SharePoint site naming conventions – my experience

The other day, Gregory Zelfond’s SharePoint Maven newsletter featured best practices for naming conventions for SharePoint sites.
In the three organizations I worked for, I have used very different naming conventions. So let me share them to illustrate Greg’s points.

My first intranet

We had central creation of sites, but not really a naming convention. We checked if there was already a site with that name, tried to keep names short, avoided spaces and special characters, and tried to bring some order in the chaos by adding business or brand abbreviations into the name, such as AP (AmbiPur), CT (Coffee & Tea) and some others.
It all worked, which is strange for such a large organization (120.000 employees at one time), but then SharePoint was not yet widely used, so we had a few hundred sites at most.

Good practice: central site creation; short, no spaces or special characters; somewhat meaningful for users
Bad practice: no formal naming convention (but best efforts)

My second intranet

This was an excellent example of bad practices before and after migration 😁
(Read more at: my second SharePoint intranet)

When I arrived at the scene, every business or corporate department had their own site collection. (Yes boys and girls, site collections were still all the rage then!)
Ownership of the site collections (including site collection administration permissions!) was with the business, and ICT was site collection admin for general support. And every site owner could create subsites. 😱
As most business owners did not really know about URL character limitations, we also experienced that documents could not be opened due to a too long URL, caused by endless “nesting” of subsites and sometimes very long site names.
Every business had a number of sub businesses, all in that same site collection. As soon as someone needed a site for Marketing, the business owner created one called Marketing under their own sub business, or created a subsite under Marketing if there was already a site with that name. So we ended up with several layers deep and various sites called Marketing (or even “…/Marketing/Marketing/…”) within one site collection.
You can imagine this was a bit messy. 😁

It was fun to support.
“Ellen, could you help me with the Marketing site please?”
“Which Marketing site?”
“Ours”
“Can you send me the link please, as we have four sites called Marketing in different parts of the site collection.”
“Oh really?”

Good practice: meaningful to users
Bad practice: no central site creation, no formal naming convention, spaces turning into “%20” in URLs, long URLs

After migration to SharePoint Online, every subsite became a stand-alone site, as recommended. We finally had central site creation and adopted a naming convention. This was simple: a number, starting with 00001 for the first site being migrated and then onwards. There was no other logic, nothing like “we reserve 00001 until 09999 for this business” so the order was the order of migration, then creation, which is completely irrelevant.
We changed the site name after creation to something more meaningful, but that number was still in the URL, providing no information scent whatsoever. I think it was rather cruel to users.

A site with a numeric URL

On site pages (see above) the number is not so bad, as the site name is shown in various places. Also across SharePoint you will see the site name, not the site URL.

But in documents you only have the number to remind you which site you are in, as seen in the screenshot below.

A document in a site with a numeric URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention
Bad practice: not meaningful to users

My third intranet

My last employer had central site creation and a solid naming convention when I arrived, and we never felt the need to change:

• a letter to mark the purpose of the site, determining the template, e.g. a for archive, p for project. We later added g for groups (Teams-sites) and i for intranet sites.
• a dash – to separate the letter from the rest
• 3 letters to mark the part of the organization
• 3 letters as abbreviation for the required name

So, that could be “p-ictprt” for a printer replacement project from ICT, or “c-fehsec” for a collaborative site for secretaries of the FEH unit.
After creation, we changed the site name to a more intuitive name.
It was short, it had an information scent, and it allowed us to filter and sort for housekeeping purposes. (In the Active Sites list in the SharePoint admin center)

The homepage of a site with a (somewhat) meaningful URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention, short, no spaces or special characters, meaningful for users, useful for maintenance and support
Bad practice: none (well, perhaps the dash in the URL but I think that added meaning and it is still short)

Remarks:

1. Please note that the site’s icon displays the characters from the original URL. It will not change upon changing the site name. You may need to change the site icon to get rid of that “2” in the screenshot below.

