Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
WHITEPAPER Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
The Definitive Guide To Intranets With Office 365
WRITTENWRITTEN BY BY Richard Rich Harbridgeard Harbridge, Kanwal & KanwalKhipple &Khipple Haniel Croitoru
PUBLISHEDPUBLISHED 05.0105.15.30.16 // REVISED // UPDATED07.15.16 & REVISED 05.22.18
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Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 6
2. THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY ...... 7
2.1. Intranet Trends Intranets That You Need To Know ...... 8
2.1.1. Intranets Are Created Faster & Go Through More Rapid Iterations ...... 8
2.1.2. Most Intranet Teams Look To Outside Agencies For Help ...... 10
2.1.2. Intranet Teams Continue To Grow And Involve More People ...... 11
2.1.3. Build vs. Buy Is More Important Than Ever ...... 12
2.1.4. More Companies Look To Avoid Customizations ...... 14
2.1.5. More Personalized, User Centric & AI Augmented Experiences ...... 16
2.1.6. Integration With Collaborative & Work Technologies Is Expected Today ...... 17 2.1.7. Mobile Client Access And Ease Of Access Are Important For Use Outside Of Work Hours Or Due To A Growing Flexible Workforce ...... 17
2.1.8. Intranets Become Less ‘Internal Only Focused.' ...... 18
2.1.9. Intranet Search Goes Beyond Basic Search Experiences ...... 18
2.1.10. Other Notable Trends ...... 19
3. THE OPPORTUNITY & BENEFITS WITH OFFICE 365 ...... 20
3.1. Cost Savings & More Value For Your Investment ...... 20
3.1.1. Infrastructure Cost Savings ...... 20
3.1.2. No More Upgrades ...... 20
3.1.3. Pay Per User Per Month ...... 21
3.1.4. Price Bundling & Pricing Innovation ...... 21
3.1.5. More For Your Money ...... 21
3.2. Continued Innovation ...... 22
3.2.1. Cloud First Features ...... 22
3.2.2. Rapid Scale & Improvement ...... 22
3.3. Connected & Improved Experiences ...... 23
3.3.1. Rapid Application Switching ...... 23
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3.3.2. Integrated Contextual Experiences ...... 23
3.3.3. Better Mobile Experiences ...... 23
3.3.4. Richer Integrated Ecosystem ...... 23
4. PLANNING FOR AN OFFICE 365 INTRANET ...... 25
4.1. Authentication & Identity ...... 25
4.1.1. Access Without A VPN ...... 25
4.1.2. Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication ...... 25
4.1.3. Branding The Sign In Experience ...... 26
4.1.4. Planning For Secondary Users ...... 27
4.1.5. External Users & Extranets ...... 28
4.2. Availability & Outages ...... 28
4.2.1. How Does Microsoft Communicate Around An Outage? ...... 28
4.2.2. Can We Recover Intranet Content Or Back It Up? ...... 29
4.3. Performance ...... 31
4.3.1. Bandwidth & Connectivity ...... 32
4.3.2. Service Degradations ...... 34
4.4. Security ...... 34
4.4.1. Dynamic Group Membership & Rule Based Security ...... 34
4.5. Support & Escalation ...... 35
4.6. Privacy & Regulatory Issues ...... 35
4.7.1. Microsoft Compliance & Privacy Policies ...... 37
4.7.2. Encryption & Bring Your Key ...... 37
4.7.3. Data Residency ...... 38
4.7. Search ...... 39
4.7.1. Usage Of The Highlighted Contents Web Part & Content Search Web Part ...... 39
4.7.2. SharePoint Hybrid Search ...... 43
4.7.3. Predictive Search, Zero-Term Search & Surfacing Search Results Together ...... 44
4.8. Navigation ...... 45 Page 3 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
4.8.1. Structural Navigation ...... 45
4.8.2. Using Managed Term-Driven Navigation ...... 46
4.8.3. Search Based Navigation (Custom) ...... 47
4.8.4. Modern & Classic Navigation ...... 47
4.8.5. Incorporate The App Launcher ...... 48
4.8.6. Incorporate The Sites/SharePoint Homepage ...... 50
4.9. New Site & New Page Provisioning ...... 50
4.9.1. Manual Approach ...... 51
4.9.2. Remote Provisioning ...... 51
4.9.3. Site Designs ...... 52
4.10. Branding & Design ...... 53
4.10.1. Responsive Design Is Not Optional ...... 53
4.10.2. Leave The Office 365 Suite Bar Alone ...... 53
4.10.3. Incorporate The Office 365 People Card & User Profile Experience ...... 54 4.10.4. Embrace The Modern SharePoint Pages & SharePoint Framework Powered Experience ...... 56
4.11. Mobility & Intranet Apps ...... 74
