The last decade saw a decrease in demand for intranets simply because the business value they provide was not obvious; users could collaborate with teams, slack, yammer and even WhatsApp. It is true that we experienced CFOs who were reluctant to pay for them. And in all fairness, Intranets were a bit expensive for an organisation that was new to SharePoint. You needed a good-sized SharePoint farm and SQL before you even talked about branding and features of your intranet. And customisations needed a heavy deal of software development expertise even if you opted in for SharePoint Online. When COVID-19 forced us to work from home, businesses realised that they needed more ways to keep in touch with their workforce. Microsoft Teams being the new collaboration tool is probably the first candidate to get the ball rolling quickly. There are however some reasons why SharePoint Intranets are the better option.
Visual Appeal
Its no lie, Teams is a desktop application that acts mainly as a conversation feed. The colour scheme has nothing to do with your corporate colours. You can bring some SharePoint pages as tabs into a team, however, when loading a team, you will always be taken into the Posts/Conversations first. Not to mention that the users will need to visit the specific team every time. With SharePoint Online, you can quickly build a visually appealing site layout with just your mouse. On top of that, you have a rich customisation options for page layouts and out of the box web parts, allowing you to build visually attractive sites without the need for technical expertise. Need further inspiration? Look at Microsoft’s own SharePoint Look Book, showcasing portals implemented by customers.
News Articles
One of the things I never liked about teams and Yammer is that “Twitter for Business” approach they take to posting updates; 10 posts later and they become irrelevant and buried at the bottom of the feed. Users will rarely scroll to the post they last read to catch up. With SharePoint, its no secret that you get a rich news article publishing feature out of the box, allowing you to publish news articles in a discoverable fashion. And the great news is that you can embed your Yammer company feed (or any other feed) in SharePoint using the out of the box web parts, giving you the best of both worlds while increasing adoption of Yammer as well.
Analytics
SharePoint Modern Experience provides enough detail out of the box on usage analytics to identify trending content, something you can never get with Microsoft Teams on a post-by-post basis or even tabs.
SharePoint Modern Experience – The Ugly Truth
One issue I have with the Modern Experience is the lack of customisations to the site layout beyond what you get out of the box. With the classic experience you could break the mould and make your Intranet truly your own. These days, majority of portals look identical, with just the colour theme and the page content to distinguish them. And historically, most businesses wanted a unique intranet layout and further customisations such as a background graphic or even a background photo. Unfortunately the product team insists that this is not needed.
Tips for a successful Intranet
Define your Intranet Objectives
What you are expecting from the Intranet will also measure its success, just like any other initiative. Be it regular communication with employees, relevant info about your business that employees might find useful, etc. This will also help you stay focused on the design, without needing to ask what content you should include.
Keep it Open
The moment you decide to store content that should not be accessible by everyone on your Intranet (or any other SharePoint Portal intended for the entire organisation) is the moment things start to go wrong. You will keep your InfoSec and admins happy if its simple: everyone can see all the content. This also applies to team sites dedicated to a specific function that only they can access.
Keep it Simple
Implementing solutions that are relevant to everyone might lead to a decision to expose it via the Intranet, or in some cases, these tools end up being implemented in the Intranet. The latter is where you move into a non-scalable information architecture. Such functional solutions can be implemented as stand-alone Site Collections that are either linked to from the Intranet, or even better, integrated using the Hub Sites feature of SharePoint Online.
Ensure the right audiences see relevant data
This is one functionality every intranet really needs and I consider it to be the area where you add greater value. Your visitors should see information relevant to them instead of everything. And this might be a problem if you are a medium or large organisation; you are either forced to keep everything too generic or your end users skip your content because they see too many irrelevant stories. This is an area where some customisation and further work beyond out of the box might be required.
What Documents should you store on the Intranet?
It is inevitable that some piece of information you want to communicate is a presentation, PDF or other document type. The Keep it Simple principal needs to be applied here as well, it is best to avoid storing documents that are meant to be accessed by a subset of your visitors. Things like brand guidelines, or your next Christmas party menu can be uploaded here and linked to pages as needed. Departmental or specific function documents should not be here. Then there is the question about Policy Documents. This is not a simple decision. Surely everyone needs to access the policies but you might need to provide evidence of updating them on a regular basis and your employees might need to sign off that they read and understood them for compliance reasons. Overall, a policy management solution is best to be kept separate unless your policies are simple and relevant to everyone. And relevancy is important here as well, some policies might need to target front-line workers but are irrelevant to finance.
How about the Weather and News?
Every person has immediate access to news and weather information from their phone or smart watch these days. Adding such information to the Intranet only adds clutter to your home page.
Push for Adoption
An Intranet is not a business critical function that your employees must access every day and you might see a huge decline on usage after the first few months. The oldest trick is to set your Intranet as the corporate browser home page. Microsoft has toyed with the idea of introducing a “Home” app for Microsoft Teams, allowing you to access your Intranet from that app quickly. There is no clear information as to that functionality is coming any time soon if ever. Alternatively, you could always invest in a custom Microsoft Teams app that does exactly that. Mobile devices should not be left behind. Since the Modern SharePoint Experience is fully responsive, your Intranet should load up just fine on almost every handheld device. You also have the SharePoint App that can be used to access followed sites.
A final word on SharePoint Customisations
Some companies sell products that provide a no-code approach to a number of scenarios. This was quickly interpreted to “customisations are bad and should be avoided”. Microsoft has a development strategy and actively encourage customsations on SharePoint. They even offer best practices guidelines to help you succeed and avoid the potential pitfalls of customisations that surfaced on SharePoint On-Premises and the Classic Experience in general. No code solutions are great for enabling your power users to achieve some level of automation or an end result quickly, however, they are not a full replacement for customisations as they lack the flexibility. Don’t allow a sales person’s pitch to become your doctrine.
Lambros Vasiliou 
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