Architecting Your Intranet

hey everyone my name is masa tourism program manager on the SharePoint product team today I'll be walking through how SharePoint is ready to power your entire intelligent intranet and how the Internet architecture is a vital piece I'll be showcasing four of the tools you should use on your journey to build a great intranet if you're wondering where to start and how you should think about your own intranet architecture that's what this session is for I'll be highlighting best practices showing you real-life examples of how we do this ourselves at Microsoft and how some of our customers do it as well let's get started first what is the intelligent intranet it provides employee experiences that bring together content and services from across the organization helps make sense of the vast information stream that users face every day it's accessible not only being inclusive but also from any device and simple so that anyone can create sites pages and content so when it comes to building your intelligent internet you'll want to use these four tools to build out your architecture the home site the personalized landing destination for your organization branding to establish your organization's and divisions identity hubs to organize related sites together into departments divisions locations functions whatever vest fits your organization and site the designs for provisioning new or existing sites using your own custom configurations let's jump right in with the top of the intranet with home sites the home site is the landing site for your organization it connects the workplace with intelligent search and rich navigation and brings together news content and conversations it's also personalized so users can connect with the information and activities that are relevant to them let's do a walk through I want to highlight that a home site is built on top of communication sites therefore a lot of what I'm about to show you is available on communication sites as well I'll be walking through what we recommend as the best practices for what should be on your home site while showing you it's superpowers here's the landing the site for contoso electronics first of all on a site marked as the home site search is global ten and wide instead of just on the site itself next up is navigation with the use of the mega menu you can set up your home site's navigation with links to the most important resources across your organization for example I recommend providing links to the most important hubs more on that later we also now support audience targeting so you configure links what should be visible to some users and not others for example I'm logged in as Megan so who whose office is in Seattle so over here she sees Seattle events if I was logged in as Adele she would see New York events this targeting is not only available from navigation but also shows up in news as well so I would get different set of news articles here it's depending on that targeting that's taking effect while we are in use when you mark a site as a home site you get what we call authoritative news this marks news from the site ask official and gets a special decoration to make it stand out we've also added the amber conversations whoa and bam which surface conversations happening for your organization and gives new capabilities such as questions and best answers to make this even more engaging and bring in some of that personalization we suggest leveraging the vertical section for web parts like my feed which brings together relevant documents activities and content and the frequent sites which surfaces recently used sites with these capabilities on your home site you can truly create an experience that is relevant and engaging I showed you what your home site can look like and its capabilities let's talk about the importance around branding branding is an integral part to overall site design and development use to establish your organization's identity in SharePoint it consists of multiple elements logos navigation theming and content structure let's do a quick walkthrough of what you can do back to the landing I'll call logo on the office365 bar this is what we recommend you place the logo for your organization and you set it to point to your home site so that anywhere the user they are they can quickly get back to their home site up next is the site logo and this could be a square logo like I'm showing here but you could also set it up as a rectangular logo if I switch over to site change the look you can also ask a Pilates for theming so here are a set of company themes that we've uploaded for this tenant and you can also choose out of our out-of-the-box themes as well we have different header types as well as now different footers as well so you can see the simple or the extended footer and the footer doesn't only show up here but it also shows up in pages see BAM do you see here in the zoo trait new teamwork training page if I scroll down you see the footer right here so not only can you make your home site useful and relevant but you can also make it beautiful with these branding capabilities now let's talk about how to set up the home site now I mentioned before any communication site can become a home site it's a super power you enable on a site and here's a tip you can start building your comm site and once it's ready move it to the root and then enable the home site superpowers this works particularly well for those of you who have a classic site at the root but it's also an approach for those who want to take their time building their site next make it super easy to get to by setting the home site as a default destination when you click on the officer to see five-bar logo finally don't forget to leverage some of the recommended experiences like personalization through audience targeting and navigation news and personalized webparts for navigation I recommend using for the most important resources and top hubs it isn't an architecture talk without a diagram we just walked through the first tool the home site the top landing site for your organization it's a great starting point for wayfinding you can enable you can establish ia in your intranet using navigation on that site now that we talked about the top let's talk about how we organize the rest of your intranet with hubs hubs organize the intranet by linking related sites together based on project department division location function or best fits your organization it helps your organization work more productively across any number of sites they are flexible so its business goals and team structures evolve you can quickly adapt to changes now let's