SharePoint Intranet Examples Deep Dive!

hi it's Dougie wood and in this video I'm going to be showing you some great examples of some SharePoint intranets both home pages and content ideas so what we're going to be covering off in this particular video as I say they're going to be some examples of SharePoint online sites which will include internet home pages different layout options as well as some names that you might want to call your intranet we're also going to be looking at some Department sites so different departments like sales Human Resources Finance there's also an element of brand guidelines so we've got some ideas about how you can share your brand guidelines with your organization as well as some content ideas so some things that you can include in your shareport Internet to make it as valuable as possible so let's take a look so the first thing we're going to be looking at is some internet home pages and now I like to give them slightly different names to be able to separate the different types of layouts so the first one we're going to look at is called one place I love the name of this intranet and I can't take credit for this it was actually one of my clients that came up with a name for their internet as it was one place to find all of their content so I really like this idea one place is a really good mixture of um when we're looking at these kind of layouts in terms of using things like the new scroller across the top here um to show news articles which are coming up and allowing users to be able to click through and read the full article um I'll just go back to the home page you can scroll through them as well by using these sliders on the left hand side on the right hand side then on the right hand side we can see we've got this countdown timer now this is set to a product launch but it could be set to um anything you you wanted to do so there's a particular event that's coming up or a key date that you want people to be aware of it's also got this kind of call to action functionality that you can click on this button and it might open up a form or go to an external web page for a registration of an event or something along the lines of that underneath we've then got this secondary news area so these might be news articles which are pulling from other areas of the internet maybe some Department sites or some of the community sites that are part of the overall internet we can also see on the right hand side on the secondary kind of content area we've got my news now it's becoming much more popular to actually have what they call audience targeted news now SharePoint online will allow you to create uh news articles which are targeted at specific groups of users so you can actually um not only target it just on an individual team but maybe a department or a business function maybe a geographical location so that means then when I log on to this maybe I'm seeing news here which is targeting me based on the department I work in or news of the country that I work in further down we can also see some recommended viewing and this might be again links to videos that could be on YouTube but they could also be on stream as well and we could embed stream videos um directly into SharePoint natively using the stream web part other cool features of this template is embedding things like Yammer so we can have um some feeds in here so we can share thoughts and ideas and updates we could also embed a Twitter feed and we can see the latest tweets which are coming from a specific Twitter handle um on the right hand side just skipped over here we've also got some um content things like my recent documents um now there are web Parts in SharePoint which will provide almost like a tailored experience uh to a user to show content which is specifically relevant to them so these are documents I recently opened from say the policy area of my SharePoint internet it will also show me frequent sites I'm accessing so um again making it easier for people to navigate between different areas of the internet we can see these are some of the different sites that have been recently accessing then underneath this we then have our um kind of call to actions and these might be linking up to learning portals social groups we're going to talk about benefits and having a benefit site later on but these can be linking out to some of your key kind of areas of your internet and then again finally at the bottom right corner you've got my recommendations so these are documents maybe that are in areas that I'm working on but I've not yet opened and it's recommending that I take a look at that so that's the first template which um I'm calling one place um it's really useful really great balance um between kind of this uh clean kind of look as well as having kind of plenty of news articles and dynamic content which is rolling up which is a bespoke and customized to the end user so the next internet home page that um I'm going to show you I refer to as Lighthouse and again I really like this name um uh for an intranet because it's almost like the beacon it's the the place where you go to get the the latest kind of information updates um and all that centralized points from your organization again it's a very similar layout to the template I was previously showing you in the sense that we have this content on the left hand side and this secondary content area on the right hand side but this is much more of a functional type of site so when I'm working with my clients I often try and explain that SharePoint internet home page is finding the right sweet spot between the kind of function or the functional kind of aspects like navigation and helping people find things but there's usually very static content compared to more Dynamic content which is more free-flowing like news articles and events and content which is being created on a much more frequent basis and you've got to find that right sweet spot because not every organization is going to have a large internal comms team which is creating a lot of news articles and keeping that sort of thing up to date so this one leans much more towards the functional side of things in the sense that we've got these large hero tiles across the top which are really easy to change the background image the text which says top of it as well as the hype Links of where it's going to and just like with any of the other sites um navigation The Hub navigation quick links we can link to anything we want that's got a URL so as long as it's got a hyperlink we could link to something internal like a page a file a folder or