4.11.1. The SharePoint Mobile App ...... 74
4.12. Personalization ...... 75
4.13. Social Integration ...... 75
4.14. Development & Debugging ...... 77
4.15. Migrating To Office 365 ...... 78
4.15.1. Migrating From Classic To Modern ...... 78
4.15.2. Migrating Articles & Page Content ...... 80
4.15.3. Migrating Documents & Files ...... 80
5. INTRANET METRICS & ANALYTICS ...... 82
5.1. Key Intranet Questions ...... 82
5.1.1. Which features of the intranet are most important? ...... 82
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5.1.2. Which features are not being used? ...... 82
5.1.3. Is the site navigation effective? ...... 82
5.1.4. Which Intranet pages/sites should be archived or deleted? ...... 83
5.1.5. What are the peak/low usage times? ...... 83
5.1.6. How is usage trending? ...... 83
5.2. Key Intranet Metrics ...... 83
5.2.1. Unique Users Reports ...... 84
5.2.2. Visits Reports ...... 84
5.2.3. Page Views & Item View Reports ...... 84
5.2.4. Unused Content Reports ...... 84
5.2.5. Recently Viewed Reports ...... 85
5.2.6. Search Reports ...... 85
5.2.7. Failed Search Reports ...... 85
5.3. Intranet Reporting In Office 365 ...... 85
5.3.1. Office 365 Reports ...... 86
5.3.2. SharePoint Metrics & Analytics ...... 92
5.3.3. Yammer Metrics & Analytics ...... 101
6. RECOMMENDED NEXT STEPS ...... 108
7. RESOURCES ...... 110
7.1. Our Whitepapers & Related Resources ...... 110
7.2. Recommended Industry Perspectives ...... 110
7.3. Recommended Technology Reading ...... 110
8. ABOUT 2TOLEAD ...... 113
9. ABOUT THE AUTHORS ...... 114
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1. INTRODUCTION The evidence is overwhelming as more and more organizations shift their digital workplace investments to Office 365. More than 300,000 organizations now have SharePoint and OneDrive in Office 365, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
There was a growing trend of organizations moving to Office 365 to meet their Intranet and portal needs over the past few years. While many organizations were running their SharePoint portals or Intranets on-premise, in a private cloud, or on public cloud offerings like Azure – many have already started or made a move to Office 365 powered Intranet experiences.
The question for many companies is no longer “should our Intranet be built with Office 365?”, but how to best integrate Office 365 (as a set of digital workplace tools) into your Intranet strategy, plan and design.
At the end of this whitepaper, we believe that you will agree that your company should not only be building your Intranet and portal on Office 365 but actively working to better integrate and enrich it with Office 365’s continuing innovation.
In this whitepaper, we will explore the benefits Office 365 brings to an Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365, and when and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing Intranet today. This whitepaper is a summary of our advice, guidance, and the feedback, and lessons learned from our team as well as the many organizations we support currently running their Intranets on Office 365.
NOTE: What happens when your users can’t decide what technology or feature to use? They use what they know, or what’s easy; even if better options exist. To help your users make better, more effective decisions on how they get work done be sure to read our When To Use What In Office 365 Whitepaper at http://WhenToUseWhat.com.
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2. THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY Is your Intranet leveraging SharePoint today? For years, now many Intranets have been built on Microsoft SharePoint. In many surveys and research reports, SharePoint accounts for the platform of choice still for a clear majority of Intranets, especially those of larger organizations who are looking for a richer and more integrated digital hub for their digital workplace.
We have begun the shift as an industry from enterprise content management (ECM) to content services, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and Office 365 capabilities make it a clear market leader and visionary according to all of the major analyst firms.
• Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the Content Services Platform Magic Quadrant for 2017. In addition to being positioned as one of only three Leaders, Microsoft is placed highest for Ability to Execute. • SharePoint was evaluated as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management—Business Content Services, Q2 2017.
Organizations are consistently finding that they can provide better experiences, greater engagement, productivity improvements and better integration with their Intranet when it is built on Office 365’s collaboration, communication, and content services.
How popular is a SharePoint Intranet in Office 365?
It is no longer rare for an organization to roll out a new Office 365 intranet as one of the first initiatives they implement in Office 365. The Intranet is seen as an essential part of a successful Office 365 rollout, in that it can act as a digital hub for the broad and considerable capabilities of an Office 365 digital workplace.
The main drivers are still navigation and integration for Office 365 Intranets. The Intranet is still the number one tool for navigating digital workplace collaboration spaces, communication spaces, tools or key resources. One of the biggest reasons for this is that it can create a more cohesive and integrated navigation experience with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft digital workplace tools.
Users now have more than one ‘place’ that they work in their digital workplace. There are still many users who prefer Outlook as their primary place to get digital work done. A continued rise in the past years has led to more and more new and existing users leveraging new and more modern tools to get their work done. These other ‘places’ people work now focus on
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Enterprise Social interactions like those found in Yammer, to ones that focused on conversations and meetings like Skype for Business which is becoming Microsoft Teams. Your Intranet is still the best way to navigate and connect employees, experiences, and key content, but it must be a part of these ‘spaces’ people work and not another ‘place’ to go. Integrating across these spaces is something that SharePoint does very well as a platform for Intranets, especially for customers who are embracing Office 365. 2.1. Intranet Trends Intranets That You Need To Know After collectively helping customers implement more than 200 intranets we have seen many trends impact Intranet design, development, and strategy. In this section, we wanted to share what we believe are the top Intranet trends today based on research, interviews, and engagements with customers over the past year. We also believe that effectively understanding, embracing and investing in these trends will help transform your Intranet into a more modern, higher performing and more successful Intranet.
2.1.1. Intranets Are Created Faster & Go Through More Rapid Iterations One of the most significant trends we have seen in Intranets over the past few years is a continued acceleration in how quickly new intranet iterations are designed and implemented.
New or improved Intranets are being created and delivered to users faster than ever before. Often we see Intranets being delivered not on yearly timescales, but instead in monthly timescales. Resulting in more iterations and improvements over time.
Our experience is more pronounced. While larger customers of ours still have a time of 5 to 8 months many are opting for simpler, more focused, and iterative Intranet iterations.
On average across our customers we now plan, design and build Intranets at 2toLead in a few months. This is down from an overall average we had of 5+ months in 2016. Our average (across a great many customers) in 2017 was about 3.8 months from strategy to implementation of iteration 1 of a custom Intranet. For those customers who leveraged vendors who offer “Intranet in a Box” solutions the average time was closer to 2.6 months (based on those projects – not Page 8 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know accounting for time to evaluate the vendor solution). That doesn’t mean that your Intranet won’t take 6+ months, especially if you are doing a lot more planning of the broader digital workplace along with the rollout of your new Digital Hub, but this puts this acceleration into perspective.
Why Is This Happening? We have seen a steady rise in businesses expecting Intranet results faster and businesses making less large-scale investments on technology platforms as those same platforms move to XaaS models (Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and even Platform as a Service).
Due to the lower cost up front of many of these new Intranet platforms, budgets don’t need to be as substantial as they have been, and more costs need to be allocated for ongoing expenses. This shift in the budgeting of Intranets means that many organizations are more open to spending that budget on ongoing improvements, more iterative development, or more engagement spending.
Intranets developed on SaaS systems like Office 365 (because an Office 365 powered intranet is more than just SharePoint) often don’t have heavy customization costs. These customization costs are lower is in part because Office 365 doesn’t allow certain experiences to be customized, or highly discourages customization of certain experiences. Additionally, because new capabilities are being added to Office 365 on an ongoing basis such as Modern Communication sites, Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams and much more there is more interest in connecting, integrating, and engaging usage of these new capabilities in or with the Intranet. This focus on new Office 365 capabilities takes time and energy away from developing custom alternatives or creates hesitancy to invest in customizations that may become redundant in 6 months to a year’s time.