break down what it delivers a communications destination that serves as a home for the shared hub content which we call the hub site and created bottoms up view of content news events and activity from across all the sites in the hub ability to search across just the sites belonging to the hub and a top-down point of control for hub owners to require some common elements such as shared navigation consistent look and feel with beaming comments to site structure information architecture through the use of site designs permissions and affordance to create sites right from the hubs and soon the ability to associate huffs together more on this soon so now let's do a walk-through of hubs first is search at the top search here if scoped to just this site and sites associated to this hub well as in the home site was scoped to your entire tenant here small scoped to that either department division region that you've set it up at the very top is the also hub navigation that spans across all associated sites I can click here in retail and seamlessly transition from one site to the next and you'll notice that not only is the nav consistently across but also the theming goes with it but let's go back I recommend using the hub navigation for your hubs most important resources as an example I've added a note call teams where I've manually curated a couple of the most important sites and even added a others link here others link that takes me to a page that has all the other sites that are associated to this hub the hub navigation also supports audience targeting like I showed in the previous home site where I only see Seattle events and this will go with me as I navigate across the different sites in the hub next up is one of the key benefits of hub aggregated views we support aggregated views for news sites events and highlighted content specifically for News you'll know it's rolling up because you'll see you can see here in this example this news post is coming from extra special promotion and this one's coming from consumer retail so you can see that it's actually bubbling up information news articles from all these other sites and we give you the controls clicking edit give you even more fine-tuned controls to pick either news from all sites in the hub or even choose to be able to select the specific sites you want to make it easier to create sites that are part of the hub you see this create site button right here and so what this will do is allow your users to create sites they're already part of this hub family so I just walked you through the basics for hubs now let's talk about the latest hub enhancements that are coming soon starting with hub analytics hub owners can understand how the hub is being used and view the most popular content the second enhancement is permissions we're making it easier to centralize visitor permissions across your hub it's an optional feature hub owners can enable and site owners can opt in or out of finally more improvements to the hub cross-site navigation from audience targeting to more branding control by letting you remove the hub name so you can only keep the logo to support to supporting multilingual nodes let's see it all in action starting with have analytics once you've set up your hub you want to understand how your hub is doing overall with hub analytics hub owners can see total aggregated data for all sites in the hub covering total viewers visits and popular content across the site in the hub you can also get a view of sites news post documents and pages and so this is obviously why we haven't shipped this yet next up hub permissions on the hub you set it up quite easily just like you do permissions you click on the gear and you go to site permissions you now have this pivot called hub when you click on that you see that you can enable hub permissions on this site if you click on you're able to add a visitors group and so what this will do is it'll allow you to set up a group that now gets stamped across all these sort of associated sites just like you do just like we do for the theming and the navigation and it's really easy to add any group of soon to want so here's an example of me adding marketing and you can also remove it at any time now you're probably wondering so I set it up at the hub what does this mean for the Associated sites so let's look at that so here I am in the consumer retail associated site it's connected us to the global sales hub and if I open here and go to site permissions these are the regular permissions for this current site but now I have this pivot called hub because my hub is enabled it and I can see that I can turn this on and I can choose to sync the permissions to the site so if I click on here after a couple seconds it tells me then now the global sales is managing the permissions for the site and this group has been added to it and so that ensures that everybody has access to the same stuff across the hub and you're probably wondering well that looks really great Melissa but like what happens when you leave the hub let's try it out so if I go back here in the consumer retail you saw that I turned it on it was there got at it and I click on site information and I want to undoing the hub I could choose none here and just like that it'll unjoin this associated it'll stop becoming an Associated site to that huh but most importantly when I go back to site permissions you'll see that the hub pivot is entirely gone and no longer sinking down those permissions BAM just like that the permissions get cleaned up and now your sites for you to join another hub so hubs are created by SharePoint admins so they can control how the organization is organized we have a limit of a 2,000 giving admins more flexibility and for some of you the reason to ease up the governance guidance and who gets a hub don't forget hubs can be scoped so do you decide who can join and please take advantage of approvals that way you can create hubs leave them open and then use the approval process to determine what sites shoot or shoot and join a hub finally hub don't sub disable sub-site creation to encourage hub use now let's talk about what should be a hub every organization will have its own twist on this our guidance on the three main areas where we see a hub called for our organization's for us the loot this would be engineering teams like SharePoint Xbox perhaps even the sales or services organization location sometimes this overlaps with the other two and that's okay this could be a regional subsidiary or independently operating company and major functions this is the ones that most companies have human resources finance legal IT and Microsoft we keep