BOOST YOUR INTRANET!

KATJA JOKISALO
LEAD ARCHITECT, MODERN WORK
SULAVA | FINLAND
Boost your intranet!
• SharePoint is constantly evolving as an internal communication platform - new and improved features are released
every week! Is your intranet already in need of a small facelift? Or do you feel that you're not taking advantage of
all the good stuff?

• Come and find out which fresh and less-known features you should at least grab! In this demo-packed set, you'll
get a bunch of concrete suggestions for improvements that are easy to implement. Session themes include
• tips for advanced content creation and visualization
• understanding your usage, improving search and keeping content up-to-date
• fostering relevancy, efficient multichannel publishing and interactivity

• By the end of this session, you've seen 3*3 concrete technical tips of how to boost your modern SharePoint
intranet. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to make your intranet more attractive, useful, and interactive for
your users!
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Our three points of view for boosting 👌

Targeted, interactive and Up to date with analytics

Visually informative
multichanneled and promoted content

Audience targeting Image editor Analytics & Clarity

Collapsed sections and

Interactivity with Viva Engage Curated search results
background colors

Employee mobile app Page templates with metadata Content update reminder
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Targeted, interactive and multichanneled

• Audience targeting
• Interactivity with Viva Engage
• Employee mobile app

• BONUS: Boost
Audience targeting
• Idea of targeting: limit the visibility of content
without restricting access
• Cleans up “clutter", i.e. content that is not so
relevant to this user
• Multiple use cases: front page news, navigation
links, events, quick link lists, Viva dashboard…

• Tip! Use Teams team membership as an

audience – enables self-service (join a local
team you want to see local news etc.)
Interactivity with Viva Engage
• Viva Engage is an essential part of your
internal communication – platform for dialogue
& interactivity
• Embed key communities on the home page of
the related intranet site

• Tip! You can also set up a page-specific

comment feed with Viva Engage topics
Employee mobile app
• SharePoint intranet can be used on mobile
browser or with SharePoint mobile app
• However, usually the most holistic approach is to
use Viva Connections (in Teams mobile app) as
an employee experience & communications
mobile app
• VC brings together your intranet content & news,
Viva Engage conversations and all other relevant
apps
BONUS!
Boost

• Boosting is a dynamic way to increase visibility of

selected news articles​
• Boosted news posts will
• be pushed on Viva Connections feed (and in the future
also other news feeds)​
• have a specific visual label (lightning bolt icon or text
“Boosted”) in news roll-ups​
• trigger a notification in Teams (if also targeted)

• You can set an expiration date for boosting​

• Boost feature is available on sites that are
configured as organizational news sites
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Visually informative
• Image editor
• Collapsed sections and background colors
• Page templates with metadata

• BONUS: PnP Modern Search web parts

Image editor
• The new image editor comes with
advanced editing capabilities such as
shape cropping, color adjusting, adding
filters and overlaying text.
• You can save your edited images and
use them in other pages

• Tip! Upcoming Brand Center allows you

to set up specify SP level colors, logos,
images - and also your own fonts!
Collapsed sections and background colors
• Bundling content behind an open/closed title makes
the page easier to scan
• Use section background color to make it even
easier to browse / glance through the content
• Use cases: FAQ pages, list-like content, structured
pages (process steps), long text content, rarely
needed additional information, etc
• However, be careful not to hide things that most
visitors usually look for!
Page templates with metadata
• Page templates make it easy to standardize the layout
and speed up content production
• Template can contain header formatting and default
image, layout (columns) and standard web parts
• In addition to the familiar elements, you can also use
templates for
• Instructional / example content
• metadata default values

• Tip: create a separate template for different news types

or other repetitive metadata selection
• Tip 2: put a site-specific default contact on the template
BONUS!
PnP Modern Search web parts

• PnP Modern Search is a collection of web

parts that can be deployed to your tenant
• The source code of the web parts is open, but
Microsoft is involved in the development work
• Use cases: news archive with custom
metadata filters, people search, custom
templates for feeds…

• Tip: put a Contact information box on the

intranet front page that directs you to a person
search (the search results page can be
standard or customized!)
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Up to date with analytics and promoted content

• Analytics & Clarity
• Curated search results
• Content update reminder

• BONUS: AI Bot
Analytics & Clarity
• There are multiple levels of usage analytics
available: tenant / M365 (All SharePoint sites), hub,
site and page
• You can also use Highlighted content wp to show
most viewed or trending news, files etc
• If you want to better understand user interaction in
your intranet, try Clarity!
• free behavioral analysis tool by Microsoft
• offers heatmaps, session recording etc
• Requires installing script in <head> area

• Tip: for a simple long-term analytics, set calendar

reminder and export data to excel
Curated search results
• There’s also Search analytics available on M365 admin center
(Microsoft search): Most popular search terms, Top 10 no-
result / abandoned queries and active users per application
• Promoted results can improve the search experience by
providing the "most correct" result as a separate card on top
of the search results set
• Different types of promoted results: bookmarks, acronyms,
locations, Q&A
• Cons: they only work at the Organization level and (acronyms)
only in English
• These can be also created automatically!

• Tip: Ask your users to send feedback and/or to suggest

promoted results
Content update reminder
• The most important thing to keep your content up-to-date
is to take care of clear responsibilities and guidelines - but
technology can help!
• Active mode: content update reminder, i.e. a workflow
that examines pages and sends an email or Teams
notification
• Passive mode: a listing / directory of content where you
can easily sort and filter pages based on responsible
person / last modified date

• Tip: link up-to-date monitoring to the agenda / operating

process of intranet development group meetings
BONUS!
AI Bot
• With Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services, it’s quite
easy to develop your own AI Bot or “internal ChatGPT”
• AI Bot allows internal employees to search and find
information using natural language queries and various
data sources​ (internal such as Intranet or CRM, or
external like company website or Internet)
• The goal is to provide one simple user interface to use
"internal ChatGPT" or find work-related information in a
conversational way
• All the data handled and produced by this service will be
completely private and only accessible by org
organization