What Should We Do? Embrace this trend. Evaluate your Intranet strategy, roadmap and plans. Are you accelerating and iterating more? If you aren’t then, you may be approaching this from a legacy mindset or could be missing out on many of the advantages that come with a more rapid approach.
This trend enables organizations to spend more energy understanding new platform capabilities and embracing those capabilities. It enables more time to incorporate and solicit feedback. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it provides more time to learn the business needs as they emerge and change over time.
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Nielsen Norman also noted a shift in the way intranets were implemented in their 2018 awards, with 9/10 winning platforms using an agile development process. We see more companies (including our own) do agile development in sprints to produce improvements to the brand, components in the Intranet or provide new experiences and business process support. The result is that this is leading to Intranet improvements getting to users more rapidly and having more impact.
Two notes of caution for these more iterative Intranets and taking an accelerated approach:
1. Some exercises shouldn’t be rushed. Make sure you are spending the right amount of time on design, search, and key business experiences that may take more planning or longer development cycles, but will be well worth it. 2. Core content, global navigation and other foundational elements of the Intranet should not change too frequently. Manage the change and ensure your Intranet iterations aren’t overwhelming users or are adding too much disruptive change. 2.1.2. Most Intranet Teams Look To Outside Agencies For Help
In the 2018 Nielsen Norman highlights that 8 out of 10 of winning organizations looked to outside agencies and consultants to help with intranet design, including content creation, information architecture and more. In the past few years, all ten winners leveraged external support/resources to achieve success. Key areas in which teams sought help included: • Content creation and editor training • Development • Discovery • Ideation • Information architecture • Persona creation • Project management • Prototyping • User research • Visual design • Wireframes Whether you hire outside help or use resources like this whitepaper, there is considerable value in getting industry insight and domain expertise alongside the historically important technology expertise. Quite a few of those areas require technology understanding, but also a
Page 10 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know deeper and richer understanding of best practices and proven approaches based on industry insight and domain expertise. Why Is This Happening?
Organizations leveraging more outside help is not a new trend, but it is becoming more critical to get outside support for all organizations due to the pace of change in technology and across our industry. We have seen the mutual rise of both user expectations/needs along with more innovation and technology capabilities to meet them from industry leaders like Microsoft. This overall is a good trend but makes it more challenging for internal IT to keep up or adapt without outside acceleration/support. It’s not just about technology expertise and excellence (though that is still important), it’s becoming more and more about domain expertise. Understanding best practices and modern approaches to navigation, personalization, integration and more can be extremely difficult to maintain in-house due to the lack of exposure across many businesses and the time to specialize/focus. What Should We Do?
We wrote this whitepaper to help – so keep reading, but if you need more help reach out to someone like us ([email protected]) or a trusted partner who can help you navigate and understand more than just the technology, but also how to implement effective user experiences, adoption, governance, and information architecture. 2.1.2. Intranet Teams Continue To Grow And Involve More People Intranet team size, when represented as digital workplace leadership, has continued to climb or hold steady according to many analyst firms and surveys. Intranet teams involve more stakeholders from the business (at least the successful ones do) and new champions, coaches and manager roles than they have historically. They also focus on a broader perspective than the historical communication focus of many Intranets and instead look to facilitate, foster, or improve collaboration patterns and productivity across the organization.
Why Is This Happening? Intranet and Digital Workplace teams continuing to grow shouldn’t be surprising. Intranets have transitioned more and more from informational portals and directories to support high-
Page 11 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know value collaboration activities and services. Due to the increased impact, visibility, scope and influence technology has on our daily work it is no surprise that a focus on improving digital employee experiences continues to increase in demand. In most organizations, the teams that influence the Intranet’s success have also grown and are also transforming towards more service-oriented business units.
IT is transitioning from project and cost management to service delivery and value creation; HR is transitioning from hire and fire to improving employee engagement and performance, corporate communications is transitioning from a push centric communication strategy to one that is more supportive, engaging and facilitating of better communication practices across the business. These changes all lead to more varied, integrated, and empowered teams over time.
