint sites using Microsoft SharePoint.

4. Corporate News Feature

You can advertise your news article as “organizational news,” which will push it to the top of the news feed and give it a more appealing layout.

5. Weather Web-Parts

For the first time, Microsoft SharePoint provided weather web parts. Not everyone has the opportunity to sit by the window and monitor the weather when working somewhere within large buildings and infrastructure. So you have the ability and convenience to stay up to date with their weather forecast and decide to leave the workplace accordingly or plan your work schedule for the week ahead likewise.

6. Microsoft Office 365 @Mentions

Using the @mentions feature, you can mention other employees in your company when you add a comment to a Word document or compose a news article. The user receives an email notification when they type ‘@’ and their user’s name, allowing them to view the document. This feature enhances Microsoft Office 365’s document collaboration capabilities while also generating a fun workflow for task distribution.

7. Upgraded Web Parts for Yammer

Microsoft has reportedly written off Yammer for a very long time. However, as these web parts amply demonstrate, Yammer continues to play a crucial role in the MS Office 365 ecosystem. Yammer’s sleek interface has been modified to encourage greater user interaction and social feed interactions like @mentions and likes.

8. Image Web-Part

SharePoint’s updated image web parts make it simple for content authors to modify and enhance images in the SharePoint intranet by doing things like adding hyperlinks or text overlays.

9. Revamping SharePoint Lists

Microsoft has overhauled SharePoint’s list-making process from top to bottom, adding more user-friendly modernized its list templates, and bolstering the system’s capacity to generate new lists from existing Excel spreadsheets.

10. An Optimized Listing Experience

In the case of SharePoint lists, the story does not end there. The new “Location” column type for SharePoint lists is compatible with the map’s web part and the map visualization in Microsoft Power BI. Plus, did you know that Microsoft has readded the ‘in-place editing’ feature in the latest iteration of SharePoint, much to the delight of list editors? And that’s not all; the MS Planner app comes with its own set of predefined assignments.

11. SharePoint Mobile App Upgrade

The most recent change to lists is the addition of the ‘Insight’ button, which allows users to perform data analytics in Power BI directly on the list’s contents. If you want to generate reports based on the data list, all you have to do is click on the insight button, make a Power BI report, and then publish it in SharePoint.

12. New Listings for Data Analysis

Because of a ‘Paradigm Shift’, the SharePoint mobile app no longer has as many tabs in the navigation bar. The ‘News’ section intends to keep you up-to-date, while the ‘Find’ feature, powered by AI, is there to help you stay connected to files, people, and websites.

Conclusion

The latest updates to SharePoint and MS Office 365 make an already excellent platform even better. One might wonder, though, if this is really the best possible platform. The improved and expanded set of features provides fantastic new opportunities and resources for fostering teamwork and enhancing internal communication. In contrast, blending them together and tailoring the whole intranet experience to your business’s needs is a viable option.

SharePoint is a primed intranet platform that has turned out to be a very successful option if you value your employees’ experiences while also worrying about implementation time. If you’re looking for a company that specializes in SharePoint implementations, look no further than Code Creators Inc. To link up, please click here.