At other times, an organization may decide it needs an intranet to solve a specific business need, but hasn’t considered the larger ways a SharePoint intranet could transform the company. Understanding the process and costs involved helps you make cost-effective technology decisions.
Here are five factors that go into building a top-notch SharePoint intranet:
- Platform selection: One of the first price points you encounter in building your intranet is figuring out the cost to get your foot in the door with SharePoint. These costs vary depending on whether you choose to use SharePoint 2013 on-premises, the cloud-based SharePoint Online through Office 365, or some hybrid approach. For an on-premises infrastructure, you have the costs of the hardware and licensing; with SharePoint Online you pay a monthly subscription by user. Sometimes organizations make this decision early. For example, they may have subscribed to Office 365 and know that they want to take advantage of SharePoint Online to build an intranet. Other organizations have a sense of their business needs, but require help choosing the appropriate platform.
- Assessing business requirements: The next factor in determining the cost of your intranet project requires spending some time to research your business requirements. By spending time up front on business analysis and user research you’ll be able to create much more effective solutions.Depending on the scope of the project, this initial research could take anywhere from a couple of weeks up to a several months, and might include audience analysis, stakeholder interviews and contextual inquiry sessions. This research shapes every step of the design effort.
- Designing information architecture: As you begin designing a SharePoint intranet, you need a rationale for making decisions about features, configuration and how to ensure a tight relationship between your site content and the design. Building an effective information architecture means creating an intuitive site structure and selecting the appropriate metadata based on common language usage within the organization.
- Customization: Some intranet development projects need few customizations, such as building master pages with minimal branding. But if it’s a larger project, you might be building custom web parts and workflows. SharePoint has lots of potential for custom development, but the costs add up quickly. Whenever possible, look for ways to accomplish tasks though properly configuring SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality, rather than relying on custom development. If you do decide to customize, augment native SharePoint functionality by taking advantage of SharePoint’s Client-Side Object Model (CSOM). This reduces the likelihood of breaking functionality and creates minimal risk during future upgrades.
- SharePoint migration: If you’re starting with a completely new SharePoint implementation, sometimes called a “greenfield” project, your goal at minimum is to build a basic, adaptable intranet that grows over time.A “brownfield” project, on the other hand, means an upgrade or redesign of your existing platform, and includes a different set of challenges in terms of migrating your existing content from the old system into your new information architecture. The extent of the migration process plays a significant role in the cost.
These are the five main considerations that affect the price of building a SharePoint intranet. Additional factors include the cost of front- and back-end development, governance strategies and education.
The goal is to solve a business problem, and solving that business problem should include fostering internal adoption through training, usability testing and product refinement. These are all important factors to consider when breaking down the cost of a SharePoint intranet.
Learn more about creating the right SharePoint intranet for your organization by contacting us.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