What Should We Do? Crowdsourcing ideas, solutions, and answers as well as enabling employees to contribute more to company information channels will lead to more employee engagement and a greater sense of shared Intranet ownership. Social and business process oriented Intranets are having a huge impact here.
Often the network does a lot of the work regarding supporting, sometimes improving, and certainly in generating content for the Intranet. Additionally, Intranet teams can often involve community management and engagement activities – especially with the rise of social collaboration and communities in the workplace.
2.1.3. Build vs. Buy Is More Important Than Ever There are more vendor options than ever before in the Intranet SharePoint space that offer valuable and useful solutions that accelerate effort, reduce risk, or can offset the need for customization.
Based on our last effective count and analysis there is more than 54 Office 365 centric “Intranet in a box” vendors/solutions in the marketplace. Our staff has now worked with over 16 of these vendor solutions, and we have examined/reviewed over 23 of them extensively. Of those, we have worked with and analyzed 2toLead only recommends a handful today.
Sam Marshall and his company ClearBox Consulting have a great summary report of 34 of these vendors that you can buy if interested. Like any report, it is not deep enough to make a purchase decision off of, but it can be a great way to familiarize yourself with the marketplace.
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Why Is This Happening? There are more vendor options than ever before in the SharePoint space as the number of organizations investing here (total market opportunity) continues to increase while organizational comfort with recurring costs for solutions on Office 365 as a SaaS platform grows.
Many of these vendors were historically consulting organizations that built SharePoint powered Intranets and who have opted to either offer a ‘product’ or have spun up separate businesses focused on delivering solutions on top of Office 365 for Intranets.
Building on a SaaS platform is easier than building and selling to a server-based marketplace. The sales cycles are easier as demonstrations can be quickly spun up, including in your environment, and deployment is substantially more simplistic requiring far less effort and upfront cost. Lastly, because it is easier to deliver continued updates and value, it is easier to respond to Microsoft changes and customer demand to deliver what should be a better product/offering.
What Should We Do? More selection and competition in this space of buy oriented solutions for Intranets is a big positive for organizations today. The downside is that it can be difficult to navigate and quite a few of these vendor offerings probably add more risk/issues in the long run than the value they promise.
It would be impossible (without writing a much longer whitepaper) to explain the nuances of risk with buy decisions today. We will share one brief example of a common architecture pattern that many of these vendors use and why we fundamentally believe it’s a high risk to invest in an Intranet vendor for SharePoint that uses that model. If you are navigating this decision, please let us know ([email protected]) as we would be happy to share free insight/advice to help you make the right decision.
Some of these vendors use an approach where they control the UX for the Intranet. That means that you navigate to their solution and then work on Office 365 (often as a content services layer) behind the scenes, but that the core user experience is based on their offering hosted in Azure or some other IaaS/PaaS offering.
The fundamental problem with this approach is that Microsoft continually innovates and improves the experience and capabilities of SharePoint and its content services within its Office
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365 experiences. When you use another vendor’s experience layer here, it fundamentally means that Microsoft innovation must be incorporated into that vendor's experience layer before you often can take full advantage of it.
The last and perhaps most important element is that the investments you make in improving the experience are isolated from the Office 365 places people work. In other words, this experience layer is ‘one more place to go’ which over time is less richly integrated with the places users work. The counter approach is building alongside/within SharePoint/Office 365. If you wanted to create a great news rollup tailored for your brand and organizations needs, and you built that using the modern SharePoint framework it could be made available across all existing classic sites, new modern sites, and would effectively be represented anywhere else these web parts are surfaced such as in a SharePoint page/news within Microsoft Teams.
Essentially this architecture pattern of the experience living outside of SharePoint/Office 365 has high-risk over time and often is not worth the trade-off of a vendor-controlled experience that is ‘easier’ for them to maintain/update, or that is more specialized/branded based on your preferences.
2.1.4. More Companies Look To Avoid Customizations This has come up in a variety of surveys, reports and across our customer base. More and more customers are hesitant to customize SharePoint or Office 365 for fear of updates that might break or make that customization redundant. Two of the 10 Nielsen Norman winners expressed hesitation to customize SharePoint.