The first character(s) of the original URL will be displayed

2. You may also want to think about a naming convention for Teams, see this article from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/microsoft-teams-naming-importance
In my third organization, we used the same convention as for SharePoint sites but then with g as the first letter, and we changed the Teams name after creation into something meaningful.

3. Please sign up for SharePoint Maven’s Newsletter if you have not done so yet. Gregory knows a LOT and explains things very well.

Which naming conventions have you used?

Please let me know in the comments!

SharePoint: the good old intERnet days

Did you know that SharePoint used to have internet sites? If you have been there from the start, or from about 2008 or so, you will know that, but if you started after 2015 you may not realize. So, as part of SharePoint’s 23rd birthday celebration, let’s talk about SharePoint and intERnet. And I am not talking about sharing sites and documents with your customers, suppliers or other business partners, but about real websites.

Brand and product sites

I do not know the exact dates anymore, but around 2009 we had a large project at the organization I worked for at that time. We had a successful intranet based on SharePoint (see My very first SharePoint intranet), and at that time you could use SharePoint also for internet sites.
Management decided that we were going to move all our brand and product websites to SharePoint. We wanted to make the best use of our investment in Microsoft tools, have more control over the hosting and maintenance, and save money.
We had a long-term partnership with a good, but very expensive web and brand design agency. They would still be responsible for the design and branding and action mechanisms.
Everyone in Marketing and Sales was very upset as at that time it was fashionable to hate SharePoint. They were very afraid that “it would look like SharePoint” and that was the worst critique you could give a website. (Some people still have that attitude, but I guess they have not seen SharePoint for years 😉)
The design agency was most dismissive, as “you could not build decent websites on SharePoint”. Of course.
Our SharePoint support team was hesitant because they expected tons of questions from Marketing and Sales about maintenance and new requirements, especially about functionality that SharePoint did not have. (And the “I-told-you-so”s that would be the result)

I would love to tell you a story of successes or horrors, but I left the organization before the project was in full swing, so I am curious if it was ever brought to a conclusion. If they had done it, they would have had to change everything back a couple of years later, when Microsoft phased out the website options in 2015 because they realized that other parties could do a better job on internet and web sites.
Do you have any real-life experiences from websites-on-SharePoint? Please share!

Personal sites in Office 365

When I started with my Office365 subscription in 2011, it came with an external site. As I have a “Small business plan” it was meant to promote my small business and services, but I have never put a lot of work in it.
The site is no longer accessible from the internet, but I can still see and even edit it! It is in Classic SharePoint, so it does not look as nice as modern SharePoint and it is also less easy to manage. This option was discontinued in 2015.

This is the homepage of my former internet site. Please look at the URL. The message in red says “Reminder, this site will be deleted shortly. Click here for more info” and then I get an error message.

In the “Edit mode” (accessible via the gear wheel) you recognize Classic SharePoint.

The site in edit mode.

Libraries and lists, site settings are still there, and I could probably rework this into a Modern site, but it is easier to create a new one. 😁

External sharing

Of course you will know the options to share sites, documents, Forms etc. with your customers, clients, suppliers and other external business contacts. That has been around since around 2005 and has proven to be very useful. But it is not the same as an internet site where everyone can access.

As part of the preparation for this post I asked CoPilot about SharePoint and internet. The answer will be something for my next post. 😉

SharePoint, the good old intranet days

As SharePoint celebrated its 23 year birthday last week, as mentioned by Veronique Palmer and many others, I thought it might be nice to share my personal history with SharePoint.

The beginning: SharePoint 2001

The first version of SharePoint that I worked with, SharePoint 2001, was a document management solution. It was comparable to the current document library, but with very limited functionality and a different design. There were folders and subfolders, you could subscribe, you could set permissions per (sub)folder and that was it.

The picture below has been taken from this post.

