Recently I was invited by Intranet Management (Italy) to talk about my video collection. I decided to choose “The Intranet Demo video” as my topic. This video type may be not as spectacular as some of the teaser videos in my collection, but the Intranet Demo video (where someone shows what the new intranet looks like, what content you can find and how to use it) is much more valuable, in my opinion.
Some reasons to create a Demo video for your new intranet
There are more benefits to the Demo Video. Not only does it create awareness (as does a teaser) for the new intranet, but it will also help people with actually using the intranet. When someone shows them how to work with the new intranet, it may help to lower the threshold to try it. Remember, not everyone is as computer literate as yourself! A good demo can therefore save the training departments (often HR, Communications and/or IT) some support time and effort. And its lifespan is much longer than that of the teaser, because it can also be used to introduce new employees to the intranet. A teaser is fun, and often very entertaining, but it is obsolete once the intranet has been launched. The teaser certainly has its uses, but as I have been at the IT-side of things, I think the Demo is more value for money.
If you have time or budget for only one intranet launch video, make it a Demo!
Do you really have to create a Demo video?
Someone asked whether an intranet should not be so intuitive that a demo is not needed? Well, a new intranet may be intuitive for some people, but you can not expect it to be intuitive for all. Some people simply need more help, or are coming in as a new employee who has been used to a different intranet platform. And especially when you have changed the design, layout, navigation and/or the platform all colleagues may benefit from an instruction on what has changed, and why and how. And where they can find their relevant content.
The Demo video is just ONE adoption tool
I think a Demo video should not be the only way to increase trial and adoption of your intranet. For some colleagues having a demo that explains the whereabouts of important content and the benefits of completing your profile will be sufficient, others will still need more help. This also depends on your organization: when I was working for multinational marketing & production companies, most people were pretty computer literate. In my last job however, which was in a mental health care organization, colleagues were “working with people, not with computers”. Some of them panicked when they had to store documents on their OneDrive instead of on the Downloads drive. So we had to spend more time and effort making things easy for them.
So, you will always need more tools: webinars or other online sessions as well as classroom training or personal help.
Or is it really the only one…🤯?
The other day I found an extraordinary demo video for the intranet of a software company. Their company goal is to help other organizations with changing/improving on their software systems, therefore giving IT time back as they no longer have to spend lots of time on maintaining legacy systems. Their motto is: Set IT Free. I like that!
Well, apparently that also goes for their own intranet. I was amused to see their intranet tagline:
“Here you will find internal information that should help you to work as independently as possible”
Am I the only one who reads this as: “This is it – you’re on your own!”?
The video is below – What do you think?
Please share your Demo video
I have seen many nice Demo videos, but have not seen the perfect one yet. Have you created a Demo video when your intranet was (re)launched? Please let me know where it can be seen…or upload it to YouTube or Vimeo.
K: “Hi Ellen, can you post this on the ICT News page for me, please?”
E: “Sure Karla, will do and I’ll let you know when you can review it.”
K: “Can you make sure all comments are directed to me?”
E: “Uh…I do not know if that is possible, I will try to find out.”
The other day a reader of my blog asked me how you can send the News comments to the person mentioned as the Author (rather than the person who created the post). I did not have an answer ready, so I decided to find out and report. I love investigating these kinds of things and finding as many workarounds as I can! And yes, I have found a few workarounds.
2. By default, the Creator of the News post = the Author
When you use the defaults, the post will appear with you as the Author. When you post something on someone else’s behalf, it is possible to click on the Author field and insert name or email address of the author. The author’s name will then be displayed on various places as the responsible person for this post. You can simply click on the field below the title and insert the name/email address of the author. BTW, this is called the Author Byline. You can make the Author Byline visible in the Site Pages library (see screenshot with #6)
You can add the Author (when this is someone else than the publisher) by clicking on the highlighted field.
3. Readers can Like and Comment to posts and comments
There’s a simple thumbs-icon for Likes and a field to add comments. Anyone who can read the News post can give feedback.
This setting is enabled by default. If you find it is not, check with your SharePoint or Office365 admin because this is a setting in the SharePoint admin center > Settings >Pages. The Author can decide to turn Comments off, but for News I do not think this is good practice. For Pages it can be a good idea, especially if they are meant for long-term usage.
You can Like or Comment at the bottom of the post, when enabled.
4. You can receive or stop email notifications of Likes and/or Comments
Check your settings on the SharePoint Homepage.
Click the gear wheel top right
Select Email Notifications Settings
Make sure you have the first 3 enabled if you want to be notified.
Please note this setting is for all sites you have access to, so you cannot set this per site.
On the SharePoint home page, you can click gear wheel and then Email notifications settings
The top 3 buttons should be enabled to receive notifications
5. External publishers (Creators or Authors) NEVER get email notifications
I do not think this will be a big deal for most organizations, but in my own tenant, where I am the only user, I always need externals when I want to test things like these. So I need to plan my tests carefully. 😊
6. You can show Likes in the Pages Library
You can make the column Like Count visible in the Pages Library. This can be helpful if you do not want to receive an email every time, but you do want to keep track of Likes. You cannot show Comments in this way, nor is there a list of Comments in the site, as far as I know.