Why Is This Happening? For many organizations, they are moving away from a customized or SharePoint Server centric Intranet, and the headache customizations bring with them are front and center. With SharePoint Online we know that the platform will be updated and will continue to experience innovation which has made many traditional customization approaches ineffective, impossible or just outright bad practices.
Microsoft themselves has adjusted their development approach from full trust, to sandbox solutions, to add-ins, and now to SharePoint Framework as well in just the past few years so it can be challenging to see stability or maintainability of customizations today in SharePoint.
New capabilities in the platform have made many customizations redundant, and in hindsight, organizations recognize poor investment decisions more easily.
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Lastly even with a good partner or internal team building customizations there can be an understandable concern with whether in-house teams are prepared for the work that needs to be done to keep the customizations/platform up to date.
What Should We Do? There are always times when customizing is the right decision for your organization. Often a minor customization can have a tremendous impact and be well worth it even if it became obsolete a year or two later (based on the value to provides in that period). The idea that just because the platform ‘might someday’ provide a capability isn’t a good reason to hold off on intelligent investments in the near term. It is important to understand what is coming on the roadmap (and from the Microsoft product team directly if possible).
In our organization, we are lucky as we have an enormous number of MVPs, and insiders who work with Microsoft regularly, but you can get a lot of insight from both the roadmap that is publicly available here. Microsoft does two very public sharing/insight events per year that build or add more detail to the roadmap. The first is in May (SharePoint Conference North America) and the second happens in September (Microsoft Ignite). Many ‘concepts’ that Microsoft outlines are not added to the roadmap but are discussed in the sessions for these events by product leads from Microsoft, so be sure to take the time and keep abreast of as much as you can if you want to be able to influence prioritization of customizations on Office 365 effectively.
There is also a clear way to build customizations or extend on the platform today. The high- level difference today is that your customizations should be more simplistic, smaller in scale, more modular, and focused on patterns we know won’t change anytime soon (such as client- side code, or proven cloud models for design/architecture).
When considering customizing SharePoint, we recommend working with a partner, rather than an in-house team of developers taking the lead without the benefit of foresight. As a Microsoft gold Office 365, SharePoint and development partner we focus on meaningful customization that’s focused on the needs of the employees, as many customizations may not always be necessary. As new updates are released for SharePoint Online, these are then integrated as and where appropriate.
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2.1.5. More Personalized, User Centric & AI Augmented Experiences The creation of personalized dashboards, inserting personalization into key pages, or making key elements like the navigation more personalized has been on the rise for many years now. All successful Intranets are based on user-centric design and user-centric experiences.
What is most notable now is the increase in the platform utilizing new improvements that integrate machine learning and advanced algorithms into existing cloud services. These both improve experiences in Intranets based on these platforms but are also opportunities for organizations to build their own more natural experiences like Intranet bots that use AI to help users navigate and get what they need.
Why Is This Happening? User Centric experiences have always been differentiators for successful Intranets, but personalization is now more easily achieved due to innovations in technology and organizational focus, while artificial intelligence is becoming more integrated and cost-effective to leverage to provide more efficient or optimal ways of working.
What Should We Do? Intranets are your digital hub and the core point of reference for your content. As such personalization in Intranets today must extend not just to news, navigation or core experiences but also to show users most recent, popular or trending content, conversations, and activities across the digital workplace.
Employees filling out their profiles is even more important to enable additional personalization and engagement opportunities. Employees should be able to decide what is important to him/her while the system knows the user’s profile and therefore preselects appropriate information. There are modern techniques that are more pro-active in the way that they help ensure more complete or comprehensive profile fill rates. As an
Page 16 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know example, Hyperfish offers a powerful user profile solution that is highly integrated with Office 365. Hyperfish allows for complete monitoring of profile gaps/needs, the use of email or chat bots, and easier update experiences.
Many organizations overestimate the complexity of implementing bot interfaces. We highly recommend understanding what bots are (and aren’t) and how they can complement or improve your digital hub or Intranet experiences.
2.1.6. Integration With Collaborative & Work Technologies Is Expected Today More Intranets are querying multiple repositories and providing users with more search options that they are familiar with. However, it goes beyond just search integration. Intranets need to be integrated with IM, web conferencing, email, document management and business process applications.
