Rethinking your SharePoint intranet: Building a high-impact digital experience 

For more than 20 years, SharePoint has played a central role in powering enterprise intranets. Once viewed primarily as a document management system, today it underpins the digital workplace ecosystem in many large organizations, offering deep integration with Microsoft 365, a growing relationship with Microsoft Viva and the flexibility to meet varied business needs. 

But while the platform is powerful, that doesn’t mean every SharePoint intranet is successful. In reality, many organizations struggle with engagement, usability, governance and value perception. DWG’s consulting work has shown time and again that technology alone isn’t the answer, but how you approach it determines success. 

Below, we have outlined our top tips for building a high-impact digital experience with SharePoint:

1. Start with purpose and strategy 

Before touching a page template or choosing a homepage layout, step back. Why are you building or redesigning this intranet? What does success look like? 

A modern SharePoint intranet should not just 'host content', it should enable employees to get work done more easily, stay informed, feel connected and access tools and services quickly. That requires strategic alignment from the start. What are the goals for comms, HR, IT and the wider business? Who are your audiences and what are their top tasks? 

The DWG Knowledge Hub outlines how organizations can define intranet success metrics across business, behavioural and experience dimensions. A well-articulated strategy makes it easier to prioritize features, clarify governance and resist the temptation to over-complicate your setup. 

2. Understand your users’ real needs 

It’s easy to assume you know what people want from your intranet – but assumptions rarely deliver good user experience (UX). Successful SharePoint intranets are built on evidence: user research, analytics, feedback and observation. 

Start by identifying user groups – new starters, frontline staff, line managers, hybrid workers – and map out the journeys they take. What are they trying to do on the intranet each day or week? Where are the pain points? What are the critical moments that matter? 

Use surveys, interviews, card sorts and tools like Microsoft Clarity to gather insight. Then design with real needs, not assumed ones – at the centre. 

3. Design for speed, clarity and flow 

Employees spend a matter of seconds deciding if the intranet will help them. Design needs to be sharp, scannable and intuitive. That means prioritizing top tasks, using clear headings and cutting the fluff.

Avoid bloated hero banners and slideshow carousels. Focus instead on what people really need: links to systems, access to services, upcoming deadlines, news and community content. 

And remember mobile. As hybrid work continues to grow, employees expect mobile parity with desktop experiences. Design your SharePoint intranet to perform equally well on phones, tablets and laptops. 

4. Make your homepage quick links work harder 

On many SharePoint intranet, the homepage quick links web part is prime real estate, but it’s often underused or poorly configured. DWG research shows that these links are among the most-clicked items on any homepage, which means small tweaks here can have a disproportionate impact. To make quick links more effective:

• make them scannable
  Use short, specific and action-oriented labels. ‘Log a helpdesk ticket’ is clearer than ‘IT portal'. Avoid jargon and minimize ambiguity to help employees act fast.


• prioritize top tasks
  Put the most-used or business-critical links first. Use analytics to see what people click on most and reorder links accordingly. Group related items to reduce visual noise.


• avoid vague labels
  Generic terms like ‘Resources’ or ‘Tools’ don’t help users know what to expect. Be concrete – ‘Travel policy’ is better than ‘HR documents’.


• keep link types consistent
  Don’t mix links to apps, PDFs and list items all in one block without signposting. Use headings or sections to make distinctions clear and aid mental models.


• use icons wisely
  A well-chosen icon next to each link can boost recognition and help scanning. Just keep the icon set simple and consistent – avoid decoration for decoration’s sake.


• review and refine
  Track usage over time. Ask employees what’s missing or not working. Set a quarterly review to update links in line with business changes (e.g. year-end processes, system updates).

These improvements don’t take long to implement in SharePoint and can significantly enhance usability, especially for frontline users and time-pressured employees.

5. Metadata and content structure are your secret weapons 

Search is often the most complained-about feature on an intranet, but usually the problem isn’t the tool, it’s the content.

Effective metadata makes content findable, reusable and useful. Use content types, assign ownership, include review dates and implement consistent taxonomy across your SharePoint sites and libraries.

Enforcing consistent metadata practices requires more than just training. Automation plays a crucial role here. Tools like SharePoint Syntex or Power Automate can help apply standard metadata at upload, trigger review reminders and alert owners to incomplete tagging.

Organizations that use term store governance, with locked vocabularies and content-type hub distribution, report more consistent metadata application and improved Copilot outcomes. It’s also helpful to build metadata into page templates so that contributors are guided through consistent tagging workflows from the moment of content creation.

Viva Topics, Copilot and other AI-driven tools depend on structured metadata to function properly. If your intranet content is fragmented and untagged, you won’t be able to harness these intelligent features in a meaningful way.

DWG members have shown that improved metadata tagging and content lifecycle reviews led to improvement in search satisfaction. They achieved this by introducing mandatory review tags, automated expiry notifications and clear accountability at the team level.

At DWG, we often help organizations build and maintain taxonomy frameworks that integrate across Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft Search. This foundational work can unlock huge value over time.

6. Build governance into the DNA 

Without governance, content becomes outdated, roles lack clarity and trust erodes.