we could link to something external um like a News website or if you're using um something like breathe HR or bamboo HR or um any of those types of external facing um kind of sites you might want to link off to them from these tiles as well so underneath that we can see we do have a news function so this is then rolling up our news again this is quite a large volume of news that's being displayed on the home page here um so we've roughly got about 12 different articles again I ask our clients to to think about reverse engineering how many um articles you're actually going to be creating on um what type of scale because let's say for example if you're only going to create one news article uh um a month then technically as you create news articles they'll drop off the page but if it's 12 once every month and it's 12 months for this news article to drop off the page because it'll slide across to the right like this then it'll go to this list and then it'll drop off the page whereas if you're creating a news article every day then this is only 12 days worth of content which is really good really fresh there's nothing worse than coming onto an internet homepage and finding a news article from something that was created at Christmas time and it's now currently summer and you're thinking hang on how old is this content so again reverse engineer that and think well if you're only going to be creating a few news articles then maybe use a layout which isn't going to be showing as many news articles on the page further down we've got more things like call to actions here which might be linking off to a certain Innovation let's have a projects or initiatives again some more call to actions here where maybe linking out to kind of videos um and using this again this is actually a hero uh web part which is only showing one tile and it's actually set to be in layers and I really like this kind of look and feel because we can have a nice large image we can have a title as well as a little category about what this is and this can then link off to another one of our maybe sites so I've actually created another type of site we're going to come on to talking about is an event or in this case I'm using it as a conference site and this could be like a promotion on our homepage to that particular conference site that we're going to take a look at shortly again on the right side we've got some more content um so we've got things like um we can have World clocks so depending on where you're working in the world and different countries that you're collaborating with you might want to know the different times of day you could also have uh the weather so if you're traveling between different offices sometimes good to know what the weather is going to be between um those different locations again the my news so this could be customized to you specifically dependent on where you are in the world your job um sort of title departments that sort of stuff um you've got my recent documents on my recent sites again um just duplicating the functionality we were seeing earlier and then company events so events which are coming up um so we've got some more examples of that coming up in a second so the next home page template I refer to as the Hub so the reason why I call it the Hub is because that's what Microsoft know a lot of these kind of sort of sites as as a hub site as it connects things together and it sort of you're using a hub as your centralized place um so I quite like that name for this layout um if I'm honest this is actually my favorite type of layout and you'll see on a lot my videos I use this as my kind of go-to site the reason why I like this site is because I find a really good mixture between that kind of balancing act we were talking about before of having uh functional things like navigation as well as that kind of dynamic scrolling news content in this slideshow and it's a great balance between the two because it's very important to have the right content loaded at the top of the page when you first see an intranet so this is where we can actually see the new scrolling and the functional kind of links to quick access areas things like raising support tickets or submitting expense requests these are things you want to quickly access so without having to scroll we've got this directly here again underneath this we've got some call to actions and linking out to key things like policies materials marketing materials branded materials as well as forms as well so these are key things in internet people are often wanting to jump directly to you can also include things like a mission statement um or a quote from somebody that's actually one you're wanting to kind of embed this into the daily kind of work life of people so it really gets ingrained into everything that they do again we've got some news here and actually I've chosen just to show three news articles here so this is a great layout um if you're choosing to have an internet which maybe doesn't have a lot of news content that's been created all that often so say for example if I was only creating a news article once a month sorry once a week that would mean that I'd have four articles a month so that means that I would only have this news article displayed for four weeks and then after a month it would drop off and it would appear the seal area once um actually the news articles have dropped off this so once you've got more than three news articles that see all option will appear and when you click on that that'll take you through to this area um where you can see all the news articles that previously appeared on that uh home page so just going back then scrolling down onto this we've also got upcoming events so this could be things like get togethers fundraisers charity events but it could also be related to um training um or conferences webinars things like that the cool feature I like about the events as well is that you can click on this add to my calendar so you can add that event as a reminder to your own calendar that that's coming up we've also got this call to action here so this is where we can have a button which is linking off to maybe some key policies or again an initiative uh campaign that you're currently trying to promote again on the right hand side we've got this secondary content area so this is where we could do things like having um quick links uh or call to actions that you have a question this could link off to a contact form or even generate an open up directly an email you've got people web parts so this is um great for sort of embedding who maybe the useful