hubs from major functions IT corporate comps major divisions and those with a committed plan for implementation for large number of associated sites here's a couple of examples for hubs that Microsoft experiences and devices it's an organizational hub that spans across the office onedrive and sharepoint devices and more divisions it consists mostly of communication sites focus on important events or initiatives there were a particular driver for the permissions feature as they wanted the same set of permissions across all these sites except for one site that one site is not open to everybody and they use audience target in the nav to promote that for managers only another example is CSE web which is the functional portal for our internal IT or station and it's more of a hybrid environment it has some sites that are more meant to serve the delivery of content so communication sites but it also has collaborative team sites where team members can work on content together hubs are not only used within Microsoft I'm excited to share a customers like Velux who are also taking advantage of hubs as well in this case they use it for their commercial business unit Microsoft and Alex are examples of using hubs for both divisions and business units as mentioned above others use it by location or corporate functions as well now a question I get often is what about one hug for my whole organization there is no requirement to have more than one hub and for small organizations it might work well for you but as organizations grow or for larger ones you really want to maximize surfacing related information in context in the end remember that hub sites are flexible and can change with your organization you aren't making an unchangeable architectural decision you're making something that can be undone redone and changed now you're probably thinking what about home sites and hub well think of them as two superpowers you can combine yes you can hub a PHY your home site an example of a home and a hub together is arla foods they brought both superpowers together for their intranet they also have other hubs as well so it's not like they're just doing one but there's kind of showcasing that you can bring the both powers together and using and use them so from that perspective you're entered in architecture ends up looking more like this where you have your home and it's also a hub so you have sites connected to it and then you also have your separate hubs which are either for your divisions or for your functions or your locations we started at the top and now we've set up our departments divisions locations you can create an intranet architecture by connecting via navigation and hyperlinks from the home site to the hubs as I showed before today hubs are independent from each other for example the Asia Pacific and Europe sales team are big enough that they need to have a hub for selves but we know based on feedback that there is a need for some homes to have a relationship with each other we are providing a way for hubs to relate to each other with associated hubs for the Asia Pacific and Europe sales hubs to be associated to the greater sales hub let me show you how it works here I am at the Asia Pacific sales hub I'm ready to associate this hub to the greater sales organization so I start by going to the hub site settings open that out and you'll see here this associated hub this is how you'll connect hubs together now for the purposes of this demo I've already gone ahead and set up the relationship so you can see here how the asia-pacific hub is connected to global sales now one thing I want you to pay attention is these articles right here so in asia-pacific you have this article that's actually posted to this site called I close to launch ideas and then this part of the article that's actually sitting in Sydney ambassadors which is an Associated sites Asia Pacific now when I do a search here you can see that I'm getting results for that are part of this hub but most importantly you can see that I have a breadcrumb up here so even though I'm in Asia Pacific I can jump to sales and if I click on sales I know now search expands not only to asia-pacific but across my entire sales hub so you'll see these two coming here and you can see campaign strategies which is actually associated to global sales BAM search across multiple hubs now I showed you search from the sales asia-pacific but what about sales well good news same thing so if I start a search here and I click on ideas those two Asia Pacific's news post that I called out before show up here as well so again it doesn't matter where you're coming from whether you're coming from Associated site it's in Asia Pacific or you're coming from the top like in this example search now goes up and down across these associated hubs yay next up is easier creation of navigation so I'm at the sales club again and I want to easily connect to the sales asia-pacific right so we're making that easier for you so if you click here and edit in the navigation and you'll notice that I have this global sales I'm gonna click plods add a link and now I'll get this option to add associated hubs I'm gonna be able to click that click ok and just like that it it interjected the connect the hub's that are connected to this one so that Asia Pacific is here I also have Europe and I also have flow time and I can go ahead and click Edit that edit that you know goal sales get rid of the old one click Save and just like that I can have like I mentioned before you really want your hub now have to point to the most important sites and so now I have my connection to the other hubs I have my local sites that are the most important and I can find all the other sites quickly and others but this capability not only shows up here if I switch over back to asia-pacific let's say that I want to establish a connection as well so I click Edit again click link and I want to show my other kind of hubs that are connected to my sales so I click OK here and just like that I get a link to global sales Asia Pacific Europe ahead and edit this click okay and now I have a quick way to get back to global sales and a quick link to get to not only to the other set of hubs so now this list doesn't automatically get updated think of it as a quick way to get started and update manually we're always considered improvements to this though the last tool for designing your instrument architecture is site designs site designs enable you to apply a consistent set of actions on a site think of them as a modern template it consists of two components the site script is the set of actions you want to take place on a site such as adding