Like count is a column that you can add to a Site Pages library view. To the right you see the name of the Author of the post (Author Byline). In most cases this is me, but some posts have another author.
7. Email notifications only go to the Creator of the post
And this is where the problem is. Although Karla would like to receive a notification of the comments, they will always be sent to me.
How can I make sure that the Author gets notified of comments and likes?
There is no simple straightforward way to set this, but workarounds a. to d. may help:
a. Train people to ALWAYS @ the Author when making a comment
As you do not see who the Creator is (unless you go to the Site Pages library) this will have to become a habit for every post within the organization. This will need education and change management!
These comments will go to the Creator (when mentioned) and also to external Creators and Authors, so this is very dependable. 😊
However, if you are a Creator who has disabled Comments on the SharePoint homepage, you will still get these messages. 😒
@mentioning the Author is workable, but will need change management
b. Use an Outlook Rule to forward Comments to the Author
The Creator must be internal and needs to make sure he or she has comments enabled on their SharePoint Home Page. They can then forward notification mails to the Author.
If they always create News for someone else, or for the same person, they can add a simple Forward rule based on the word “Comment” in the subject.
This Rule will forward all comments and replies to comments to Mystery Guest.
If they only occasionally post News on someone else’s behalf, they will need to be more specific and create a new Outlook Rule for every post, based on the title. 😒
In case the Creator only posts something on someone’s behalf occasionally, they will need to set a Rule for each post, based on the title of the post.
If the Creator does not like to have the comments, they can add an additional rule that these messages are deleted immediately after forwarding.
This also works for external Authors, providing your organization has not blocked external forwarding.
c. Use PowerAutomate
I tried to find a “trigger” for the addition of a Comment or Like, in order to notify the person in Author Byline if this was different from the person in Modified By, but could not find it. Whenever I thought I had a good trigger, I could not select the Site Pages library, so I guess Power Automate does not want me to automate something from here. (Which is strange, as the Power Automate link is visible in the Site Pages library) Does anyone know if this is correct? Or have I just selected the wrong triggers?
Of course you can use Power Automate to forward the email that goes to the Creator, but I find Outlook Rules much easier to use.
d. Add a web part with instructions to move the conversation to Yammer or Teams
You can also disable Comments and divert the discussion to a Yammer or Teams community. The Author can set notifications there and join the discussion. (For external Authors, please make sure you have externally facing communities!)
This will be most useful for updates for important projects that will stay in the organization for some time, as it will allow you to have an ongoing conversation about the project and its outcomes. For a very temporary news post I think it is too much work, unless you have a generic News discussion community.
An example of diverting Comments to an open Yammer community with the relevant Yammer web part to the right.
You can also divert Comments to an open Team site. There is no web part, so I used a button, but if you publish this news in a Teams-connected SharePoint site, people can find the Team easier.
There are also some options that do NOT work or are not advisable:
e. Set Alert for Likes
Likes or Comments do not count as a “Modification of an existing item”. The Modified column shows no change when a Like or Comment is added. So, an Alert does not work for this purpose.
f. Set SharePoint Rule “when column value changes”
Sadly, this type of Rule, available for most types of modern Libraries and Lists, is not available for Site Pages libraries. 😒
For more information on this nice, but rather obscure functionality, read my earlier post: List Alerts Rule.
Rules available on all types of Lists
Rules available on all types of libraries, except the Site Pages libraries
g. Add a web part with instructions and Author’s contact details
You could disable Comments and add the Author’s contact details and ask people to message or email them. (Just clicking on the Author’s name will already bring these details, but you may need to be more specific) Apart from being extra work for the Creator, this will make the comments invisible to the rest of the organization. Comments are meant to start some open discussion in the organization. Moving this discussion to a personal email conversation is not the way to go.
You can try to redirect people to email but that is really not the way to go.
Depending on the situation one of the following workarounds may work:
The best option for now is to train your users to always use the @mentioning in Comments. This will always send a notification to the person in question, external or not. However, this will override disabled notifications for Comments on the SharePoint home page. 😒
If you post for the same person on a regular basis, you can set an Outlook Rule to forward the comment email to the Author.
If the News is part of an important organizational topic or project (and you post on behalf of the Project Manager, for instance) you may want to switch off Comments on the page and direct people to a Yammer or Teams community for any comments and discussion.
Please let me know if you have found other options!
This was also very likely my last! 🙂 Start and finish: 2021.
When I arrived at the scene, the organization had an intranet on an outdated, unsuitable platform. It was very complicated to create News and add pictures, content was outdated as it was quite a job to update stuff, and there was no interactivity at all. The formal document management system (on the same platform) was cumbersome, the content outdated, the owner had left and nobody felt really responsible for that system. On top of all that, there were considerable costs involved while we also had Office365, so it was only a matter of WHEN we would move to SharePoint Online and other Office365 applications, not IF.