contact is for this particular intranet if you've got any questions again embedding latest tweets um or quick charts so quick charts are really useful as a much quicker to update content rather than embedding power bi so now you I don't want to say that you can't use power bi because you can use power bi there is a web part that you can add into a SharePoint page if you do have power bi reports but I really like these quick charts because they're super simple to update and in fact if I just go into edit mode I'll quickly show you how they're updated because it's so super simple I'm just going to open this up click on edit web part and then we can see I've already added in these fields but I could add in say I've got October November December let's add in January for example and then we'll add in a value and you can see it's automatically updated here it's really super simple quick and easy to update there's a republish my page again that can be in a bar chart uh bar chart or it could be a pie chart and I've also chosen to add a video of the month which could be embed from uh YouTube but again we could embed stream videos or even stream channels directly into our SharePoint page as well so let's talk a little bit now um about some other types of sites so Department sites so say for example a sales department site so quite often you get Department sites which are all about promoting content um that that department wants to share with um The Wider organization and going back to my internet home page you can see as a hub site we can have this Hub navigation bar and quite often you'll have a top header called departments which you can then link off to things like a sales department so as a sales site this is traditionally a bit more of a functional type of site so we're using things like this hero tiles to make it easy for people to jump directly into um certain content which is going to make the lives of sales people a bit easier so it might be say for example top tips for sales people or information on how to communicate product value this is all going to be content which is going to be really useful especially to the sales team uh sort of new starters that are joining maybe a bit of information here as well about things like how we work the sales Vision um things like that which is for the wider kind of organization um to know exactly what does the sales department do how does it work and these are almost like FAQs which may lead on to um they could be documents PDFs but it would be better if they were SharePoint pages to kind of build out that kind of portal a little bit more again we can create news articles from here so these are news articles that are tagged with the global sales site so if we were to roll these up onto our home page we'll know of our internet we'd know which department site these news articles came from we could also tag in here the sales team so as a sales department quite often there are sub teams which sit underneath this um which we might want to Branch out an individual team sites now quite often you would only see the teams that you have access to and you'd only be able to access so say for example if I was a member of the consumer retail team I could click through to this and I could see my team site here um so I could see maybe some news articles some useful guides resources as well as some um sort of product pictures images some information about the products that is that we're actually selling so this is almost like a little start a pack of information that's going to be really useful for me as a member of the consumer retail team and this actually is a SharePoint team site which means that it could also be related to a Microsoft team where it could have that instant messaging that collaboration with my team members as well so I'm just going to go back to the sales homepage um so then underneath that we've also got upcoming sales events so these might be conferences or things like that or training that's coming up popular documents so things I might want to download maybe sales materials that sort of stuff again we could see maybe um some events or town hall type events which have come up videos and useful contacts as well in the sales department next up um is our events template so Events maybe things like I'm going to show you an example of a conference that you're using this for but any kind of events Department would probably want to use these types of things to be promoting core events which are happening around the organization so this is an event which is promoting a conference for uh drone enthusiasts um but essentially take this with a pinch of salt this could be any type of event um so in this scenario it's simulating a conference for a tech organization which is running conferences um about certain technology like drones but you could take this with a Pinter saw and apply it to all sorts of different events so you can see the home page is promoting um the sort of the date of when this event is is going to be happening a countdown timer to when the event is going to get started as well as a bit of sort of text up what it is maybe you could include some events which are sessions which are taking part on that day and even add those sessions as reminders into your own calendar as well as promoting the keynote speech uh what the schedule of the conference is going to be and even providing an area where you could sign up to get tickets maybe for your particular event also we can see that we could have Pages which link off to details of who the speakers would be at this particular conference the schedule the event FAQs related to that event but this is just one example of how you could potentially use this this layout it's a great way for internal comms teams to be promoting an event which is coming up and build up that hype with that buzz around it before we go any further just a quick reminder please do subscribe to the channel it really does help us grow this out further like the video and if you've got any questions ask them in the comments box below and we try to make sure we respond to everybody but let's get back to the video so the next apartment site we're going to take a look at is the marketing site and this is um one of the most important sites to get your kind of content across in the right way so going back to our Department's links here I'm just going to jump into my marketing site from here and you can see the marketing site is a great way of promoting things like maybe it's a product launch or an event which is coming up or anything that the internal comms is trying to push