Augmenting Intranet User Experience with SharePoint.
Nowadays, more business owner has moved towards digitalizing & modernize office and operations.
Considering the pandemic and the evolution of the internet that promotes more remote work and virtual offices, building an intranet portal where employees could communicate and collaborate is important to ensure better productivity and a smoother process.
One of the best technology or services that could help the business owner to modernize is Microsoft SharePoint.
What is SharePoint?
Microsoft SharePoint is a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information and have a seamless collaboration across the organization.
The core functions of SharePoint are an intranet portal, workflow automation, and enterprise content document management system.
SharePoint Online is not only available on its own, but the organization could also obtain SharePoint if subscribe to either Microsoft 365 small business plans, Microsoft 365 enterprise plans, or Office 365 enterprise plans.
Within these plans, users are also given access to other collaboration and communication tools that integrate well with SharePoint such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Office apps.
Users can have access to SharePoint through any chosen web browser or by installing the SharePoint mobile app to connect with mobile devices.
Create SharePoint sites.
There are three different types of SharePoint sites that organization could use to maximize the user’s experience and navigation which are Team sites, Communication sites, and Hub sites.
Team sites
The main function of creating a SharePoint team site is connecting all the people or users in the organization to shared content and resources.
The team sites can also be used to store and collaborate on files or to create and manage lists of information as well as tracking and stay updated on project status, organizing and co-author shared content, and connecting to a Microsoft 365 group to access team resources.
Communication sites
The SharePoint communication site is a place for users to broadcast information to others.
The sites allow users to create portals, department, or project-specific sites, share the company news, announcements, and events, or even engaging with viewers or external users.
Users can either choose from the given template option or create an original design to create a communication site.
Hub sites
The SharePoint hub sites help users to meet their organization needs by connecting and organizing sites based on the project, department, division, and region.
Unlike the other two sites, the user must be a SharePoint administrator to create a hub site.
They also will be able to determine the number of hub sites created and whom to be assigned in each hub.
Creating multiple hub sites is encouraged as it will ease users in discovering related content such as news and other site activities and search across all associated sites.
In addition to that, it also eases the administrator to apply common navigation, branding, and site structure across associated sites.
Integrate Sites with Microsoft 365 Product Family
Besides creating sites, an organization could obtain maximum user experience by integrating SharePoint to other productivity tools available or given through the chosen Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription.
Microsoft flow, for instance, helps users to set up a workflow for the list or library created inside SharePoint and OneDrive.
The function of Microsoft flow is to streamline all the repetitive tasks in the business process and provide a paperless process.
Not to mention creating a flow is in Microsoft Flow is much simpler compared to building a set of codes to automate business processes. Users will be given multiple templates to choose from such as shown below:
Besides Microsoft flow, users can also integrate SharePoint to other Microsoft 365 product families such as Dynamics, Yammer, Stream, and Planner to better improve and augmenting the user experience.
It is important to know which works best for the organization and adopt them into the SharePoint sites to create a better digital user experience.
Conclusion
To conclude, SharePoint Online is one of the best technologies to go to if you are looking for a modern intranet with a higher user and customer experience.
With the support of the collaboration tools, navigating through the SharePoint sites make business process clearer to the employee and ease the process of collaborating and communication between the different team.
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