The Intranet is Dead. Long Live Microsoft Teams!

In this session we talked about the intersection to Teams, SharePoint, and other M365 tools and how we can leverage them all together to create an engaging user experience. To start things off we should define what we mean when we talk about an Intranet.

What is an Intranet?

Wikipedia defines an intranet as: A computer network for sharing information, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization. Access to people outside of an organization is usually limited.

The Reality

Intranets represent many different things. They are a communication vehicle allowing the company to share news and information with its employees. It is also a place where groups can work together and collaborate.

For an effective Intranet, you need content. It’s always about the content. This can include:

  • Pages
  • Documents
  • Video
  • Images and other digital assets

And for all that content to make sense to anyone, you need:

  • Information architecture
  • Groups for targeting
  • Search
  • Context (What tool are people using to consume that content)
    • It used to be Outlook
    • Then SharePoint
    • Now it is more frequently Teams

The Intranet does still serve a purpose, but that purpose is evolving. It doesn’t matter where stuff lives. It matters whether or not people can get to it quickly. So where does the content live?

  • Pages - SharePoint
  • Documents - SharePoint
  • Video and Images - SharePoint, Stream

Where do we get the context from?

  • Interactions with others in Teams
    • Chat
    • Team Posts
  • Yammer
  • Notifications from other tools
    • Outlook
    • Yammer
    • Planner
    • Power Apps
  • Email (Yes people still use that)

What about Viva Connections

Q: “Is Viva Connections intended to be a replacement for the Intranet?”

The short answer is no. Microsoft Viva Connections isn’t intended to be a replacement for the intranet. It is a way for us to enhance that context.

It gives us a way to:

  • Provide Intranet access in Teams (SharePoint content natively in context)
    • Using the Viva Desktop
    • App Bar
  • Provide “applets” for employees to use to get things done
    • Viva Connections Extensions (SPFx)

Q: “Is there a use case for not using a SharePoint intranet at all and just using Teams”

There are certainly reasons to use Teams exclusively for communication and Intranet functionality. Small companies are a great use case for this. We use an all company chat for group communication. For a large company it doesn’t make sense.

Resources

Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.