Latest Intranet & Employee Experience topics

Intranet owners have a wealth of resources at their disposal, catering to their needs across various aspects of intranet management. Whether you’re looking to configure your intranet, enhance your knowledge through self-guided learning, explore powerful user configurations, or seek inspiration from configuration examples, there are numerous community-driven assets available to you. Basic Configuration Intelligent Intranet by Microsoft Intelligent Intranet is a Microsoft site that offers insights into their vision for intranets, providing a comprehensive understanding of what an intranet entails.

In this episode of Ask Sympraxis we begin by looking at the home and start page experiences in Microsoft 365 through the lens of the Maturity Model. The journey begins at level 100, where some users have isolated site collections. These site collections lack interconnectedness. At level 200, this could include the utilization of the Viva Connections Home Experience, which consolidates news and conversations from various sites, along with surfacing the SharePoint app bar navigation.

In today’s fast-paced world, effective internal and external communication is crucial for organizations. SharePoint News provides a centralized platform to streamline news delivery and enhance collaboration. Join as we delve into the various features and capabilities of SharePoint News. The Maturity Model In relation to an organization’s news and the Maturity Model, an organization at the 100 level solely relies on email for news distribution. Level 200 introduces newsletters and aggregated information from different departments.

The Microsoft 365 conference took place Spring of 2023 and introduced the community to a lot of updates road mapped for the platform. Continue for Sympraxis’ take on many of these changes! Copilot Microsoft Copilot is going to be rolling out slowly and is a new artificial intelligence software. Although there is a lot of excitement about this introduction, we need to mention that it’ll likely be a service you’ll have to pay for and the cost is yet to be announced.

Business use case: Benefits documents Join the Ask Sympraxis team for this session focusing on building sustainable information architecture (IA) through the use case of benefit documents management in your Microsoft 365 environment. From backend management of the content owners, to easy front-end consumption in your intranet, we walk through many of the challenges that are unique to benefits documents. Maturity model approach The Maturity Model for Microsoft 365, based on the capability maturity model, takes a holistic view of this technology and focuses on different business outcomes so you can distinguish your current state versus your desired state.

In this session of Ask Sympraxis Derek, Julie, and Todd are joined by Andrew Connell, developer and SPFx expert, and Stefan Bauer, developer and designer, to discuss when and why to build custom Microsoft 365 code that extends its functionality, particularly in SharePoint and Teams. However, we only suggest extending the platform when the out-of-the-box solutions fail to meet 80% of your business requirements. From there, try some of the tried-and-true technologies that exist such as PnP search web parts or list/column formatting, which give you more configuration options.

This session of Ask Sympraxis focuses on different methods and steps you can take to empower users while you build your intranet and how to set up Microsoft 365. Not every suggestion will be pertinent to your organization, which is why we suggest starting with the Maturity Model and determining your current and desired levels! This session is also a great reference to come back to as your organization levels up in maturity.

SharePoint Search has been available for quite some time and can be managed by a variety of flexible tools. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft Search tends to be more rigid as it’s not as mature. Although Microsoft is constantly adding capabilities to Microsoft Search, we are focusing primarily on SharePoint Search for this article. Building columns In SharePoint, a common use is to build a list or library with columns to organize information.

We’ve come across many clients who express the need for an employee directory. We have learned this may mean something slightly different for each company. We always return to, what problem are they trying to solve? This week we are discussing how you’ll find people, their information, and different surfacing options. User stories User stories are a great resource to define outcome goals. For example, an employee directory might be used for a wide variety of different reasons so having your goals outlined upfront and identifying who will be the users, why they need it, and what they’re going to achieve by using it, is important.

In this episode of Ask Sympraxis we are focusing on search optimization. Search may seem initially as simple as typing into a box and having results show up, however you’ll soon learn that there are a tremendous number of options to customize search to truly be the most effective possible for your users. Maturity Model approach How individuals think about and/or use search in their organization can be broken down into different levels of maturity.