Fortunately the project could start when I was still there and we would launch before I would retire.
1. Two projects: intranet and document management system
While I was trying to convince everyone that we really needed to start working towards SharePoint, I noticed that there was a lot of pushback. Gradually we understood that the governance model was unclear. We tried to help people see that the intranet and the DMS (document management system) happened to live on the same platform (at that time under one governance) but were two very different things. We needed to separate the two projects with different project teams and ownership.
My colleague was involved in the DMS, as this would be more complicated and she was expected to stay in the organization after my retirement, so it would save a handover. The intranet was simpler and I could easily document and transfer the knowledge to her.
So, from now on, this post will deal with the intranet.
2. SharePoint out-of-the-box
This was a strong wish from everyone involved. We did not think customization would be necessary for our requirements: News, formal information from various departments and processes, and an entry point into applications such as the HR system and the DMS. We also wanted to avoid complexity, a longer timeline and costs.
3. Office365 was already in the organization
We did not have to worry about technical implementation, as we already used the Office365 suite. We needed to set a Homepage and make sure we could create Hubs, but those were only small adjustments.
Our colleagues were also already familiar with how things worked, so it was not a major change. We already used SharePoint sites for projects, departments and what not. Those would not be included into the intranet per se but could be linked to when needed.
4. Small project team
There were only three people involved in the day-to-day project management:
The project manager and intranet owner from Communications. She was in charge of the content and design, and also liaised with the various stakeholders in the organization. At launch she was responsible for Communications and training of News publishers and other colleagues.
An external Microsoft consultant who had created intranets before. He knew all the functional details, and he also brought experience from other organizations as to what worked and what not.
And then there was me, who knows about SharePoint, but I did not have experience with Hubs and Homepages and Organizational Assets and those kinds of things. I was the liaison for IT-matters, and e.g. informed my colleague and our systems administrators what was happening, and which changes we needed to make in the system. At launch, I was also involved in the training sessions.
This was very effective. No large meetings, no endless discussions, we shared progress with the organization and asked for their feedback and worked that into the new intranet.
5. No additional branding needed
After having worked for a number of brands, with branding customizations that were “absolutely essential”, it was very strange for me to notice that this organization (mental health care) was not really interested in branding. Every site beloning to the intranet has the intranet icon, and the DMS (called “Werkwijzer” aka “Work directions”) has its own icon, but that’s it. Everyone can select their own Office365 top bar colour/pattern, we did not need the name of the organization in the bar, and the “default blue” SharePoint theme was close enough to the company colours. I tried to convince the project manager that we could easily change the theme to the actual blue from the corporate colours, but that was not needed.
6. No content migration
We decided not to migrate anything centrally. If a site owner wanted to move content from the old intranet to the new one, they had to do that themselves. We advised against copying, as most content was outdated. This led to some struggles with people who did not want to refresh their content, but the project manager insisted on at least a review and preferably a complete redesign to fit in the new setup, such as more picture materials and better use of page columns.
7. Guidelines for News and pages publishing
During training sessions of the future news and page editors we noticed that some people felt confused about all the options for visual display of their News and pages.
We decided to create some guidelines to help the publishers and keep things consistent. That post (from April 2022) got a lot of positive responses in the SharePoint/intranet community, so I guess this is interesting for other organizations as well.
8. A hard shut-down date for the old intranet
We needed to shut down the old intranet before November as the yearly bill was due then. We closed it down for employees three months before the pay date, but every publisher and content owner still had time to check if they had everything in their new site. The project manager warned everyone several times about the final shut-down date until it was finally gone forever.
What did not go so well?
Although nothing went wrong, we found that having many different News channels and publishers in one Hub site made the News part of the intranet a little crowded and overwhelming for some. Every News post is public, so a lot rolled up into the Hub, meaning a very short visibility time for each item on the Homepage. (Only 4 items were displayed at any given time) Besides, some posts were duplicated as a re-post, and it was not always clear where a post originated. We spent some time fine-tuning the number of items, creating links to the Hub site, communicating how things worked etc. in order to improve.
Below is a screenshot of the Homepage just before I left (December 2021). You see it is standard SharePoint. It is all in Dutch, but I think you can guess what is what: Central news, the DMS, Events (including our Office365 webinars), the various intranet sites/departments, some highlighted items and links to various sites and applications.
Homepage December 2021
Three months after launch it was decided to show more items on every page, to address the wishes from the organization, and to rearrange things a little. The screenshot below is from October 2022. The News and Events are both a little longer, there are some (pink and green) highlighted organizational projects, changing every month, and the various external web sites have a separate row with yellow icons. This was all done by the intranet manager herself, no difficult customizations needed!
Homepage October 2022
Now: Happy intranet manager and publishers
The intranet manager (the former project manager) informed me she is really happy with SharePoint. She finds it easy to work with and regularly makes small changes to the homepage herself, such as new buttons, or new highlighted items, to keep things fresh.
Furthermore, the news and page publishers like working with it, too! They inspire and stimulate each other to make posts and pages as nice and useful as possible. How cool is that!