out at that point in time you could use this countdown timer which we've looked at in other areas of the internet so far but you can have it as a full width section on your SharePoint page um so other things that we've got so we can have news from your teams rolling up onto here so again this is just a news web part which is displayed in slightly smaller area and this could even be a little scroller as well of some content um that you want to promote they might want to link off to some brand guidelines and we're going to talk a little bit more about brand guidelines uh in a second in the fact that we're going to have our own brand guidelines SharePoint template site as well but you can also see that we can have things like find photos another common thing that marketing teams do with SharePoint is that they have a stock image Library that's pre-approved of images that you can have stored on SharePoint and even have an org image Library so when you're adding images to news articles and pages in SharePoint rather than using these of upload images or stock images you can actually have your own image Library appear in there as well as your org images but essentially that needs to feed from somewhere which is typically the marketing site where they maintain that stock images to make sure that they stay on brand so you can see we've got other things in here so maybe it's linking off to social media content or content related to sort of presentations we can see marketing events which are coming up as well as some generic information that you might want to give out about the global footprint Global assets and Tool kits that you offer as well as again maybe a large kind of call to action um for whatever campaigns or initiatives that you're running so this is the the typical kind of marketing home page looks really nice really clean you might also want to have a bit of information about who you are your kind of overall vision and strategy as well as the leadership um so maybe some pages about the leadership team and members of the team what it is that you do so this might be all the services that you offer or even linking to if you have like a marketing collateral form that you want people to fill out to request things that are created for them but essentially this is the overarching marketing site um uh I think it's got a really good clean look and feel to it it's a great place as I say to have a sort of centralized point for things like stock imagery and branded materials to make sure that people are staying on your brand guidelines talking of which the brand guidelines for a lot of organizations tend to either be PowerPoint slides or PDF or something like that which is a bit of a document which floats around um and not always given the attention that it should have so why not instead of doing a a document and creating a document for this why not create a SharePoint site specifically for this that you can pass people through to as a kind of self-service area to gather information that they need to ensure that they stay compliant with brand guidelines so this might be a simplified version of the marketing site we were looking at before but essentially it could be linking off to things like um the the stock imagery that we're talking about before maybe it's just giving some people some really easy information about why um things like Simplicity matters and the importance of keeping brand identity going um so it's it's quite often their articles their Pages they're almost like Wiki articles news Pages which helps educate people again having some quick links to things like photos brand guidelines um PowerPoint templates word templates things like that and just some generic information to make sure that people are staying in compliance with your brand guidelines um there might be some general information on things like what's the story of your brand um and where things came from so it's a great for especially sales guys that know the kind of overarching brand story so when they're speaking to your customers it's transparent and everything that they're they're talking about as well as things like strategy uh identity and resources that can be used as well also having a help function as well so some FAQs so often marketing teams uh get inbound questions about what they can use how they use it things like that which you might want to automatically and so with FAQs if you want to look at building an FAQs I do actually have a separate video on my channel which is all about building FAQs in SharePoint so check that out because that could be really useful in this scenario or it could even just be that you're wanting to ask a question which opens up an email or goes to a Microsoft form or something like that so the next Apartments I want to talk about is finance so Finance is a very common Department site that you see on SharePoint as it will often provide key information forecasts um and things like that to people as well as providing an area for things like expense requests so let's take a look at that so this is the finance site layout that I've got here and as you can see we've got across the top here that hero tile again I really love using this kind of single layered hero tile to give it an image a bit of text as well as a little category label across the top and then we can have this continue reading text which actually you can change that text it doesn't have to say continue reading um it could say read more or discover more or click here or whatever you like but that can then click off to a little bit more information about what the finance team does which might be one of these Pages up here so um so our leadership how we work um or one of those uh sort of pages that we've got linked to across the top as well underneath that we've got a little bit of a sort of Bio text area of what the department is and what we do as well as some links as well so some useful links maybe to the sort of the vision of the uh or the leadership of the department as well as some useful links out to maybe things like expense requests or that sort of stuff again some upcoming events from the Department as well as some useful downloaded materials so if you get to sort of create a expense request power app it might you might still be using Excel spreadsheets or forms or things like that and you might want to have these as documents that people can download directly from these useful documents download area as well as having some news again creating the news on this site will create it as news that's been created on the finance site so if I was to roll this