a site column to a document library creating a list adding a navigation node there where all the action is site designs are a wrapper around site scripts and can contain one or more scripts and then what and it's what gets applied to the site you can use site designs during site creation as part of how association or even apply them on existing sites so I talked about what side the signs are now let's see them in action so here I am in the trends research site and I've decided that you know this site should actually be part of the overall sales hub so let's go ahead and join it I'm actually gonna be showing you two things at once I'm gonna show you the house like this line will get applied to this site but I'm also gonna show you back to talk about permissions how the permissions work for somebody who's joining a hub so I go ahead and click on the gear and I'll open site permissions and inside permissions you'll see the hub site Association drop-down and I'm gonna go ahead and find global sales and immediately you'll see two things first but I've you know global sales are selected just like I just did and second you'll see this option to sync up permissions to the site what this does is that it lets me opt out because if you didn't want to have you know the rest of the sales organization let's say that this was a top-secret site that you didn't want to have everybody have access to you can just uncheck this and not worry about people getting access to your site but you know trends research is all about showing and sharing that research information across the organization so I'm going to go ahead and keep it checked so and with that I'm gonna click on save now a couple of things are gonna happen first this sites going to join the hub BAM it's notice the immediate change so you'll see the theme changed drastically to the green you'll see the navigation and if when I open here site permissions you'll automatically see the hub component and that it's syncing and the sales FTE got added that's pretty cool right but at the same time I want you to play attention pay attention to this so when I talked about applying consistent set of configuration across your site this is what site designs are for so you can see here that on this site because I joined it to the hub as part of that action it's actually going ahead and setting up this site a certain way and just like that you see the site design got applied I can refresh and a couple of things happens so on my you'll immediately notice that now I have this case studies link so if I go here it created this library and it went ahead and added these files and when it created this library it not only created them but it also added schema you can see here as I scroll down and supercool it also added these two files if I go to documents it also not only provided documents in case studies it also set up a folder structure and additional files for me so giving me a quick way to get started with information that's important to me as part of the singles organization now you're wondering hey it's kind of hard to view everything that got applied so you can quickly go back to the gear settings find site designs here and you can see exactly what was that the site design did so here you have the case studies and it tells you exactly the changes that are carried out it tells you that case studies got added to the nav and it shows you the that it added a column to the documents default library and it added created these files and folders to it as well oh and they tells me that it even said document templates so if I click here and go to new it now also sets defaults for me for my template for my for my templates for this library pretty cool right I hope you guys like it now this is an example of a site design apply when you join it to a hub but I mentioned before that they applied not only when joining a hub you can also apply them when creating a site but you can also apply on existing sites without joining hub so let me show you what that looks like so here I am in market trend stories and this is one of these sites I'm not joining it part of the hub because part of you know a specific project and I reached that point where I'm like hey I want it to be more consistent I want to make sure that it's got the right brand for my organization so I go back to the gear settings open site to science here and I can pick from this drop-down whichever site design is available to me in this case I'm going to go ahead and click branding and as part of this a couple things will happen it'll apply a theme it'll set a logo for my site it'll also configure the nav for me and they'll even configure the footer so I'm going to go ahead and click apply site and after a few seconds now my site will get magically transformed to have all these things that's very similar to what I showed when you joined a hub but actually now when on an existing site without joining the hub and just like that a couple of seconds it got complete click view updated site and immediately you get that logo you get that branding that dark color behind-the-scenes you the nav was updated you can see here the Megane menu that get automatically got populated and as I scroll down you see the footer as well so you can use site designs whether it's during site creation ad hubs for hubs when joining to a hub or on existing sites to get configurations applied over and over again on your sites so you're probably wondering how did I create those site designs and like I mentioned it's made up of two things there's a site script and then there's the site design and site design is the wrapper so first site scripts we actually have an exporter tool that you can use so site designs and site scripts are created using PowerShell today but you can make it quicker by using our extract tools so we have a couple of commands special commands that let you generate the list in library sight scripts from existing ones that you set up and we also have a new option that generates lists libraries branding and even more other configurations with get SPO site script from web so do you use those build the lists and the libraries and the site how you want it and then use these commands to extract the script for you so you're not having to manually put it together here's a list of the fullest of site script actions that you can take advantage today we continue to invest in adding capabilities and new ones so do come back and check on the new ones that are getting added soon so to recap everything I just went through in one slide you'll want to connect the work place together with the intelligent and rich landing site for your organization