Intranet Insights 2024 is now a historical event, so this article is not pretending its sessions are current product announcements. The useful part is the operating lesson that survived them: a SharePoint intranet succeeds when useful information has owners, a distribution route and a measurable job to do.
The event helped shape our view of modern intranets, but attendance and replay views do not prove that any particular design increases adoption.
The intranet is a service, not a launch project
The familiar failure pattern starts after launch. Pages look polished, then policies age, news becomes irregular and search results fill with duplicates.
Treat each important area as an owned service. Record:
- the audience and task it supports;
- the accountable content owner;
- the review date;
- the authoritative source;
- the archive or replacement rule;
- the measure that would reveal a problem.
This is less glamorous than a redesign. It is also what keeps the design useful.
SharePoint home sites and Viva Connections do different jobs
A SharePoint home site is the organisation-level landing and search experience for an intranet. Viva Connections can surface intranet content, resources and dashboard cards within Microsoft Teams and other supported Microsoft 365 surfaces.
Viva Connections does not repair weak information architecture. It gives people another way into what you have already designed.
Before configuring it, check the current Microsoft documentation, supported experience and licensing for your tenant. Product surfaces and licence packaging can change.
Design around tasks, not departments
Department names make sense to the people who own the content. They are often less useful to someone trying to report sickness, find a policy or request equipment.
Map the top employee tasks, then decide where the authoritative answer lives. Use navigation, search, audience targeting and dashboard cards to shorten the route, but do not create several competing copies of the same answer.
Audience targeting changes what is promoted. It is not a security boundary. Use SharePoint permissions for information that must be restricted.
Search quality is partly a content problem
Microsoft Search respects permissions, but permission-trimmed results can still be stale, duplicated or badly titled.
Improve findability with plain titles, consistent metadata, content types where they genuinely help, and a disposal process for obsolete pages. Test searches with ordinary user accounts rather than administrators who can see everything.
Measure tasks, not vanity traffic
Page views can tell you whether somebody arrived. They cannot tell you whether the person completed the job or trusted the answer.
Choose measures tied to the intranet's purpose, such as:
- successful searches for the top tasks;
- searches that produce no useful result;
- expired high-risk content;
- repeated help-desk questions that the intranet should answer;
- task completion or abandonment on key journeys;
- broken links and inaccessible pages.
Collect feedback at the point of use, but keep it short. A page-owner review triggered by evidence is more useful than a yearly redesign based on anecdotes.
A practical 30-day repair plan
Week 1: List the ten employee tasks that matter most. Find the current answer and owner for each.
Week 2: Remove or redirect duplicate answers. Fix unclear titles, access failures and broken links.
Week 3: Test navigation and search with people from different roles. Record the words they use.
Week 4: Add review dates, measures and a simple owner report. Decide which tasks deserve promotion through Viva Connections.
Thirty days is a planning window, not a promised implementation time. A large or regulated intranet will need more discovery, accessibility work, governance and testing.
Proof boundary
The event supplied ideas and examples. This article turns the durable themes into an operating checklist. Neither the event nor this checklist proves adoption, employee satisfaction or compliance in your tenant. Those need measurements from your own users and content estate.
For practical SharePoint intranet and governance decisions, join the SharePoint & Teams Admins Space.