One of the most challenging aspects of designing an intranet for SharePoint Online is you need a SharePoint consultant that not only understands all of the stages in the design process, but also understands the technology’s limitations and how to work with them to create a solution. While SharePoint has limitations, these constraints also provide opportunities for creativity.
For example, if you’re working with SharePoint Online in the context of the Office 365 suite, there are specific restrictions that limit or change a developer’s access to certain areas of the SharePoint platform. The reason for limiting access is that Microsoft wants to prevent a developer from changing code on the back end that ends up bringing down another company’s Office 365 environment.
While this contained environment safeguards the stability of Office 365, it makes it more difficult to integrate SharePoint Online with other line-of-business solutions, which may present an obstacle in some situations. Customizations take place in client-side development, with limited access to the server. A good SharePoint consultant should be able to explain these limitations, and work within those constraints to give you the best possible solution for your business problem.
In the implementation stage, two key elements are quality assurance (QA) and user acceptance testing (UAT). These are often difficult stages in a SharePoint implementation, but if you’ve followed a research-based design process these steps allow you to ensure that you’ve framed the problem effectively and put forward solutions that solve them.
QA and UAT are fundamental to a successful implementation, but also challenging. In a UAT session, it’s easy to get sidetracked, with business users and stakeholders focusing on surface issues, like color preferences. It’s important to stay focused on what’s important, which is whether or not they think the solution is going to solve the organization’s challenges.
Finally, you need to support your new intranet implementation with training and governance. Training is essential to successfully meeting your business objectives, and should always be taught and delivered in context and with narrative. Governance, meanwhile, ensures that your team is able to maintain the solution at a high level and expand the intranet as the needs of the organization grow.
When it comes to training, a common mistake is to focus exclusively on the technical side, such as documentation that shows how to upload a document to SharePoint or how to search for a piece of content. The problem is that people don’t learn well in a vacuum. They need context and narratives that make this technical information useful to end-users.
Training material should help users connect the dots and understand the business problems you’re trying to solve and how to use the SharePoint environment to solve them. When you deliver content in a narrative that’s relevant to a business user, they’re more excited about using the technology to solve problems that truly matter to them, helping them become more productive.
Governance is often seen as an extremely complex topic, but it’s important to ensuring a successful implementation. Governance focuses on managing information, and how you’ll grow your solution and ensure your taxonomy design will be easy to use in the future. You’ll want to develop rules for how users create new sites, for example, and identify auditing tools to monitor how users tag documents. All of these kinds of governance decisions are valuable ways to give users ownership and accountability in the implementation.
In the end, a successful intranet is based on a solid design process more than a technology solution. Thorough planning helps to create a solid foundation for your company’s productivity, both today and in the future, as technology continues to evolve.
Learn more about implementing SharePoint Online at your organization by downloading our free e-book, “Designing A User-Centered Intranet For SharePoint Online”.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