using home sites you'll want to establish identity on your sites using our brand features you'll want to represent your divisions departments regions and take advantage of cross site navigation and roll ups and search with hubs and then you'll want to drive consistency with your own custom configurations across any number of sites using site designs now this might seem a little bit overwhelming you know I get the question a lot of hey how do you know how do I even get started what should I consider so here are some tips for you for getting started with your intranet architecture first think about starting small tackling one at a time you can either start at the very top that works well for some organizations start with the home site if that's the most important thing that you can be doing for your organization or I really recommend starting with a hub as well so pick one hub one department Division region which best fits your organization and use that service that use that to go first and that serves that's the showcase for everybody else a little bit of if you build it they will come kind of thing so I find that if you try to do it all at once it can you you can start getting some analysis paralysis around hey but what's the best way like what should be my home side what should be your hub so it's better to start with with with a start small and tackle one at a time and then continue to grow and that's the one of the key benefits of the modern SharePoint intranet is that it's flexible and you can change at any time you can create new hubs you can take away hubs you can move sites from one hub to the other you can start with a site that's your routes and then create a new site somewhere create a new communication site and then have that move over to the route so there's a quite a bit of flexibility another key tip is to involve key stakeholders early so make sure when you're kind of thinking about your internet architecture you bring in your corporate communications you bring your hub owners bring IT along as well to think about how you guys want to do this and I can't stress enough the reason we build intranets is to connect the workplace together so make sure you review your plans and test it out with a sample set of users so that you have that confidence when you go live that it'll meet the needs now a question I get very often in as well is you know how do I move from classic how do I think about it so one key is use navigation for the most important resources don't think that everything has to go into navigation if it's everything goes into navigation it can quickly become very overwhelming for folks so really hone in on what's the most important and then provide links to other places where they can find more for example like I showed at the very beginning you can use pages to highlight other relevant resources or you can even include a page where you have basically list out all the sites that they have access to leverage audience targeting so they can use serve more relevant content both in News and the navigation and then if you're if you have a ton of sites that are classic you can use transformation tools to upgrade to modern sites and I have a link at the end that shows you more information about that and by the way if you do have existing sites do know that you can also join those to the hub you don't get the full benefits like the hub nav unless you're on a modern page but you do get some of the others now you've heard me talk quite a bit about how flexible our intranet architecture is but let me actually show it to you here I am in the SharePoint admin center and you're looking at the active sites list and I went ahead and filtered by one of the hubs called product so I mentioned before how flexible our internet architecture is well let me show you how actually flexible it is so let's say for example that there was a reorganization or we decided that you know it turns out that you know the division for product research and product development actually makes more sense to go into the sales organization and we gave them a hub but s turns out you know it's it wasn't really the best approach so we're gonna go ahead and rehome these folks so it's really this easy so I'm going to go ahead and pick these four sites which are not the hub yet you can see the hub here and they are connected to the product hub bulk edit hub Association and I'm gonna go ahead and pick sales because that's the one I like the most for my examples global sales right here and just like that after a couple of seconds now these sites will transform over to using the global sales hub Association you can see just like that it was done now for my last hub which is this one which is currently the hub site I'm gonna go ahead and unregister as a hub site because I don't want it to be humming anymore and by the way we clean up for you here's prompts showing you that and now it's no longer a hook and I actually now want to associate it with the hub global sales and what up and just like that now these other sites were that used to be a hub and connected to that are now no longer part of that hub and so I can fill there now to global sales and show me all the sites that were previously part of global sales and these new ones so just kind of going to show that it's really not like it's good to get it right but at the same time you can be flexible and change this you needed so back to that tip you can start small pick one and your hubs grow with you as time progresses so I just showed you how flexible your internet could be now to sum everything up let's go into some resources you could use to get started first I recommend reading through realizing the value of intelligent internet it's a great article if you want to learn more about modernizing classic sites go to aka.ms/offweb modernize and down below you'll see a k-8 autumn s links for both home sites more information around branding and even more about hubs and if you want to get started with site script insight designs here's a link for that as well BAM and just like that we're done things for joining me in this session I hope it was useful I hope you learned a lot about architecture in your intranet and then it was useful to understand how we think about it how our customer other customers are successfully implementing it including Microsoft's

Channel: Microsoft 365 Community

Views: 23,447

Rating: 4.9571047 out of 5

Keywords: SharePoint, Development, PnP, Dev, community, open-source, Microsoft, Microsoft365, teamwork, productivity, remote work, files, sharing, intranet, intelligent intranet

Id: 8jPzjNlf3bM

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020