Now: Proper governance
In the old intranet, both content, design and technical/system support for the intranet and the DMS were the responsibility of the Communications department.
Now, Communications is responsible for design and content of the intranet, while the DMS Owner is responsible for the design and content of the DMS. ICT is responsible for technical and functional support for both.
Conclusion
All in all, we completed the project in about 6 months. It could perhaps have been done faster but things were a bit slow over the summer holiday period. Still, it was the shortest intranet project I have ever been involved in, and it was a most enjoyable last project. I could finally prove that customizations are not needed for a good intranet!
So, go for standard out-of-the-box SharePoint, folks! There are already so many options, and most of them have been well thought out for intranet use. No need to re-invent your own wheel!
This project was started in 2015 and launched in 2016.
The situation
The old intranet was built on SharePoint 2007 (on-prem) and bursting at the seams. Each business had their own site collection, with many subsites underneath. Each site collection could only hold 2 GB (!) so it was a constant struggle to keep within those limits. I was the functional owner of a number of site collections and most of my posts from that time deal with keeping the storage space within its limits. So I shaved off versions, migrated stuff to archive collections or even shared drives, optimized presentations and what not, in order to keep the ever growing collections within limits.
The different business were quite autonomous in their approach, so some site collections had been nicely reworked with SharePoint Designer, and some had lots of workflows. There was an attempt to have common procedures, but this was all voluntary and not mandated.
All business and ICT folks who were involved with content, support and system maintenance really wanted a new intranet!
The project
After many years of project proposals we finally got approval to start creating a new intranet, based on SharePoint Online. This was not so much because the budget holders thought they needed an improved intranet, but because support for SP2007 would stop and the business wanted to move more applications to the cloud.
A Microsoft partner was found and off we went! At the beginning I was not really involved, which frustrated me. At a certain moment I just inserted myself into the weekly progress meetings and started asking questions and giving advice. After all, I had more direct contact with users of the current intranet than anyone else in the project, so I thought my input could be useful. Some weeks passed and I was considered one of the project team 😁
Mistake #1: Majority of budget went to News
We spent the majority of budget on creating a custom News function, which would be targeted and personalizable. It consisted of one page per news item in a special page format, a (too large) number of tags, and a publishing flow. Especially the targeting and personalization took up most of the work, as it had to be build and was rather complex.
When we launched, it was not fully ready but most of it worked. Improvements were on the roadmap.
The project team then attended a Microsoft event and heard that Microsoft would launch SharePoint News a few months later. We collectively cried a bit 😂
This project would be a pilot for introducing Agile methodology into the organization. We got trained and it went actually quite well. I like having many short improvement cycles, it suits my working style. When I was creating “Business solutions” at my former employer, I also worked like that, knowing that ideas and requirements would change as my customers learned more about the capabilities of SharePoint as we progressed. (I know there’s more to Agile but this stood out for me)
At launch, the intranet was a Minimal Viable Product. We had a roadmap to improve it over the next months. Only…due to cost savings the improvement budget was cancelled, which was a big disappointment and not a good way to deal with Agile. It turned out that an MVP is a good, but vulnerable, concept.
Additionally, no budget was provided (let alone left) to provide adequate documentation, as that is “not Agile”. That did not sit too well with the operations manager who had to provide the support, but we thought we could manage, as both an important developer and myself were in-house. I wrote about this mistake as well. (TLDR: the developer left shortly after launch…)
Mistake #3: Custom design
The idea was to make the intranet look like the corporate website. I do not always like this, as the purposes and audiences are completely different and one generally changes the website design more frequently, leaving the intranet with an “old” look-and-feel. I have ranted about this earlier. 😁
It meant that, for communication sites, we had
a non-standard font size, rather large
a Promoted Links tile that had slightly different behaviour (dimensions, hover-over) than regular, causing tons of confusion with people who looked on Microsoft Support or YouTube for instructions
65% white space, which drove people nuts because they had to scroll a lot to see the content they had to work with daily
Example of a page with customizations.
We had custom page templates to allow these features.
For team sites, we had custom content types, created to make a difference in stages of a document, as well as hidden tags to help Search. These were also organization-based. Then we changed the organization. Do I need to tell you about the consequences? Fortunately, not many people were aware of the custom content types, most people just used the default and never looked back…
In my post about my first intranet I already mentioned the joy of customizing SharePoint, so I will not do that here. Let’s keep things cheerful! 🥳
Mistake #4: Migration mistakes
The project team initially decided that we would only centrally migrate content that was no older than 2 years. Older content could be migrated by the owner if they thought it was necessary. However, the business insisted that everything should be migrated, as it was too much work to filter out the relevant content and “we had enough storage space now”. So even very old files that I could no longer open in our SP2007 environment were migrated, and still could not be opened. What a waste!
