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Fundamentals of Intranet Success in 2020

Michal Pisarek ‐ July 10, 2020

5 MIN READ

We’ve overcomplicated the technological landscape for digital workers and organizations today. That is why it is our objective at Orchestry to make work simple, getting you to the right Office 365 tool at the right time, for the right purpose.​ 

We understand that designing a strong and powerful intranet that is user-centric, but also sustainable and customizable, can be tricky. That is why we have decided to step in and share our expertise.

Fashioning Intranet Success in 2020

While it is important to have a good-looking website, precise search experience, seamless forms, and influential social features, it’s not the be-all and end-all. You also need to have an intranet that supports the objectives and goals of your organization. Common business requirements of an intranet include:

  • Improved collaboration amongst the workforce
  • Enhanced engagement when making announcements
  • Increased system accessibility 
  • Better internal communications
  • Enriched productivity

If after reading that, you’ve noticed your intranet hits most of these points, then you’re well on the road to a successful intranet!

Common Roadblocks for Digital Workplace Success

In general, businesses seem to have similar struggles when it comes to digital workplaces. These fall into the following buckets:

  • Poor user experience
  • Strategic misalignment
  • Disengaged employees
  • Information silos and/or bad content structure

So, although the content may exist, it takes too long for users to get to it quickly, resulting in an underutilized intranet. 

Modern Intranet Success Roadblocks - Digital Workplace Success - Orchestry

Tips on Creating a Successful MS SharePoint Intranet

To create a truly successful intranet in MS SharePoint, it’s essential to have a combination of these 5 elements:

  1. Alignment and understanding of your organizational needs 
  2. Ensuring your technology supports your business objectives
  3. Maintained and monitored content 
  4. Buy-in from all the people associated with the intranet project
  5. Excellent processes to ensure your intranet is set up and supported diligently

Below we have defined why each element is imperative to creating a successful foundation for your intranet.

1. Organizational Alignment

To create a great intranet, it’s important to remember that its success is driven from within your organization. By understanding what your organization needs, you can define how your intranet should function. User groups, managers, and employees tend to have conflicting preferences, so understanding and aligning these is key. Additionally, change can be hard for many, so by implementing intranet champions within your organization you can help spread positivity. 

2. Technology

The technology you require depends on what your organization needs from an intranet. In general, intranet features include:

  • News
  • Events 
  • Corporate Directory
  • Search Capabilities
  • Forms & Workflows
  • Social Engagement Tools 

All of which need to be accessible via mobile. 

You should ensure you understand your company’s needs before you make any decisions on what technology to implement. Here at Orchestry, we have a preference for MS SharePoint as it provides a lot of features to organizations, some of which are essential for a successful intranet and others which are optional depending on the organizational requirements. 

3. Content

Good content is central to ensuring your intranet has a high level of user engagement. It requires thoughtfulness and thorough planning: 

 — A content audit should be performed to identify what content is relevant, what should be kept and what should be deleted or re-written.

— After this, create a content plan to identify who will write the new content or migrate the existing content. As part of this, content authoring guidelines will serve as a foundation to ensure all curated content is top-notch. 

— The final stage is a content review. This will help you to instill cadence and ensure errors are captured. Ultimately, you want your intranet to remain up-to-date and accurate. 

4. People

Inputting a new intranet into your business impacts everybody in some way, from end-users to executives and everyone in between. It’s important to have great people on your team and they need to understand their roles and responsibilities from the outset of the project. Whether it’s executive alignment for support or change management for increased acceptance, everyone is involved in ensuring your MS SharePoint intranet is a success.

5. Processes

To ensure your intranet is sustainable, long-term governance is extremely important. This helps define the types of content that are created and made available to the masses. Each business has its own style of governance, but support processes are fundamental to intranet success, including:

  • Facilitating how users request help 
  • How users suggest a new feature 
  • How contributions are made to content 

Defining guidelines is beneficial as they help to steer the direction of intranet content and define acceptable standards. For example:

— Guidelines on engagement and authoring help to manage different areas of the intranet

— Guidelines on behavior are essential for setting expectations and protocols on the intranet (e.g. including profile pictures)

Improve Intranet - MS SharePoint - Digital Workplace

The Modern-Day Intranet

Your intranet is part of the digital workplace, essentially, your digital workplace encompasses all the technological tools your organization uses. Most organizations have a need for both a digital workplace and an intranet. An intranet can provide a base for employees to gain access to the digital tools within the workplace. 

