Category: Modern Intranet

Over the past year and I half I’ve been privileged to work on work on one of the first modern intranet’s for a fantastic biotech company, Shire. My role is the associate director of collaboration responsible for SharePoint, Yammer, and OneDrive and related technologies. Two companies, Shire and Baxalta were coming together and looking to create a new intranet for the entire company.

As the lead architect for the Intranet and a long term SharePoint guy, I was passionate about being a part of the renaissance that SharePoint was experiencing. Our timing was a bit ahead of the product but we were able to make decisions aligned with our long term goals of modern, mobile, and out of the box even when we needed to build a few temporary solutions to ensure we met the needs of the business.

6 months after the general availability of communication sites, we have launched over 300 communication sites and 3000 modern team sites in our governance first self-service intranet. Being first comes with unique challenges but also some fantastic opportunities to share lessons learned with companies who are redesigning their intranet right now.

I had a great conversation a couple weeks ago with a friend who’s designing right now and was deciding between classic and modern for the root of her intranet. We collaborated on some pros and cons so I wanted to share these with the hopes that it helps others who may be asking the same question.

 What is Classic, What’s Modern?

Classic SharePoint is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET web technology. The pages are rendered on the server and HTML is sent over the wire to clients. When a user clicks, the page posts back to the server and the server renders the new html. This back and forth can make interaction seen a bit slower as you need to go roundtrip to the server for each edit. This technology was not designed for modern connected devices and works best on desktop browsers.

Modern SharePoint is pages are based on modern web development standards and are written in JavaScript and run on your device for a faster, natively mobile responsive application experience. This new set of experiences was designed for mobility and leverage a number of native iOS and Android applications such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, and Teams.

 Building a Classic SharePoint Online Intranet

Most customized classic intranets in SharePoint rely on master pages for their branding. It is possible but more challenging to customize relying only on css and javascript injection which is more complex and costly but doesn’t have the same supportability challenges.

If you are going to design in classic, please be sure to follow these best practices from Microsoft for the best supportable outcome: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/portal-branding

 

Building a Modern SharePoint Intranet with Communication Sites

Microsoft’s fully supported forward direction for Intelligent Intranets. Communication Sites will allow you to quickly create an out of the box responsive intranet and extend where necessary using the SharePoint Framework.

Communication Sites are not supported in the root Site Collection for your tenant so you’ll need to create it under the /sites/ path and use a little JavaScript to redirect to the Intranet. This can be done with no user perceptible impact.

 

Responsive out of the box	Both the site chrome and all webparts are automatically optimized for modern mobile devices.
3rd Party solutions may be immature	Developers less skilled with modern customization techniques may have a tough learning curve.  SharePoint developers have traditionally been .NET developers working in Microsoft Visual Studio.  SharePoint Framework is based on open source tools and is written in JavaScript so there is quite a bit of learning required.
Anyone can design a great looking intranet	Easily updated without third party or IT support.  You need some great pictures and writing skills but significantly lowers the technical demands for creating a professional responsive intranet.
Consistency between Modern Team and Communication Sites.	Maintains continuity in design and function of rest of the new Intranet and Collaboration Sites.  If you use SharePoint framework to extend the design, the changes can be easily applied to all modern sites.
Evolving Platform	Continually evolving as Microsoft releases mature the platform.  For example: Hub Sites, News Alerts, Parallax Scrolling, Image Search and Image Cropping have all shipped since the launch of Communication Sites
Hub Sites	Hub Sites will allow you to connect a number of Site Collections with a common Hub navigation, shared theme, news roll-up and ability to search across all Hub connected sites. Unlike sub-sites, one can easily reorganize what Hub a site is connected to to adapt as your organization changes over time.
Extensible with SharePoint Framework	Can extend with 3rd Party or custom webparts or extensions on site pages for customized look and feel or functionality
Safer to customize	Modern Customizations are designed to not break as SharePoint evolves and changes. As an example built in locations for top and bottom user interface customization will always be supported vs the developer choosing a location on the page and hoping that it’s not broken by future changes in SharePoint
Get started with free PNP samples	Large collection of open source Web Parts available from Microsoft Patterns and Practices

 

Conclusions

For me this is really about aligning with where the product is going to get the best user experience for my company and reducing the amount of rework we’ll need to do over time.

There were some classic sites we build early on when communication sites weren’t available and it’s been painful to go back and rebuild once users have moved in and settled into their sites. For those who are starting now, I’d encourage you to seriously consider if there are hard constraints that would prevent you from starting modern.

 

I’d love to talk with you about your questions and help as many folks be successful with their SharePoint based intranets as possible. If you’d like to learn more there some great events coming up on the east coast and west coast.   I’ll be at SharePoint Fest DC March 26 – 30, 2018 and SharePoint Conference North America May 21- 23 in Las Vegas

 

To save a little money on these conferences:

Use code FeldmanDC100 for SharePoint Fest DC March 26 – 30, 2018

Use code Feldman for SharePoint Conference North America May 21- 23 in Las Vegas