Additionally, the “migration factory” (as the migration team called itself) often forgot to include the new page templates and/or to remove the old page templates. This led to frustrated users who could not use the new templates, and to frustrated support people as people kept using the old templates so we did not get the uniform look-and-feel that we wanted. It was up to Support to adjust all mistakes as these would generally show later. Permissions were migrated as they were, and not (as we preferred) on the site level only (to allow the business owners to review any more detailed permissions).
Of course we also have some successes to report:
Success #1: Modern SharePoint environment
Apart from all the other SharePoint mod cons, we finally managed to make every site stand-alone; the subsites (sometimes 7 layers deep) were gone, and we had STORAGE SPACE! 🥳
Success #2: Central governance
The organization had given a more central role for ICT. This meant that all site collections were now managed by one ICT team, rather than by the various businesses and ICT. This allowed us to finally have one central governance, for instance:
Central creation and deletion of sites
Naming convention for sites, so each site had a unique identifier. We used a number, which I thought was rather unpleasant as it gives you no clue what the site is about, but with about 25,000 (!) sites it was the easiest system
Custom role for the site owner, so they could not do everything (esp. in design)
Central review and reporting on the site collections
Success #3: Mandatory Site owner e-learning
I have always been in favour of a sort of “site owner exam” and it fitted within our more strict governance, so I created a training and a test in e-learning format. Remind me to share the test in a Form one of these days, so you get an idea of what we wanted people to know. An earlier post about our training setup.
Success #4: Launch video!
The communications department created a rather nice teaser video to celebrate the launch. The original version lives on a corrupted USB-stick, but I managed to find an old Teams recording showing it. Please play at 2 x speed to see it properly. The sound has been lost during the process, there was a simple music soundtrack behind it. Now you understand why I am partial towards intranets called “Connect”! 😊
During my career I have helped to create and implement 3 SharePoint-based intranets:
Custom-built > SharePoint 2003 (on prem)
SharePoint 2007 (on prem) > SharePoint Online
Other platform > SharePoint Online
I have made mistakes and created things I am proud of, and I thought I’d share it for your amusement and possibly learning.
Let’s start with the first one, this was in 2005.
Our custom-built intranet was just beginning to take off, and when we moved to SharePoint 2003 we did not want to lose momentum. So our goal was that everything worked as much as possible as the current system. This may not have been the best idea, but we had even worse ideas. 😁
Mistake #1: Too much customization
I have described most of this in my post “The Curse of Customization” because we customized everything, and that included adjusting texts in the back end and removing the Folder capabilities from Document Libraries and replacing that with a mandatory column called Category, which was totally cool but most annoying when you quickly wanted to add a new category.
Mistake #2: Too complex usage statistics
Another idea that seemed great at the time was custom-built usage statistics. The standard SharePoint info was (and is) meagre, and we wanted to be able to break down usage at various organizational and business levels, just like we had with our old intranet.
This was not our decision of course, but a company decision. For our intranet this was rather devastating, as you can read in my post “Ouch-sourcing“.
Of course there were also things that went well!
Success #1: Do More with SharePoint: our Business Solutions
Although in the beginning people were a bit hesitant to use the new intranet, we quickly created a process to help them make the most of it. We turned into a “Business Solutions team” that improved problematic business processes, based on a business case. Our calculation method to determine priority for us, and benefits for the business, has been described in this post. And yes, this method was approved by our finance team.
One of the most successful cases was a pre-SAP automation of the CRM-process of part of the organization, where different teams analysed every complaint and determined whether they needed to re-imburse the customer or that someone else was responsible for the complaint and any damage. See “CRM in a Team site“
This was REALLY fun to do, we all learned so much about SharePoint and the business was happy with better and cheaper processes. Sadly, my later employers were not really interested in this setup. 😥
Succes #2: Good score in Digital Workplace Group’s Benchmarking tables
We became members of the Digital Workplace Groep (then: Intranet Benchmarking Forum) and we quickly rose to the top of the league for most categories except Usability and Design. More information on the Benchmarking process: https://digitalworkplacegroup.com/benchmarking/
Succes #3: The oldest intranet promotion video in my collection!
Although I can not imagine that we were really the first organization that created an intranet launch video, our video is the oldest in my collection that I am aware of. Enjoy!
May I present you with the latest batch of intranet promotion videos? And now that we are talking about this, would you please complete my survey on the relevance of my collection, if you have not done so already? Many thanks!
1. Teaser for fintech solutions provider
Nice teaser for a new intranet – from the imagery it must be fabulous! It looks communications-based and it is available on all devices, but that is a given these days. Uploaded February 2022.
2. New intranet for an online market place for the public sector (in French)
If I understand correctly, this organization manages an online marketplace where the French public sector can buy things that are approved by the government, so they do not have to set up complicated procedures to select the right vendors and products.
The new intranet is called Connect (another one! I can almost start a collection of intranets with this name 🙂 ) and the format is interesting: 4 employees of different company backgrounds have tested it and they answer a number of questions, such as “what do you like best?” and “what do you think of the name?” Of course they are positive, but this is a nice way of showing that you have engaged real employees during creation of their new intranet.
Sadly, there is no screenshot of the intranet. They refer to Office365 so I am curious whether it is SharePoint.