However, both your digital workplace and your intranet need to be an interactive experience for the end-user. They’re platforms where users can find and access the tools they need easily in order to perform their roles more efficiently.

Back in 2018, the Nielsen Norman Group’s Design Annual undertook some research that has stood the test of time and is still relevant in 2020. It showed that the best intranets include: 

  • Simple structure and content
  • Supportive systems for content owners
  • Plenty of planning prior to launch
  • Iterative and flexible design
  • All aspects are created with the user in mind 

Importance of Intranet Information Architecture

Intranet information architecture is generally defined as the content structure of a website or intranet, including site structure, wireframes, the layout of content and information categorization (e.g. news, policies, procedures, etc.). Basically, Information Architecture is the art and science of structuring, labeling, and categorizing content.

There are exercises and activities you can perform to ensure your information architecture is performing at its best, pre-and-post intranet launch. Join our upcoming webinar ‘Intranet Information Architecture Best Practices‘ to learn more about intranet success in 2020. Register now! >>

 

Work Made Simple with Orchestry

Orchestry makes work simple in Office 365, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online by empowering your IT Administrators and employees to define a winning Microsoft 365 adoption and change management strategy, with a roadmap of what to use when, for what purpose.

Orchestry empowers organizations to define a winning Microsoft 365 adoption and change management strategy. Built by SharePoint MVPs and Microsoft 365 experts, Orchestry helps organizations formulate the roadmap of ‘what to use when’, increasing technology adoption, empowering through governance, and simplifying through intelligent provisioning organization-wide. 

To see Orchestry in action, send us an email at hello@orchestry.com to start your free access now!

About the Author

Michal Pisarek Image

Michal Pisarek

Orchestry CEO, 7X Microsoft MVP

Seven-time Microsoft SharePoint MVP, former Co-Founder of Dynamic Owl Consulting and of BONZAI Intranet, this serial entrepreneur, international speaker, Office 365 thought leader, and former professional chef brings the great depth of product, leadership, and user experience expertise to Orchestry, working with Fortune 500 companies to deliver maximum efficiency of their Microsoft 365 investments.

When Michal takes a day off occasionally, you will find him experimenting in the kitchen, inventing a new cocktail or learning a new language while enjoying all that Vancouver has to offer with his wife, daughter, and furry companion.

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Introduction

This Privacy Policy explains what information Orchestry Software Inc. and its associated entities (collectively “Orchestry”) collect about you, why, what we do with that information, how we share it and how we handle the content you place in our products and services. It also explains the choices available to you regarding our use of your personal information and how you can access and update this information.

Privacy Policy Scope

Our Privacy Policy applies to the information we collect when you use one of our services, or when you otherwise engage with Orchestry Software, including, but not limited to:
when you visit our websites (“Websites“);
when you contact us for assistance;
when we connect with you as a prospective customer or as a customer;
when you attend customer or prospective customer events;
when you meet us at third party events, gatherings or meetups.
Orchestry is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy applies to our websites (Websites), including www.orchestry.com, www.success.orchestry.com and www.app-dev.orchestry.com, owned and controlled by Orchestry.

This Privacy Policy governs our data collection, processing and usage practices. It also describes your choices regarding use, access and correction of your personal information. By using the Websites, you consent to the data practices described in this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with the data practices described in this Privacy Policy, you should not use the Websites.

Information We Collect

We collect personal data that you submit to us via our website or third-party tools including, for example, when applying for a job via our website or requesting support in relation to one of our services.
You are free to explore the Websites without providing any Personal Information about yourself. When you visit the Websites, we request that you provide Personal Information about yourself, and we collect Navigational Information.

Information Collection & Access

Orchestry acknowledges that you have the right to access your Personal Information. If requested to remove data we will respond within a reasonable timeframe.

We may transfer Personal Information to companies that help us provide our service, such as those organizations as part of our Global Partner Alliance. Transfers to subsequent third parties for the sole purpose of responding to requests from Websites in the appropriate geography service territory.

“Personal Information”
This refers to any information that you voluntarily submit to us and that identifies you personally, including contact information, such as your name, e-mail address, company name, address, phone number, and other information about yourself or your business. Personal Information can also include information that you enter into on the Websites, and information about you that is available on the internet, such as from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, or publicly available information that we acquire from service providers.