A document library from SP2001. Jussi Roine was also already active at that time! 😉

At the company I worked for at that time, we had developed our own “document cabinet” functionality on a different platform. It was just one flat list of documents with permissions on the cabinet level.
We provided the SharePoint solution to “serious” users only: people who had experience with document and records management, such as research departments, quality control functions, finance etc. Everyone else, such as Communications or Marketing, had to make do with the document cabinets, as SharePoint was considered “too complicated” for “normal people”. Can you imagine? 😁

My first intranet: moving to SharePoint 2003

We had built an intranet around the year 2000 using our own document cabinets, a third-party Discussion Forum functionality and Frontpage webs. When we started to develop a new intranet for the organisation, we found out that the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, was something more than just document management. It was a complete intranet platform, so we could replace everything with SharePoint! It sounds very simple and obvious now, but at that time we were so used to building things ourselves that we were very confused at first. How would this work? How should we replace our Forums? Could we move documents from our cabinets to SharePoint? What would it mean to our developers? How could we inform people about this complicated new functionality?
Despite making a few mistakes (such as wanting to replicate old functionality) we created a rather successful intranet on SharePoint 2003.
I wrote about that here: My very first SharePoint intranet.

My second intranet: moving from SharePoint 2007

After that came SharePoint 2007, which had more functionality. After that, there was a split in SharePoint on-premises (the installed version on an organization’s servers) which has versions SP2010, SP2013, SP2016 and SP2019 (I do not think any versions have been added since) and SharePoint Online, which is the cloud version used by most organizations, I think.

I have worked with SharePoint 2007, struggling with storage space, and moved to SharePoint Online from there. I wrote about that here: My second SharePoint intranet.

My third intranet: moving to SharePoint Online

The third intranet project I was involved in meant moving to SharePoint Online from a very outdated non-Microsoft platform. By that time (2021) most employees were already familiar with SharePoint Online and the complete Microsoft365 suite. Combined with just a few requirements and a very good project manager, this was a model project completed in record time. I wrote about it in this post: My third SharePoint intranet.

So, I have worked with various versions in the years that I worked with SharePoint. And I still love it, it can do so much!

Next time, I will discuss the external capabilities of SharePoint. It used to be more than what you can do now. Did you know?

10 tips for owners of (intranet promotion) videos

It always makes me sad when some of the videos in my collection disappear because the owner deletes them or makes them private. Of course I appreciate that they have to keep their channels up-to-date, but for my collection it is not ideal.

And while toying with the idea for a post on this “problem”, I came across many more things that video owners on YouTube and Vimeo could do to help me with my collection. If they want to, and if it fits with their organization’s procedures, of course!

So I decided to write an instructional post about uploading and maintaining “my kind of” video, aimed at

• Communications or intranet managers who have been so kind to share their intranet launch or promotion video on a public platform
• Employees of creative agencies, who share their created intranet promotion videos as part of their portfolio
• And everyone else who manages videos on YouTube, Vimeo or another platform, and would like to be in any collection

So, please share this with other video owners that you know.

Thank you!

First of all, a big thank you to all owners! Your video will help the intranet and digital workplace world to learn about other organization’s approaches and focal points. Your example is not only entertaining, but it can inspire other organizations, for instance help them express their thoughts on the intranet, visualize their concepts or give them fresh ideas!

For instance, below video from Kelloggs has a voice-over from people with different accents from around the world. This makes it clear they are an international company without explicitly saying so. I think it is much nicer than when an American or British manager from the corporate office provides the voice-over. And it is not that difficult to implement. Nice tip, right?

https://vimeo.com/552422366

Multiple accents from across the world show that you really are a global organization!

Secondly, there are a few settings and processes in YouTube and Vimeo that help or hinder adding them to my collection.
Of course I respect your governance processes around video. But in case you do not have a confirmed process, or you and your organization are open to suggestions, please find here some suggestions that help me adding to and maintaining my collection. And therefore help other intranet people.

Some tips are suitable for any video platform, but as the majority of my videos lives on YouTube or Vimeo, I will focus on those platforms.

Please click on any of the titles below and you will jump to the corresponding paragraph.
If you want to read them all, just scroll on!