Sadly, the video can not be embedded but if you click the button, it will show.
Teaser with some screenshots of a new intranet for a London-based architect. It is all very elegant and colourful, in line with their website, and it is based on SharePoint.
Uploaded March 2022
4. Intranet for the university of Verona (in Italian)
I had to see this video twice because I was very much distracted by the visuals. 🙂 Ah, Italian design! Starting with the classic Italian building behind the university’s CIO, moving to interesting modern buildings and halls, a row of bespectacled phone users (Myopia will be an epidemic as more and more people spend more and more time on small screens) and an enormous touch-screen whiteboard.
But back to the intranet. There are no good visuals, which is sad, but it should be the place where all students, teachers and personnel can find their information, reserve rooms, communicate quickly, collaborate in project groups and what not.
Uploaded May 2022
5. Intranet for a plastics manufacturer
I have a large backlog of videos, including this one from a plastics manufacturer in the UK. The design may be a little less familiar (SharePoint is so ubiquious these days) but the content looks good – lots of interaction options, including questions to the Executives and interest groups, as well as news, procedures, and other shared content. And this was already available on multiple devices in 2018!
Whenever I published a SharePoint news post, I have always been happy when people took the trouble to read my posts at all, let alone push the 👍 button or even spent time on a reply.
But when we introduced the publishers to these feedback options a few people were hesitant. When we told them they would get an email for feedback some were relieved that they would not miss comments, some were even more hesitant because it meant “more email to take care of”.
Nonetheless, we strongly advise publishers to allow interactions for news posts. It means more two-way communication and that is a good thing. For static pages, which are available all the time, we leave it to the publisher. It may be better to mention the responsible person or provide an email address for questions about a page on processes within the organization, for instance.
So, how can you manage comments and likes?
1. Best option: as is
When you publish a page, comments and likes are on by default. When someone likes or comments, the post’s creator (this is not necessarily the author mentioned on the page) will immediately receive an email for each interaction. (The Microsoft info says it is batched, and I remember it worked like that, but during the creation of this post all likes and comments turned into individual emails.) This email may end up in “Other” if you have enabled the Focused Inbox.
Whether this floods you with emails, is dependent on many things: how frequently you post, the type of info you post, the size of the organization, and how interactive the audience is, for instance.
This is the email for a comment.
When do you NOT receive an email?
When you like or comment on posts you have created yourself
When you are an external publisher, i.e. you have no (email) account on the tenant where you publish
When you are mentioned as the author, without being the person who created the post. The person in “Created By” will receive the email instead.
2. Collect all feedback mails in one folder by using Outlook Rules
If you receive (too) many feedback mails, and/or you do not like to have all these mails scattered around your inbox, you can use Rules to collect all these in a separate folder.
Make sure you create a folder first and then set up the rules, based on ‘subject includes”
The subject lines for the various posts are
[Person] liked [Title of post]
[Person) left a comment on [Title of post]
[Person) replied to a comment on [Title of post]
You can also do this in PowerAutomate, of course, but Rules are easier.
My Rule to move comments to a special folder in Outlook on the web
You can also use this when you are often posting news on someone else’s behalf; you can forward comments to them using a Rule. In that case use “Forward to” as the action.
Remember to look into this folder on a regular basis, and to reply to comments where needed. This is important as the phrase “left a comment” is also used for comments on shared documents and Lists!
An alternative option for Likes
It is possible to see all Likes in the Pages library, so you could also choose to make that visible in the library, look there on a regular basis, and move the emails to the Deleted Items with a Rule. After all, you are not expected to react on Likes. You can make it visible in the Pages library as follows:
Open the Site Pages library (Gear wheel > Site contents > Site Pages)
Click “Add column”> “Show/hide columns”
Select “Like count” (at the bottom) and click “Apply” top left. You can also do this by editing the View, but that is more work.
Add the Like Count by using Add Column
3. When appropriate: Turn off comments for one news post or page
When you click “Add > News post” from the web part, you will see the Comments option on the bottom of the page. When you toggle the switch before publishing, nobody will be able to add comments.
Toggle the switch and people will no longer be able to add comments
People can still like your post, however, and this will send an email to the creator’s mailbox. This will also happen when there is no author mentioned or when the mentioned author is not the creator. The creator will receive the email.
There is still a “Like” button, and this will send you an email when clicked.
So, turning off comments on your posts or pages can save you some emails, but you will still receive an email for each like, so you could also use the “autodelete” option by using a Rule.
4. Not advised – turn off all notifications across SharePoint pages/news
I would not advise to do this, but for completeness’ sake I can inform you that there is an option on the SharePoint landing page to remove ALL likes and comments across SharePoint news and pages for all your SharePoint sites. I honestly can not think of any good business case to do this (except for the Likes, see 2.), so if you have a reason to recommend it, please share in the comments!
There are two ways go reach the page with the settings:
Click “Notification settings” at the bottom of every email notification for news and pages.