“Navigational Information”
This refers to information about your computer and your visits to this website such as your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit and pages viewed.

We use Navigational Information to operate and improve the Websites. We may also use Navigational Information alone or in combination with Personal Information to provide you with personalized information about Orchestry.

Information About Children

The Websites are not intended for or targeted at children under 13, and we do not knowingly or intentionally collect information about children under 13. If you believe that we have collected information about a child under 13, please contact us at hello@orchestry.com, so that we may delete the information.

Information Usage

We use the information we collect only in compliance with this Privacy Policy.

In addition to the uses identified elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, we may use your Personal Information to: (a) improve your browsing experience by personalizing the Websites; (b) send information to you which we think may be of interest to you by post, email, or other means; (c) send you marketing communications relating to our business.

We will never sell your Personal Information to any third party. However, we may share or disclose your Personal Information as follows:
we may provide your information to our business partners, vendors or service providers who perform functions on our behalf;
in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company;
as required by law, government officials, or other third parties pursuant to a subpoena, court order, or other legal process or requirement applicable to our Company;
when we believe, in our sole discretion, that the disclosure of personal information is necessary to prevent physical harm or financial loss;
to report suspected illegal activity or to investigate violations of our agreements.

Reviewing, Correcting and Removing Your Personal Information
Upon request, Orchestry will provide you with information about whether we hold any of your Personal Information. If you provide us with your Personal Information, you have the following rights with respect to that information:
To review the user information that you have supplied to us.
To request that we correct any errors, outdated information, or omissions in user information that you have supplied to us.
To request that your user information not be used to contact you.
To request that your user information be removed from any solicitation list that we use.
To request that your user information be deleted from our records.
To opt out of being solicited by Orchestry or third parties.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at hello@orchestry.com or by mail to Orchestry Software Inc., 422 Richards St, Suite 170, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2Z4, Attn: Privacy. We will respond to your request to change, correct, or delete your information within a reasonable timeframe and notify you of the action we have taken.

Retention of Personal Information

We retain Personal Information that you provide us as long as we consider it potentially useful in contacting you our services, or as needed to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements, and then we securely delete the information. We will delete this information from the servers at an earlier date if you so request, as described in “Unsubscribe from Communication” below.

Customer Testimonials and Comments

We post customer testimonials and comments on our Websites, which may contain Personal Information. We obtain each customer’s consent via email prior to posting the customer’s name and testimonial.

Security of your Personal Information

We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your Personal Information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. We secure the Personal Information you provide on computer servers in a controlled, secure environment, protected from unauthorized access, use or disclosure.

Social Media Features

Our Websites include Social Media Features, such as the Facebook Like button and Widgets, such as the Share This button or interactive mini-programs that run on our sites. These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our sites, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social Media Features and Widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Websites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to these features.  Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy and other policies of the companies providing them.

External Websites

Our Websites provide links to other websites. We do not control, and are not responsible for, the content or practices of these other websites. Our provision of such links does not constitute our endorsement of these other websites, their content, their owners, or their practices. This Privacy Policy does not apply to these other websites, which are subject to any privacy and other policies they may have.

Public Forums

We offer publicly accessible blogs, message boards and community forums. Please keep in mind that if you directly disclose any information through our public message boards, blogs, or forums, this information may be collected and used by others. We will correct or delete any information you have posted on the Websites if you so request, as described in “Opting Out and Unsubscribing” below.

International Transfer of Information

To facilitate our global operations, we may transfer and access Personal Information from around the world, including the United States. This Privacy Policy shall apply even if we transfer Personal Information to other countries.

Corporate Events

If we (or our assets) are acquired by another company, whether by merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or otherwise, that company would receive all information gathered by Orchestry on the Websites. In this event, you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our website, of any change in ownership, uses of your Personal Information, and choices you may have regarding your Personal Information.

