For today’s remote and hybrid work environments, the intranet plays a pivotal role in fostering collaboration, sharing information, and driving productivity within your organization. With the proliferation of AI, the old and familiar intranet is also undergoing a transformation that promises to be not only aesthetically beautiful and adaptable but is also infused with the power of artificial intelligence. In this blog, we will explore the exciting developments in the world of intranets, focusing on SharePoint and the incredible possibilities it holds for the future.
What’s Brewing in the World of Intranets? Let’s Dive In:
- Visual Transformation: The intranet of the future is not just about information; it’s about captivating and engaging experiences. SharePoint is leading the way in visual transformations, with the new image editor that provides advanced editing capabilities such as shape cropping, color adjustment, adding filters and overlaying text. The updated Stream web part also ensures that you can stream all types of videos inside your pages by supporting single and multiple videos with folders and playlists.
- Real-time Collaboration Magic: Step into the era of real-time collaboration with Microsoft Loop, transforming the way teams work together. With dynamic, synchronized editing capabilities, employees can collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations directly within their SharePoint environment.
- Microsoft Viva Integration: Microsoft Viva includes powerful tools like Viva Engage, Connections and Amplify to generate reach and engagement on your SharePoint content. Customers including Carlsberg and CBRE have transformed their employee experiences with Viva and amplified their existing SharePoint content.
- Robust Authoring Experiences: Authoring content for your intranet should be a seamless and empowering experience. SharePoint is addressing this need by providing more robust authoring tools and features. Statistics show that organizations with user-friendly content creation tools witness a 40% increase in the frequency of content updates.
- AI’s Grand Entrance: AI isn’t a distant dream; it’s your intranet reality. SharePoint’s AI integration promises personalized experiences, intelligent searches, and automated processes. But wait, there’s more!
So, what’s the scoop on Artificial Intelligence in SharePoint?
Harnessing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and seamlessly integrating them with your Microsoft Graph data, Copilot in SharePoint revolutionizes the way you create captivating web content. Transforming your descriptions into fully-fledged SharePoint sites and pages, Copilot streamlines the setup process, all while adhering to strict data security and privacy requirements for organizations. The new AI-powered SharePoint aims at enhancing the entire spectrum of web design, covering branding & theming, typography & fonts, grid & layout, video & imagery, and animations & motion.
These innovative features reduce the time spent on SharePoint site configuration, ensuring that your site leverages the best SharePoint has to offer. You can initiate the creation of sites using Copilot directly from the new SharePoint start page. It provides you with a set of inspirational templates for your needs, including newsletters, event announcements, project tracking sites, trip reports, and brochure sites. With just a brief prompt, Copilot generates a starter site, pulls in relevant information from your organization, and aligns the design with your organization’s brand. For example, creating a video page for your recent town hall recording is a breeze. If adjustments are needed, Copilot collaborates with you in a conversational manner, allowing you to fine-tune elements such as navigation and look & feel settings.
Moreover, Copilot assists page authors in transforming existing content into visually stunning SharePoint pages. As your design partner, Copilot takes your documents or presentations and transforms them into pages with the latest web design visuals. It can even assist in rewriting key passages to strike the perfect tone for engaging your audience.
Additionally, SharePoint also launched page coauthoring capabilities, making collaboration on intranet sites a seamless team effort. Simplified page sharing and section commenting enhance the collaborative experience further, connecting SharePoint to more team-oriented needs.
Content is king, especially when it’s discoverable in the flow of work. Organizations rely on SharePoint not only to create content but to help generate engagement and reach the right audiences. Connecting SharePoint into key workflows where people spend most of their time such as email, Teams, and Viva helps make the content easy to access.
Copilot integration also allows SharePoint pages to be previewed and sent as full news posts via email. Because of unified page analytics, you’ll be able to see your total page reads across Outlook and SharePoint together. Readers can consume SharePoint pages without leaving Outlook.
The capability to connect SharePoint pages to Teams channels also ensures content is readily available in the hub for teamwork and can be added and pinned as tabs to the General channel in the team. You can also edit SharePoint pages right inside. The simplified integration has led to a significant increase in SharePoint usage inside Teams.
Developers continue to play a vital role in integrating SharePoint into organizational workflows and tools. With one out of every three pages in SharePoint including an embedded part, developers can leverage site and page templating, UX-layer parts, and plug-ins using the SharePoint Framework, ensuring continuous improvement even as the user experience transforms.
Embed Copilot into your intranet for a transformational experience:
- Developers can seamlessly write code within the intranet environment while Copilot suggests code snippets, offers documentation, and helps them understand best practices. This fosters a collaborative learning environment and improves overall code quality.
- Employees creating documentation or contributing to the knowledge base on the Intranet can receive intelligent suggestions from Copilot, ensuring that the content is comprehensive, accurate, and up to date. This accelerates the knowledge-sharing process and facilitates easier onboarding for new team members.
- Lawyers and legal professionals can leverage Copilot to generate drafts by describing the desired content. Copilot assists in formulating legally sound language, citing relevant precedents, and ensuring document compliance. This accelerates document creation in the Intranet and enhances overall efficiency.
- As employees engage with training materials on your intranet, Copilot assists them by generating additional examples, explanations, and exercises based on their learning style and pace. This adaptive learning approach enhances the onboarding process and facilitates skill development.
- Companies can streamline content discovery with intelligent search capabilities, and automated tagging based on context and user behaviour.
- Employees will receive personalized notifications and alerts, ensuring that they stay informed about relevant updates, deadlines, and actions required.
Intranet’s future is not just beautiful; it’s flexible, engaging, and AI-ready. Whether you want to implement a SharePoint intranet from scratch, migrate your content from another platform, or are looking to enhance your current SharePoint intranet design, Elantis can help! We have a Microsoft Gold-certified team of enterprise content management experts with years of experience deploying and upgrading SharePoint intranets. Let us help your organization maximize your investment in the Microsoft ecosystem! Connect with our team for a complimentary assessment and consultation.
