Whither a New Intranet on Modern Office 365?
I was thinking about this a while back, and I started a conversation with a few of my go to smart people, Sue Hanley (@susanhanley) and Julie Turner (@jfj1997). If you were starting today with someone on a new Intranet on Office 365 – someone who has never used SharePoint at all – where would you put the Intranet “home page”?
The question seems simple, but the root site of a tenant is a “classic” site, and most people would want their new Intranet to be “modern” all the way. So a shallow page in the root which just contains links to some other Hub Sites (maybe Departments, Projects, etc.) or an Intranet at /sites/Intranet? This isn’t just an academic discussion – I did a half day workshop with a new client a while ago, and it was hard to answer this without equivocating.
Every organization I’ve ever worked with wants that one landing page that meets virtually every need. We end up parsing that down into realistic implementations, but there has to be a single launchpad. The Intranet home page is almost always that, and it has to be somewhere sensical. It’s hard enough convincing people that http://tenant.sharepoint.com makes sense. Office.com or portal.office.com, etc. are non-starters in those discussions in my experience.
Most user bases are made up of people who rarely remember the URL to the Intranet or Office 365 unless they use it every day, and in many organizations, that’s just not the case. (The ones that end up using SharePoint for document storage only – a large proportion – fall into this category.) Anything we can do to make that one landing page both compelling to visit (always a content generation challenge, rarely a technical one) and easy to find contributes to success.
Sue’s take on it was this set of three options, which seem to cover the current realm of possibilities.
- Option 1 (Microsoft’s “official” answer, perhaps): Make a modern page on that classic site and make it the home page. My take is that this “page” would feel weird and be marginally useful. It would also have the Quick Launch, which wouldn’t feel right. Since it’s classic, the root site can’t be a Hub Site, so the only way to get useful content onto it would be via development or roll up Web Parts. I am a strong believer in very little manual management of content on an Intranet home page; most should bubble up from other sites.
- Option 2: Dave Feldman’s (@bostonmusicdave) recommendation: Create a Communication Site that will be the new “home” (odds are it would live at /sites/Intranet or /sites/WhateverYouCallYourIntranet) and add a redirect from the classic home. I think that the user experience will be weird for this, but you could test it. Option 3 is a variation on this.
- Option 3: Make a modern site (/sites/Intranet or whatever the name is) and ask users to go to that site. If you don’t advertise contoso.sharepoint.com as the home of the intranet, users won’t go there. If you give them the URL (and make a shortcut for it), that will become the home – because it’s where people expect to find it. You can also make that site a Featured site on SharePoint home. Then, you can design your “home home” to have whatever user experiences you want – directory to the hubs, of course, plus enterprise news that will show up on the mobile app, plus all the other great things that home pages should have to engage the users.
None of these feel “right” to me. I know we’re in a transition phase, but we’re always in one these days. In my experience, most people want the home page of their Intranet to be a no-brainer URL. The most logical place for that on Office 365 is the root of the tenant. Sue raised the question of whether it really matters: using DNS you could come up with a short link that points to /sites/Internet, but I feel strongly that to most people this would just feel wrong – the URL in the browser would look too “messy” to them. (IT people probably wouldn’t care, Corporate Communications or the like would probably freak out.)
The other angle here is how we can future proof that landing page. If we decide to use http://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/Intranet and we can eventually move it to http://tenant.sharepoint.com, then we have what amounts to a non-durable link.
What do you think about all this? I’d like an Option 4 – make the product do what we really want. This would mean that the root site of a tenant could be a Communication Site or a modern Team Site, and we’re off to the races. I’m sure we’ll get there soon enough.
What are you doing out there, whether you’re a consultant or work within an organization?
Wow, you nailed everything on the head here. I constantly find myself trying to explain this limbo phase to clients and try to figure out which path to lead them down. Agree 100%, let’s get that option 4 implemented. There should be an option in the admin center to convert the current default classic root site to modern. Just like when you used to be able to upgrade it from 2010 experience. That button is still there!!
Option 5 – make my personal profile site my home page. Have the news webpart include a non-removable company news feed in additional to those feeds I add, but leave the rest of the page free for me to edit. Provide a default setup for those that do not wish to change their site.
You do can ‘Hubify’ your root site site collection. I followed these steps and it worked for me:
Create a modern page and make it the startup page.
Run the PowerShell script Register-SPOHubSite https://[tenant].sharepoint.com
Remove all Quick navigation links. The page will resize to full. It’s almost the last script that runs on the page so you see it happen. It’s not the full communication site experience, but pretty close.
Then you have a working option 1.
What I like about option 2 is that if you decide to create a new starting page from scratch you can easily change this by changing the redirection script.
It would give you the opportunity to build a new site without anyone noticing this.
I agree with having a full fledged Modern Site as the Main Site and have it be the Hub Site.
I disagree with you regarding the URL. In my experience people don’t care these days about the URL. What I like to do is teach people to click on the company logo to get to the hub/home site. This logo used to reside in the middle of the top bar and now resides on the left side of the bar.
The link that the logo is associated with is set in the profile portion of the Farm Administration Site.
I have been praying such an intranet-layout forever: have all the content in separate site-collections and just have a root-site which will be the starting point, which aggregates everything. Hub-Sites are the rescue to implement such a strategy.
So we went to create such a homepage without a quicklaunch (and in the pre-hub-site-era) without a top-navigation. Just created a simple page which allows to go the the different topic-sites.
I then moved towards https://tenant.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx, which is not the most prettiest page, but is a quite a good starting point to go wherever I go most. So instead of me (as the architect) trying to guess what would be the most useful for every user – let Office365 decide what would be useful to me, based on what I’m usually doing.
Maybe something like this would be the next intranet-landing-page.
(Yeah, I tried using the mysites as well, but I found them pretty hard to customize withouth teaching every user how to add certain content to them)
just my 2 cents
I find most orgs set the browser homepage to be the intranet so people don’t think about the URL. Youre right its an awkward transition. Most of our clients still use a Publishing site because they want to retain the control over menus and publishing features.
Some smaller orgs are looking at hub sites as the home site, but have been waiting for things like the ability to pin important stories to the top.
What my organisation have done. We went with “sites/intranet” approach. Sadly, its using classic view sharepoint, as we started before modern view was in place. The recommended browser is still IE (started with IE11 & now moved to edge), so we had the home page of IE set as intranet homepage for all the users. So they don’t have to remember the url. Also, a shortcut like http://intranet/ would redirect to the SPO site url.
I’ve come across a working solution based on a couple of blog posts. I’d be keen to hear from people who have any issue with this.
It involves creating a site template of a Communications site, deleting the root site collection and recreating it using the Communications site template.
I’ve not really found any negative impacts except the design gallery would not load due to one or two masterpage URL’s corrupting and including the URL of the site that was templated. The second blog post explained how to fix.
Steps to change root site collection to Communication site
https://hangconsult.com/2017/06/29/change-sharepoint-online-root-site-collection-to-use-the-new-communication-site-template/
Design Gallery fix
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/16461c60-4831-44bd-af11-1f6d99e44ab6/composed-looks-change-the-look-themes-are-missing-when-creating-site-from-saved-template?forum=sharepointgeneral
If you are asking what the intranet should be then maybe you should ask whether you need an intranet at all? If there isn’t a business problem being solved then don’t waste shareholder money. Don’t build an intranet because someone says they need an intranet.