Click the gear wheel on the SharePoint landing page, and select “Email notification settings”
Here you can turn off all news/pages notifications
You can toggle the notifications on and off.
Please note this does not stop the comments on documents. If you click “Notification settings” at the bottom of a “document comment email” you will be taken to your OneDrive notification settings, where you can turns some notifications off. But why would you?
Conclusion
If you are a news and/or page publisher, and you receive too many notification emails because your colleagues respond frequently, first congratulate yourself with being a publisher that can set people in motion! 🙂 After giving yourself this constructive feedback, check if 2 or 3 are suitable options to reduce the noise a little.
If you have any experiences with managing comments within your organization, would you please share them in the comments?
A few months ago I helped create and introduce a SharePoint intranet for “my” health care organization. The majority of the new intranet consists of SharePoint Pages and News, default functionality. As this provides our publishers with tons of options for layout, colour schemes, styles, fonts and what not, we had to take a few measures to keep a somewhat consistent look-and-feel. Additionally, many publishers wanted some guidelines as they were a tad overwhelmed with choice.
I mentioned before that our Communications function is not too fanatical in enforcing the corporate style guide on people – everyone can select their own Office365 theme, for instance. But some consistency is needed, of course.
What a difference with my (multinational) employer before! There we spent the majority of our intranet redevelopment budget on creating a complicated News setup, which was at that time not available in SharePoint, with fixed page templates and colour schemes, fonts, whitespace and what not. Did I ever tell you that, after launch of this beast, the team attended a SharePoint conference and learned that Microsoft would be introducing SharePoint News? Out of the box? FOR FREE? You can imagine what we felt when we heard that 🙂
Please find below an overview of our attempts to keep things consistent. Feel free to translate these to your own organization or clients, and please let me know if you use any other guidelines for this purpose.
1. Structure what can be structured
All “formal organizational units” have their own site for publishing pages and news posts. Although I know you should not structure your intranet according to the organizational setup, there were hardly any other ways to structure it by without running into other issues, such as ownership. Trust me, we tried 🙂
All organizational sites are grouped into one Hub site. This allows for one navigation and colour scheme, and roll-up of news.
All hub sites have the Blue theme. This matches best with our style guide. I offered to change the main blue colour into the actual style guide colour, but that was not necessary.
The standard Blue theme matched well
Every hub site has the same site icon. This way it is always clear if a site belongs to the intranet.
The news web parts on all sites are configured to display title, summary and date only. Adding too many data provides a cluttered look. It also uses a little more vertical space.
Left colum: with author, date and views, right column: date only.
Headers are compact, footers simple.
2. Provide guidelines for what is flexible
As we use the standard functionality, we had to create some guidelines for writing and design to try and keep the pages and posts consistent and in line with our standards, and to limit the options for publishers. Those guidelines were brought up in training sessions for all potential publishers (and whoever was interested), and are available as reference material.
Use a short and catchy title, one line max. The title shows what interesting information your text contains, attracts attention, is informative, distinctive and piques curiousity. There are internal trainings for writing catchy titles!
Use active text. Do not use verbs such as ‘will’, ‘can’, ‘be’, ‘may’, or ‘become’.
Do not underline your text. Readers may think it is a hyperlink.
Avoid abbreviations where possible. If you must use one, first write it out completely and add the abbreviation behind it in parentheses. For example: “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)”
When you add a document, give the document a clear title, without date or version. The date and other information can be viewed from the document library it lives in. And in case you need to edit the information, you do not need to edit the title.
Keep your page or news item as short as possible. When you really need a long text, please break up your text with headings and use anchors to allow the reader to jump to the desired part immediately.
Use capitals sparingly. There is a paragraph in the style guide for the use of capitals. (I am a Big Fan of Capitals, but the style guide is not :))
Use “One column” or the “One-third right” layout for news posts The first one suits straightforward posts, the other is better when you want to add a photo, button, etc. For static pages, publishers can use another layout.
The preferred page layout for news when you want more than just text
Use our “Image bank” (Organizational assets) or Stock Images for images where possible. The photo’s in the image bank are suitable for the organization, and, like the Stock Images, have no copyright issues.
When using an introduction text, use standard size, bold, black or “theme dark alternate” blue. That blue is well readable and matches best with our corporate colours.
The preferred blue colour
For headings, use standard size bold, standard size italics OR heading 2 or 3. You can use black or “theme dark alternate” blue, as long as you use the same colour of the introduction text.
Add the Publish date on your news posts. By default this is off, so this is easy to forget. Perhaps a new page template may help. If anyone knows how to turn this on by default, please let me know!
Show the published date is off by default. 😦
Enable comments for news and short-time pages. This allows for discussion within the organization. You can disable comments for static pages.
Comments are on by default
You probably recognize some of these as standard writing guidelines, but it never hurts to repeat, as not all publishers are experienced writers.
Please note publishers can deviate from these guidelines, e.g. if they have a post or page about a special topic that needs to stand out.
What have we missed? What do you use?
Please let me know which other guidelines you are using to make your vanilla SharePoint news a little consistent.