Cookies & Similar Technologies

Orchestry uses cookies or similar technologies to analyze trends, administer the website, track users’ movements around the website, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

The cookies we use on this website are broadly grouped into the following categories:

Essential: Some of the cookies on our website are essential for us to be able to provide you with a service you have requested. You may not be able to use our website effectively without these cookies.
Analytics: We use analytics cookies to help us understand how users engage with our website. An example of this is for counting the number of different people coming to our website, visiting a particular page or using a particular feature. Without this cookie, if you visited the website once each week for three weeks, we would count you as three separate users and this wouldn’t be a true representation. These cookies do not let us identify specific users as the information is aggregated.
Social sharing: We use cookies to allow you to share content directly to your social networking sites for example Facebook, Twitter and Google+ i.e. clicking Like on Facebook and Share on Twitter.
Interest-based advertising: You may have noticed that when you visit websites, you will be shown advertisements for products and services you may be interested in. Cookie information about certain pages you have visited on our website helps us be more relevant in our advertising. Having these cookies does not increase the number of adverts you will be shown on these specific sites. These ‘persistent’ cookies last no longer than 90 days, or until you clear them. These and the other cookies we use do NOT allow us to see what other sites you have been visiting, they simply act as a record of our web pages and advertisements that you may see.
Opt Out of Cookies
When you first visited the websites you will have been shown a status bar notifying you that this website uses cookies and inviting you to review this cookie policy. Once you have clicked to go further into our website, the cookie prompt will disappear, this confirms that you consent to us using the cookies detailed in this policy.
Please note that we can’t always control third party cookies (such as from social networks) stored on your machine from our website and where this is the case you will need to visit the relevant third party’s website directly to understand their cookies stored on your machine by them. Please see our ‘third party cookies’ section below.
If you want to reject cookies we use from this website you will need to:
Delete the cookies from your browser. Most browsers also allow you to prevent all or some cookies being stored on your machine in the future. For more information on how to delete or disable cookies from your browser please use the ‘help’ function within your browser, or alternatively visit www.allaboutcookies.org. By deleting our cookie preference cookie, the next time you visit our website the cookie status bar will appear again inviting you to again reconsider your preferences.
AND/OR: If you only want to reject the Internet Based Advertising cookies we store on your machine, you can opt-out of receiving these cookies at any time by going to the Internet Advertising Bureau website at http://www.youronlinechoices.com and following the opt-out instructions.
Please do be aware that disabling cookies may impact the functionality of this website.
Third Party Cookies
Some of the cookies described above are stored on your machine by third parties when you use our website. We have no control over these cookies of how the third party uses them. They are used to allow that third party to provide a service to us, for example website analytics. For more information on these cookies and how to disable them, please see:
Internet Advertising Bureau website at http://www.youronlinechoices.com/ where you will be able to opt-out of receiving Internet Based Advertising cookies from some of the third parties, such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
The use of cookies and web beacons by any tracking utility company is not covered by our Privacy Policy.

Log Files

We may collect demographic information, such as your region, preferences, interests and favorites using log files that are not associated with your name or other personal information. There is also information about your computer hardware and software that is automatically collected by us. This information can include: your IP address, browser type, domain names, internet service provider (ISP), the files viewed on our site (e.g., HTML pages, graphics, etc.), operating system, clickstream data, access times and referring website addresses. This information is used by Orchestry to provide general statistics regarding use of the Websites. For these purposes, we do link this automatically-collected data to Personal Information such as name, email address, address, and phone number.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)

We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better manage the Website by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users.  In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages or in emails and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients.  This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. We tie the information gathered by clear gifs in emails to our customers’ Personal Information. If you would like to opt-out of these emails, please see “Opting Out and Unsubscribing”.

Advertising

We partner with a third-party ad network to either display advertising on our Web site or to manage our advertising on other sites. Our ad network partner uses cookies and Web beacons to collect non-personal information about your activities on this and other Web sites to provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests.  If you wish to not have this information used for the purpose of serving you targeted ads, you may opt-out by clicking here: http://preferences.truste.com/ (or if located in the European Union, by clicking here: http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/). Please note this does not opt you out of being served advertising.  You will continue to receive generic ads.

Unsubscribe from Communications

You may unsubscribe from our marketing communications by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link located on the bottom of our e-mails, or by sending us email us at hello@orchestry.com or by mail to Orchestry Software Inc., 422 Richards St, Suite 170, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2Z4, Attn: Privacy.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our treatment of the information you provide us, please write to us by email at hello@orchestry.com or by mail to Orchestry Software Inc., 422 Richards St, Suite 170, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2Z4, Attn: Privacy.

Changes

We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. When there are changes to this Privacy Policy, we will update this page. The date on the bottom will always indicate when we last made changes.
Last Updated: July 28, 2020

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