Another common expectation is that users should have single sign on to relevant services and web-enabled applications. It’s not enough to simply have links to applications. With the rise of application single sign-on portals, there are ways to integrate these into the Intranet experience itself. Office 365 can do this by using Azure Active Directory Premium, which can enable new applications to show up in the user's app launcher itself.
2.1.7. Mobile Client Access And Ease Of Access Are Important For Use Outside Of Work Hours Or Due To A Growing Flexible Workforce Responsive design and targeted mobile apps should be leveraged to improve the mobile experience for users. Additionally, for collaborative focused Intranets, it is important to deploy an effective mobile device and application management solution(s).
An example of an effective Mobile Intranet app experience is Barclay’s MyZone, which works on iPads and mobile devices. Read more about it here. One of the reasons this is successful is that it connects employees, goes beyond pushing information and goes through rapid iteration and improvement.
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Microsoft is embracing this trend with new mobile experience and apps for Office 365 and your SharePoint Intranet. What is important here is that you don’t replace the powerful capabilities and benefits Microsoft provides with their first party apps, and instead add value alongside these with better more integrated notification services across your digital workplace or other benefits you know won’t be built into the SharePoint mobile app or other popular Microsoft first-party apps.
2.1.8. Intranets Become Less ‘Internal Only Focused.' There is an expectation for more open, horizontal, and networked environments over time. More customers, partners & external integration, is expected.
There is a growing trend for enabling secure, responsible and encrypted sharing from where the content resides in the intranet versus forcing the user to copy the content to an extranet environment.
While this is still early on it does have an impact. Especially in the more traditional sense when organizations have multiple Intranets for key business groups but may share global people search experiences and other features based on the broader organization making investments in platforms like Office 365.
NOTE: We highly recommend downloading our External Sharing guidance whitepaper. Within it, you will discover guidance and insights based on our experience working with hundreds of customers in a wide variety of industries and organization sizes. Find it at http://Office365Extranets.com.
2.1.9. Intranet Search Goes Beyond Basic Search Experiences Search is often used to drive dynamic, targeted and more interactive experiences around content discovery. Whether it is being leveraged to roll up appropriate information on the homepage or a subpage of the Intranet search remains a critical element of a successful Intranet strategy.
Feature-wise search filters are common in Intranets enabling users to refine their results or narrow a result set based on descriptive keywords and taxonomy values. This is often
Page 18 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know represented in facets or refiners that change based on the search you made, or where you searched.
Search also provides more immediate results to help the user identify whether the result is correct, or provide access to an action right from the result - avoiding an additional click or step. There are a few ways this is represented from providing type ahead and one-click results in the search box itself, to providing the rich previews often found in modern SharePoint search experiences.
2.1.10. Other Notable Trends There are some additional trends that continue to be important when improving or implementing a successful Intranet. However, we believed they were not as significant as the ones listed above. Here are a few notable trends that aren’t as impactful as the ones above.
1. The growing use of megamenus which help users discover more content and more of the IA hierarchy from anywhere in the Intranet. Many of these megamenus are becoming more dynamic and allowing personalization or rolling up stories/relevant content to provide continual value as users navigate around the Intranet.
2. More intranets are using carousels, parallax and sometimes even video backgrounds to make the Intranet seem more modern and to improve the experience.
3. Many intranets are integrating video or providing video portal experiences. This has been accelerated by the popularity and ease of deploying Microsoft Stream, which provides organizations with an easy way to capture, share, and consume video through a blend of Azure services and Office 365. Many organizations that have adopted Microsoft Stream are also embedding video on key pages.
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3. THE OPPORTUNITY & BENEFITS WITH OFFICE 365 When you are building or improving your Intranet on Office 365, you have options available to you that you may not have had in a traditional SharePoint Intranet or an on-premises world. There are also some benefits you realize from basing it on Office 365 or powering it by leveraging Office 365 over silo like or isolated best of breed solutions.
The top 3 opportunities for an Office 365 intranet are:
• Cost Savings & More Value For Your Investment • Unique & Continued Innovation • Connected & Improved Experiences
What follows in this section is further details on each of the opportunities listed above. 3.1. Cost Savings & More Value For Your Investment There are many reasons running or powering your Intranet on Office 365 saves money and delivers more value for your investment. Here are a few of the most significant reasons.
