How to Revitalize Your Intranet Without All the Drama
Maybe it’s the new year, maybe it’s just three years of everyone working remotely, but many organizations are revisiting their intranet to address growing issues.
Especially uncontrolled growth, declining performance, and document management problems.
After a few years of employees working from home, using systems and procedures that were designed in haste… The result is not just a lack of compliance but an erosion of the efficiency of the organization itself. Key documents can’t be found. The latest versions can’t be determined.
We all know what happened. When work from home began in earnest, Microsoft Teams had just been released, OneDrive was new, and people were still learning modern SharePoint.
When Teams was launched in the middle of this, suddenly, even well-designed Intranets began expanding has each newly created Microsoft Team automatically created a new SharePoint site with its own document library.
These undocumented SharePoint sites and their libraries began accumulating the files that were passed between employees during Teams meetings.
Without a coordinated effort to add these new SharePoint sites into an Internet’s overall navigation system many of them remained largely invisible while they continued to accumulate documents.
At the same time employee use of OneDrive skyrocketed.
Currently, many management teams are waking up to the knowledge that vital departments may have their key documents spread across dozens of locations. Many of which are unknown and even unreachable by the department’s own manager.
Historically this would have meant rebuilding or replacing an Internet and significant disruption in business operations.
Fortunately, recent changes in Microsoft’s Internet design strategy and improvements to migration management software provide an easy way to implement the required cleanup.
Microsoft's recent switch to SharePoint intranet structures based on a flat horizontal design, with each department site being its own site collection, means that restructuring an intranet can now be done one department at a time.
This is an enormous benefit in that allows the current version of the department site to continue to exist while its replacement is being implemented. Daily routines are not impacted.
The process identifies the most critical company departments and prioritizes them to be addressed one at a time.
Once a department's replacement site has been created, content consolidation tools like Sharegate are used to copy the widespread documents to the new department site and into libraries that have been named for the original locations of these documents.
Once the new site is completed, populated and owner approved, the intranet’s primary navigation is updated to direct employees to the new site.
The previous site is set to read-only for a grace period to provide a safety net for the department owner and then archived.
Using this process, in just a few days a critical department can have all its documents consolidated into a single new SharePoint site and stored in libraries whose names are already familiar to the staff.
If you want to learn more about this process JFD puts on a webinar about it monthly, just check their list of upcoming live presentations.
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