The latest choice of intranet and digital workplace launch videos!
I recently searched on YouTube, but nice videos are hard to find there. There are many school projects (“what is the difference between internet and intranet?”), recorded meetings, game videos and commercial videos for intranet platforms. Vimeo is apparently more of a catalogue for video creators, and has tons more of the video type I am looking for.
However, please be aware that recently upladed videos on Vimeo need to be “rated” and this will give you a warning. Creating a (free) Vimeo account and logging in solves that issue, so in case you do not see a preview, please make sure to log in!
We have a lot of “people” video’s today!
1. Another intranet with a person name: Lucy
I always like videos with the name of a person. In my most recent overview, there was an intranet called Charlie, named after the founder. This one, for a health care service center based in the Dominican Republic, is called Lucy and that stands for “Linking Us ContinuouslY”.
The VP of Human Resources and the local Marketing Manager show News, training courses, colleagues, work procedures, well, everything you need to make your work life easier.
Uploaded February 2022.
2. Intranet for electricity supplier (in Spanish)
This is an older intranet, you can see it from the design but also from the date of the week menu 🙂
This electricity company from Peru has a homepage with a news carousel. It also has a Photo gallery, Calendar, HR information etc. Strangely enough, the buttons open small popups, and they appear to lead to pdf’s. Hmm.
Uploaded March 2022.
3. Personal welcome to the intranet for temps
I quite like this idea. When you start temporary work for this Australian recruiter, you will get this “personal” welcome video and introduction to the intranet from the General Manager and Founder herself. She explains the importance of the platform, what you can expect, and invites new “hires” to give feedback.
Uploaded February 2022.
4. Another intranet called Connect!
You may remember that I used to work for an organization which named its new intranet “Connect”. Since then I have seen a ton of intranets with that name. Perhaps I should dedicate a post to intranets called Connect! 🙂 This one is for a stairlift company which was founded in the Netherlands, apparently. It is now an international organization. The VP Commercial introduces the new intranet and invites everyone to participate and share their stories. Because “the more you put into it, the more you get out”. This is interesting, as most organizations who did an intranet relaunch boasted that they removed tons of old content clutter and are only relaunching with the bare minimum of necessary information.
Uploaded March 2022.
5. Intranet for a beauty and cosmetics company (in Portuguese)
This intranet, for a Brazilian beauty and cosmetics organization (not sure if it is cosmetic surgery or mainly injectables and fillers – is there a word for that?) looks just as beautiful as their website and their models. 🙂 Nice purple colour, nice icons, large photographs, modern look & feel. It has all the things you expect from an intranet – news, pictures, calendar, social network, and a mobile app.
I thought it was time for a few new intranet videos. The below are all from Vimeo, which has turned out to be a better source than YouTube. The only drawback is that you will need an account (free) with Vimeo and log in in order to see some videos. This is a recent measure.
So, create an account, log on and enjoy!
1. New intranet for a global construction/engineering company (teaser)
“A Digital Headquarters to bring employees from all geographies together”. This intranet for a global engineering company (mostly agricultural from the website) is named after the CEO (who is also the name-giver for the company) which is a nice touch. Many employees feature in this teaser. Sadly you can’t see much of the actual intranet, but it is supposed to be social and connecting, and not just functional en efficient. I also get a little irritated these days by all that corporate talk and big intentions, but I am sure that’s just me!
Uploaded January 2022.
2. Updated intranet for an Australian child care organization (demo)
After a rather bombastic musical intro, you see a decent functional SharePoint intranet with all the usual trimmings. The demo takes you through all the menu items. It has a focus on documents and links rather than news. (Nice search options in the central Document library, by the way).
There’s also some community elements.
The site title shows this is a demo site, so I hope that they have had the time to add some images to the link tiles, and to update the icons for the Office applications in the real site 🙂
Uploaded September 2021.
3. Canadian university/college (teaser)
“The more you engage the better it will be”. Quite a cryptic promise, especially because there is no explanation of how that would work.” There is also no preview of the intranet, which is disappointing.
This teaser is one big promise for a new intranet called College Connect, and as you may know, one of the intranets I worked on/for has been called Connect, so I have always been partial to the name. 🙂
Uploaded February 2021.
4. Intranet for a Swedish university (demo)
An interesting SharePoint intranet with a few non-standard items, I think: breadcrumbs on pages, selection of news sources (different than following sites) and My Menu. I like the yellow dots that signify central sites. Technically it is just the site icon, but I like the concept to separate content in subtle ways, while keeping the design consistent.
There’s also some attention for general SharePoint stuff: search, save for later, navigation and the SharePoint mobile app.
Tip: if you think the speaker talks a bit slowly, you can speed up by clicking on the gearwheel at the bottom of the video and adjusting the speed.
Uploaded January 2022.
5. New intranet for a US online fashion store (teaser)
Nice colourful teaser for this fashion store. It has relevant info and a social component, and even “integration with Slack and workspaces”. I do not think this is a SharePoint intranet 🙂
Ellen's Digital Workplace 