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?