Tips summary:

1. Share your videos publicly
2. Give your videos a good title
3. Use the word “intranet” in the title, description and/or tags
4. For people videos, add the name and role of the speaker
5. Provide a transcript or subtitles (and in English if possible)
6. Select the correct audience
7. Allow adding to collections
8. Allow embedding
9. Let me know about them!
10. Hide video instead of deleting it when the video is past its date

By the way, I have got 600 videos in my collection now!

Give or take a few.

Tips full-length:

1. Share your videos publicly

I will be unable to find your video if they are hidden, or behind a password, obviously.

For YouTube, that means this setting:

Please make your videos public!

For Vimeo, it looks like this:

This is the preferred option in Vimeo.

If you really want to hide your video, but you are OK to share it with people who are interested in intranet videos, you can also make it “Unlisted” and send me the link. I can then add it to my collection, provided you allow that. (see items 7 and 8)

2. Give your videos a good title

I see many videos called “Company_Intranet_IT_something else_PEP_V.06_final.mp4” or similar unpleasantness. A better name is something like “[Company name] Intranet Launch” or “[Company name] new intranet teaser”. Here’s how to do this a little better:

• Save the video you want to upload with a pleasant file name, without underscores, version numbers or other things that are not relevant for your audience. Keep a separate copy with the technical information, such as version, if you want.
• Alternatively, you can edit the title after uploading to YouTube or Vimeo.

A good example from Eindhoven University (screenshot):

Technical University Eindhoven uses a good title for their intranet video.

3. Use the word “intranet” in the title, description and/or tags

“intranet” is my main search keyword, so if you can add this to the title (preferably) or in another place, please do.
I sometimes also use “Digital Workplace” but that generally gives a different type of video, e.g., an expert’s lecture on digital transformation, or an introduction to an organization’s office suite overview, such as Microsoft365.
It is also helpful when you add information about the video and the intranet in the description, e.g. purpose, launch date, if there are any more videos, etc.

4. For people videos, add the name and role of the speaker

It helps viewers if they know who is addressing the organization. It can be the CEO, HR Director, someone from the IT helpdesk, a factory employee. Please mention their name and their role in the video itself, or in the description of the video.

Good example:

Good example: we know who this person is. (The video title is less good though 😉)

Not so good example:

This is a really nice video I think, but why do we not know who this person is?

5. Provide a transcript or subtitles (and in English if possible)

YouTube can provide automatic live captions in the language spoken in the video (provided you have set the correct language while uploading), and do a live translation as well, although it is not always perfect.
This will be very helpful for people who can’t hear, but also for people who are watching the video in a noisy environment or with the sound off. Or for people who are learning another language.
However, if the video is not in English it would be nice if you were able to provide English subtitles as well, or an English translation in the description.
Hey, a girl can ask, right? 😊

Don’t worry, I am working on good instructions on how to extract an English transcript from a video.

6. Select the correct audience

Intranet promotion videos are meant for the general public. They are not specifically meant for children, even when the organization is a children’s hospital or a primary school.

Recently, both YouTube and Vimeo have added an audience check for your video. You will be prompted during upload. It is important that you check the correct audience. And for older videos, please may I ask you to retrofit the audience? Not having an audience assigned has various drawbacks for my collection.

For YouTube, please select that this video is “No, it’s not ‘Made for Kids'”.

If you select the other audience, I will be unable to add the video to my “Watch later” list (which serves as my backlog) so I have to do extra things to keep it in sight.

Below you find an example of an intranet video, rated as For Kids. This means I cannot download the video, which is OK, but I can also not add it to a watchlist. As this is a video targeted at employees of an insurance company, this rating appears not to be correct. I can share it, however. You can watch it here.

This video should not be rated as “Made for kids”.

For Vimeo, you are requested to select a rating, and then specify this video is for “All audiences”. All unrated videos are currently waiting for a rating, and if it has not been specified, you have to be logged in to Vimeo to view the video. This is most annoying! Fortunately, a Vimeo account is free, but it does not help a good experience for viewers of my collection.