up onto the home page I could see uh when there's a year-end reminder or when there's um a change to the expenses uh process and policy um that news article could be pulled up onto my internet homepage and I could see that it's generated on the finance site this is another little example of FAQs I've seen before I really like using sections or in this case collapsible sections as FAQs and then you can just move between the different sort of questions that you have and answering FAQs on your internet page is a great way of reducing traffic um of questions and emails and phone calls to that particular Department the next Department site I'm going to be talking about is the human resources or HR site so this is a great place for storing information on kind of policies um General kind of self-service portal again can reduce the amount of questions that employees have that are direct that human resources if there is a proper self-service portal set up so this is an example of a human resources site across the top we might have some news articles which have been created so the news articles I've created from this site again I'm going to pull up onto our internet homepage and say they've come from a human resources site so any kind of updates related to kind of policies benefits things like that are really good to be created from this site so that they're rolled up onto the homepage and people can trust that they know they're coming from the human resources so they are a trusted kind of policy change um other things so um we've not seen this yet in any of these examples but you can embed things like Powerpoints and other types of documents directly into a SharePoint site so you can see here we can flick through this PowerPoint on different slides as well as we can see upcoming um sort of dates so in this case we're looking at upcoming um uh corporate holidays in the US but you might want to have that to be all sorts of different things so maybe some training that's coming up um or sort of get-togethers parties conferences all that sort of stuff as well um so we can see here we've got um things like um going to our benefit site so we can talk a bit about benefits in a second but this might link to key kind of areas of that benefit site so um things around sort of gym memberships or employee handbooks um discussing things like work-life balance and that sort of thing as well as links to core areas like careers so learning development feedback maybe linking to areas where you're submitting information um to your line manager for um personal development plans things like that links down to key tools that you're using things like booking holiday um payroll systems um that sort of thing you can embed powerapps as well so this is just an example but it might be say for example if you're booking a holiday you could embed your holiday request power app directly into your SharePoint human resources site again across the bottom we've got some useful contacts so these might be people that you can reach out to now I would suggest using this with a little bit of caution because if you ended up embedding people into this page these are the people that are going to be receiving kind of the the contacts the the questions and things like that quite a lot so if you don't want that just to be going directly to people then you might want to use like a call to action which when you click on that opens up an email to a shared mailbox instead then the final site that I want to talk about is Company benefits so this quite often sits side by side with the human resources site now I tend to find when I'm working with different organizations that actually they often have really good benefit packages the problem is that they're just not shouting about them to their their employees and they should know about that and actually um boosting kind of retention and holding on to people is really important and having something like a SharePoint benefits like can really increase that kind of stickiness of your employees to stay around because they're actually seeing the benefits that they have and also it's answering the questions that they might have about making the most of those benefits so having a site like this where we can link off to um core kind of information about the benefits is going to be really useful again we've got this hero tiles here that we can navigate to some of the core kind of areas um we can see information um about sort of maybe sort of financial education that you provide or Medical Treatments or medical care I should say um we can also see things like corporate kind of holidays um events which come up so even just telling people about things that the Christmas party and maybe you have a summer kind of get together and things like that and showing those kind of benefits off is really kind of impactful especially to new starters that are joining the organization and they're trying to get a feel for the company culture and what the types of benefits are that they can receive as part of working for your organization again we can break this down into some other areas um so under benefits or even work life so work life balance so talking about time off linking to vacations policies about making sure people are taking holidays um and all of that good stuff we can roll up into these kind of navigational areas so well done if you stuck all the way through that if you did please let me know in the comments because um this is one of the longest videos actually that I've done um originally I was planning it was going to be a 10 minute kind of overview and it ended up being much more of a deep dive so if you like the longer videos I would like to hear from you let me know and I can do a few more of them in the future or if you'd rather have my videos a little bit shorter maybe around the 10 minute Mark let me know as well please do subscribe to the channel like this video any thoughts comments questions use the comments box below uh and I hope to hear from you shortly thank you

Channel: Dougie Wood

Views: 5,919

Keywords: sharepoint intranet, sharepoint, intranet, sharepoint online, intranet sharepoint, sharepoint intranet examples, microsoft sharepoint, sharepoint intranet templates, sharepoint intranet portals, sharepoint intranet tutorial, sharepoint intranets, sharepoint hr intranet portal, create a simple intranet portal in sharepoint, sharepoint tutorial, intranet examples, sharepoint 2013, sharepoint intranet example, sharepoint office 365, sharepoint online tutorial

Id: dy3uBGp-vmc

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023