Establish clear roles and responsibilities: Who owns what content? Who approves new pages? How are review cycles tracked? Consider a governance model with three layers: strategic (vision and policies); operational (roles, standards, tools); and local (site-level ownership).

DWG's Governance Playbook outlines how to scale governance models in federated publishing environments, including policies around archiving, decommissioning and content freshness.

Don’t forget support: content owners need more than permissions – they need coaching, templates, style guides and feedback.

It's also important not to neglect less visible but nonetheless high-value areas of the intranet like governance registers, operational calendars and compliance checklists. When these are embedded into workflows – through lists, reminders and tools they drive long-term utility.

7. Make it part of the flow of work 

SharePoint is now part of a broader ecosystem; with Viva Connections, your SharePoint intranet homepage can live inside Microsoft Teams. This reduces friction and increases engagement – but only if you manage the experience well.

Organizations need to align intranet content with what’s happening across Teams, Outlook, Viva Engage and mobile notifications. Consider how internal news, updates and service content are surfaced across channels. Context matters and meeting users where they are makes all the difference.

Organizations that do this consistently report higher visibility and engagement. DWG members have seen significantly better reactions and reach by cross-posting SharePoint news into Teams channels. SWOOP Analytics also encourages intranet teams to use multiple channels to extend the lifespan and reach of internal news.

8. Support your content community 

Most intranets rely on decentralized publishing models, but many contributors are non-specialists. They need guidance, support and tools to help them create content that’s useful and accessible. In our article How to train publishers and content owners for your SharePoint intranet, we explore why publisher training is so important for SharePoint intranets and the part it plays in a wider content governance framework, what it likely needs to cover, and how it should be delivered.

Offer publishing clinics, onboarding resources, checklists and peer support groups. Recognize contributors who maintain high-quality content. Regular audits and content reviews should be shared responsibilities, not just the intranet or corporate communications manager’s burden.

Clients we work with often introduce a ‘publisher portal’ on the intranet itself – a central hub with tips, visual standards, link checkers and a content health dashboard. This empowers non-specialist publishers and helps build a self-sustaining editing community.

DWG’s research into intranet governance communities shows that organizations with active contributor networks deliver more up-to-date content, better search outcomes and higher satisfaction.

9. Measure what matters 

Intranet analytics should go beyond clicks and visits. Are tasks being completed? Is the intranet saving time? Are employees informed, enabled and engaged?

Use a combination of quantitative data (usage reports, traffic, engagement scores) and qualitative feedback (surveys, interviews, comments). Establish a reporting rhythm and share results widely. Let data drive decisions, not guesswork.

To deepen measurement impact, consider setting key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned to core business objectives – such as reducing onboarding time, increasing HR policy access, or driving adoption of self-service tools. Organizations have embedded intranet success measures into their wider digital workplace dashboard, combining SharePoint usage stats with Viva engagement and IT service ticket data. This gives a holistic view of employee behaviour and allows targeting of content and campaigns more effectively in addition to tools and employee feedback gathered by survey platforms. Qualitative insights complement the click data and help uncover blockers or opportunities not visible through analytics alone.

DWG clients often track metrics like time-on-task for common actions, reduction in duplicate content, and helpdesk ticket volume for known queries. These offer a more meaningful picture of value than vanity metrics.

10. Improve continuously – not just at launch 

Intranets should evolve constantly. Too many organizations treat them as projects with a start and end date, but the best intranets are managed like living products. Ways to achieve this can include:

• maintaining an improvement backlog
• reviewing feedback monthly
• testing changes in pilots or on select pages
• planning quarterly reviews to check content freshness and structural alignment.

Some DWG members and benchmarking participants are now using structured health scorecards covering areas like governance, usage and publisher activity to monitor progress over time and guide continuous improvement. These internal tools are often reviewed quarterly or biannually, and help demonstrate the value of intranet investment.

11. What’s next for SharePoint intranets in the age of AI? 

As generative AI tools become more integrated into the digital workplace, the role of the modern intranet is set to evolve. No longer just a publishing platform, your intranet will become a key knowledge source feeding AI-powered insights, answers and recommendations. But AI is only as smart as the content it can access. If your intranet is cluttered, unstructured or poorly tagged, the answers AI provides may be outdated, incomplete or incorrect.

This means preparing your SharePoint intranet for AI isn’t just about enabling new features, it’s about cleaning up content, improving metadata, defining access controls and identifying authoritative sources of truth. Organizations that approach this proactively will benefit from smoother AI rollouts and better user trust.

We're also seeing the emergence of AI-assisted publishing, where SharePoint integrations with Copilot and Viva Topics help authors draft content, tag pages or summarize updates automatically. This can boost contributor confidence, reduce time to publish and support multilingual needs, but only if governance and content models are already in place.

DWG's AI readiness research shows that intranet content quality, structure and governance are top enablers of AI success across the digital workplace. SharePoint is often at the heart of this, so now is the time to get your house in order.

In the near future, we can expect more semantic search, richer knowledge graphs and AI-assisted personalization. SharePoint intranets that evolve alongside these trends, rather than react to them will remain essential to organizational performance.