Video owners on Vimeo, please check your videos and rate them as “for all audiences” so people do not need to log in to watch.

7. Allow adding to collections

If you have earmarked the video on YouTube as “Made for Kids” I will be unable to add it to my “Watch Later” List (which is my backlog) but I also will be unable to add it to any other playlist. I am currently working on a YouTube playlist so it would be nice if I could add your video to it.

For Vimeo, there is a separate setting. I can always use “Watch later” for the backlog but please allow “people can add to showcases” (6 in the screenshot below). A Vimeo showcase is similar to a YouTube playlist.

The video settings in Vimeo.

8. Allow embedding

Embedding is showing the video as a whole on a page, for instance the videos in this post, but adding the video to my collection is also done by embedding. If you do not allow it, I need to create all kinds of workarounds with thumbnails and links to add the video.

On YouTube I cannot embed Shorts videos, and on Vimeo it is a specific setting as shown in the screenshot above, number 7. Please enable it.

9. Let me know about them!

Did you recently create a video that you are proud of? Do you think it could help other intranets? Would you like feedback? Do you want to have some control over the description in my collection? 😊
If you do not want to wait until I have found your video, please send me the link and anything you would like me to share, and I can add it asap.
That will also make things easier for me. In most cases I have to look up the type of organization and country, and I sometimes have to guess about aspects of the intranet or video, so if you want to keep me from making incorrect assumptions, please contact me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

10. Hide video instead of deleting it when the video is past its date

All videos have a lifecycle, and I totally understand if you want to keep your video platform free of outdated stuff. I am that person who is always nagging about housekeeping, remember? 😁 But in the case of an intranet promotion video, may I ask you to make the video Unlisted instead of making it private or deleting it altogether?

An unlisted video can only be seen by people who have the link (or when it is embedded). It will no longer be visible on your page or in search results, so it will only be visible for those people who are really interested in my collection. I hope you do want to keep sharing with us!

Two of my own videos. I do not want to make the intranet video from a former employer too visible, so I have made it Unlisted.

Conclusion

There are a number of settings in YouTube and Vimeo that influence my ability to add your intranet promotion video to my collection.
As mentioned in the beginning, I totally understand if you must adhere to your organization’s guidelines for managing your video presence. But in case you do not have guidelines yet, or you are open to review your procedures, you may want to start doing the above so we can all benefit maximally from your work!

Go to my video collection

The intranet demonstration video

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.

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.

Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author

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.

Recap of the basics:

1. Read my earlier post on the topic

I suggest you read my earlier post “4 ways to manage comments on SharePoint news and pages” as a starting point.

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.

Conclusion

I think being able to redirect Comments to the Author of a News post or page is useful functionality. There are a number of items on this topic in the Microsoft Feedback Portal and you may want to add your votes.

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!

My third SharePoint intranet

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.

This was a model project, quite unlike the two I had experienced before. In my first intranet we customized for functionality, in my second intranet we customized mainly for branding, and this one was a breeze: no customizations wanted or needed! Of course, SharePoint Online had evolved since I was involved in my second intranet, but there were a few other success factors as well:

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!

My second SharePoint intranet

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 😂

Mistake #2: Agile development, Waterfall operations

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”! 😊

My very first SharePoint intranet

During my career I have helped to create and implement 3 SharePoint-based intranets:

1. Custom-built > SharePoint 2003 (on prem)
2. SharePoint 2007 (on prem) > SharePoint Online
3. 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.

How that turned out, you can read in “KISS: Keep Intranet Statistics Simple“

Mistake #3: Outsourcing support

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“

You can find more examples here: https://mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com/tag/business-example/ (you may need to scroll down a little)

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/ 

The homepage above the fold; you can see some more here

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!

More #intranet promotion videos (#13)

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.

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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.

Uploaded March 2022

Watch video

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3. New intranet for an architect company

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

https://vimeo.com/692196786

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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

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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!

Uploaded March 2018

That’s it for this week, folks!

And please remember to complete my survey!

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