SharePoint Intranet 2017: What Are Your Must-Have Features?

Every business has its own set of unique goals and objectives. So when it comes to choosing your must-have features with SharePoint Intranet for 2017, you’ll need to take a hard look within the walls of your own organization.

Since SharePoint is a complex platform, we won’t attempt to explain all its features here. That would simply be impossible in this short space.

However, with regard to must-have features, some common themes have emerged from discussions with current users, and we talk about the chief ones here.

Responsive Design

SharePoint is not responsive for mobile right out of the box. All the same, if your business includes a mobile workforce, your intranet must be responsive. Unless you have a crack IT team already in house, you’ll need to bring in an experienced professional to make this modification for you. SharePoint consultants from Itransition will help you design and plan your desktop experience with mobility in mind.

Information Discovery

Information discovery is critical, and configuring metadata in SharePoint is a major challenge, particularly for large companies. Microsoft’s TermStore method and SharePoint’s content type feature can combine to help you to construct a comprehensive and intuitive taxonomy for your files. Using these tools, you can catalog tens of thousands of documents so that people can quickly find what they need.

Most likely, your company has many different kinds of content. These could include year-end reports, presentations, intellectual property of various types, and invoices. In a properly set-up SharePoint system, users must fill in certain metadata columns or fields before they can upload to a document library. For example, someone uploading a year-end report could be required to specify the file’s purpose. They might also need to designate someone to sign off on it. By cataloging such pieces of information for each file, users themselves will build a search taxonomy. This will help later when people need to locate documents easily.

Knowledge Sharing

If you fail to share pertinent knowledge across your company, your employees can’t be expected to have the information they need when they need it. SharePoint offers the perfect solution for this challenge. That’s because you can configure the platform for sharing documents and files in ways that work best for your company.

Additionally, you can set up team sites for project collaboration. You have full control, however, about how and with whom each piece of information is shared. You can also choose to include a news feed. With a news feed, employees can share documents and files with other workers simply by tagging them.

Content Management

SharePoint is a great collaboration tool. For example, you can choose to allow co-authoring. This means that more than one person can edit the same document at the same time. If you decide to permit co-authoring, one person’s changes could be saved over by another’s.

If you choose to restrict this option, however, users will need to check in and check out of files. Only you and your team can determine which choice is right for your company.

In order to sidestep this issue, you can enable versioning at the document library level. With this feature, you can easily return to earlier drafts of a file whenever you need to. Also, you can designate both minor and major versions of files in order to keep all versions secure. Only specific users who have restricted access can see minor versions. On the other hand, major versions are the final versions and are visible to anyone who has permission to read them.

Ability to Improve the SharePoint Intranet Continually

After several years or months of continuous use, your SharePoint’s features could become overburdened and even approach obsolescence. You’ll need to be able to continually improve and upgrade your SharePoint in order to keep up with your company’s needs.

Especially if your intranet is the heart of your employees’ social life, you’ll want to refresh the design and add custom features from time to time.

Final Thoughts

If you select SharePoint as your company’s intranet solution, think about your must-have features before you purchase, and save yourself headaches in the future.