SP Marketplace returns to the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, May 21-23. Come join us for the world's biggest and most comprehensive event empowering you to achieve more in the modern workplace with Microsoft 365.

​We are excited to showcase our new Modern suite of native out-of-the-box SharePoint templates - SP Workplace Solutions. And our new SMB Business Solutions, a suite of products designed and priced especially for small to medium sized businesses.

We invite you to join us and will gift you a $50 off discount for attending. Simply use the code: SPMARKET50 when checking out here: https://sharepointna.com

SPC is where business leaders, IT pros, developers, consultants come together to learn how technology can power teamwork, employee engagement and communications, and organizational effectiveness.

CONNECT with industry gurus, thought leaders and Microsoft's product groups 

COLLABORATE with peers to share best practices and insights

CREATE solutions to your business challenges

CELEBRATE the launch of Microsoft's latest innovations and our diverse and vibrant community

Come joing SPC is packed with over 200 sessions, panels and workshops for everyone who works with SharePoint and Microsoft 365, presented by Microsoft's leaders and experts from around the world.

For the first time, Microsoft is hand-picking sessions for people who are new to Microsoft 365.

For seasoned veterans, you'll learn what's coming to the suite, and dive deep into practical guidance to help you plan, architect, deploy, support, and extend Microsoft technologies to address your business objectives.

SPC embraces all of Microsoft 365: SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, Outlook, Office applications, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and more.

SPC is an immersive, "actual reality" experience that brings the community together, from around the world. Don't miss your chance to experience it! Register today.

Listen to this invitation from Jeff Teper, Vice President for Office 365, OneDrive and SharePoint at Microsoft

​​We look forward to seeing you at our booth!

The short answer is about five to seven hours.

Here at SP Marketplace we have implemented over 600 Intranet portal and business solutions for our customers. Key to success is having an “owner” of the solution, often not a SharePoint technician, but rather a business person who is a SharePoint Power User. 

While your IT people may understand the technology behind your business, and keep everything humming along quite nicely, they often do not understand your business practices and processes. In fact, your typical IT staffer is possibly the worst person for this role. The person you want is the one who is not only a little technology savvy, but understand the needs and requirements of your business and is able to then interpret what each department's needs are, and translate this into the best SharePoint practices for you. This may even be the person who can make Excel sing and dance to create all those reports with the graphs that you like.

There is a wealth of training and instructional videos available that can take a user from novice to a power user level. Some of those links can be found on Lynda.com or in the training section at SP Marketplace. These provide some great examples of what is available out there (the latter is even free).

Just by watching some of these will help you gain a better understanding of how powerful a tool SharePoint can be. It is much more than a document repository/management tool. Once they have an understanding of not only how lists and libraries work, but workflows and permissions as well, they will be able to not only successfully configure your SharePoint sites, but are then are able to add more functionality to this business platform.

Another point you will want to consider is how you are going to administer each department site as well. As your Power User won’t want to be inundated with requests to add new announcements, change some of the existing links, or even manage the contents of the emails that are sent out when a new ticket is logged. For this you want to ensure that the content is easily managed by an appointed person in each department.

It no longer is just a set of static pages like a home-made website, but a powerful tool, that will let you perform a lot of business workflows, like approval processes, and manage tickets quickly and effectively with its own built in reporting functions. A well designed SharePoint site collection can allow a small to medium sized company to forgo the ongoing expense of lots of Siloed applications, which will have no inter-relation to each other, and have this replaced by a single platform to manage most if not all of your business needs—all in one place.

Just ask yourself…  How much is a well-designed, correctly maintained platform worth to your organization? Make sure that you have the right person for the job. They will need to know how your staff communicates with each other, and how information flows around your organization. This will ensure that not only is the correct information being delivered to the correct people, but also greatly assist in the behind the scenes automation and reduce in the manual handling (and mishandling) of the communications around your organization.

So while you need someone who not only understands the capabilities of SharePoint, and what it cannot do, they need to be someone who understands your business processes to be able to translate that into your business environment. Then you will have a site that can not only sing and dance, but perform for you and your organization.

Obviously, the above answer is very clear, the path to a successful intranet portal is in the details.  Another excellent source for definition is good ole Wikipedia.  Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intranet for a good overview and introduction to creating an intranet.  One important piece of information is that over 50% of intranets operating today are running on SharePoint.  So Microsoft’s claim of an intranet is generally accurate, except that they should say it is a great platform for an intranet!  Not an out of the box intranet as many assume.  We at SP Marketplace have implemented our Intranet Portal template in over 400 organizations in the last 18 months, and we have learned a few things to pass on.

So what should an intranet look like on Office 365? 
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Well much of that depends on your organization.  Most important is that it reflect the structure of your organization.  Second it should make it easy for your employees to find the things they use most often, and have intuitive access to those things they only need once in a while.
If your organization is typical you might have a top organizational portal (Home) and several department portals (example HR, IT, Marketing, Engineering etc).  If you have an organization that is a retail organization or has several divisions which share common services it might have the organization above, plus a portal for each division, store, region etc.   

Summary

For those of you new to or using Office 365 and thinking about using it as an intranet portal, we hope this article was informative.  Obviously there is much more to a successful intranet deployment using Office 365 like organization education, keeping content fresh and more.   For those of you who would like to quickly deliver an Intranet structure to your organization, we at SP Marketplace offer SP Business Suite and a range of services as a way to cost effectively jump start the solution.