3.1.1. Infrastructure Cost Savings There are significant costs to maintaining a highly available SharePoint farm for your Intranet on premises. Especially when hardware investments are necessary. It also requires a team with knowledge and specialized skills to maintain the infrastructure and application.
3.1.2. No More Upgrades Once you are effectively leveraging Office 365 and SharePoint Online, there are no significant upgrade costs or cycles. Your portal can use new features and updates as they are released. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost every few years as you look to optimize your Portal and Knowledge Management experiences across the organization, but it does mean that your investments will be focused on activities that drive more value instead of infrastructure or technical upgrades.
Some examples of how you might be able to drive more value with additional resources or investment?
• Improve and guide user adoption and engagement. Page 20 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
• Optimizing employee productivity with training and education. • Enhancing user experiences and usability. • Automating or optimizing business processes with forms, workflows, and apps. • Providing better document and records management. 3.1.3. Pay Per User Per Month Office 365 licensing plans are based on assigned active users. This enables you to pay based on usage of the platform and adjust your user count based on changes in your business.
3.1.4. Price Bundling & Pricing Innovation Office 365 bundles the suggested capabilities you would leverage with an Office 365 powered Intranet in suite pricing that includes capabilities your organization most likely already has a need for such as Messaging & Calendaring (Exchange Online), Communication (Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business), Work Management (Planner), Enterprise Video (Microsoft Stream), Enterprise Workflow (Flow), Enterprise Apps/Forms (PowerApps) and Enterprise Social (Yammer).
3.1.5. More For Your Money Office 365 continually provides additional capabilities regularly across the suite such as:
• Many new web parts and controls for your Intranet (quite a few of which integrate other services/systems that are popular). • New and improved authoring tools/experiences. • More ready built integration templates and processes in Microsoft Flow that can be easily leveraged across your Intranet • Advanced capabilities like automatic transcript creation/facial detection on video in Microsoft Stream that can improve the ways video can be integrated into your Intranet. • Improved and rich people cards that show up whenever you see someones name. These aren’t just showing profile data, but LinkedIn information, recent documents, or other useful insight across your digital workplace. • And much much more.
What is included in the suite pricing continues to improve with more and more new capabilities being added that are critical to your organization and can augment other costs. An example of some of the features that organizations underestimate might be Mobile Device Management being added to Office 365 (which it currently includes), or the considerable security and
Page 21 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know information protection capabilities that can be leveraged with your Intranet to improve security posture, compliance, and privacy protection. 3.2. Continued Innovation Beyond the financial and cost savings benefit of continued innovation, there are a few reasons why powering or running your Intranet on Office 365’s continued innovation is so important.
3.2.1. Cloud First Features Cloud only features will be available only to organizations who leverage or connect/integrate Office 365 with their organization.
While innovation will be bundled with SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2019 for on-premises SharePoint environments, these SharePoint releases are based on the innovation in SharePoint Online and Office 365.
In many cases you may wait over a year before a cloud-based feature of SharePoint is available on-premises, and some features may never be available based on how they use Azure enabled services like Video Streaming, Auto Transcription, or Machine Learning.
It’s not that this capability might not be available in a hybrid configuration or potentially some elements may be made available in feature packs in the future for SharePoint 2019, but innovation is both cloud first and sometimes cloud only. 3.2.2. Rapid Scale & Improvement Cloud innovation enables rapid scale and solution development. The amount of storage, improvements to encryption and security and new integration opportunities are delivered continually by the team based on customer and industry feedback. These aren’t just behind the scene improvements that enable new scenarios, but often can be represented in improvements (often significant) for end users who are using your Office 365 powered Intranet. It’s not just Office 365 improvements but also Azure improvements you are getting at incredible scale and with thorough quality assurance.
Example: Consider mobility support with an Intranet powered by Office 365 versus a traditional one. There will be far more app experiences for new Portals that you can connect and integrate with your company Intranet in Office 365 than could be developed by an on-premises Portal team. Not to mention that mobility from a management perspective is powered by Office 365’s MDM capabilities which are a subset of Intune (another Microsoft cloud service) innovation.
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3.3. Connected & Improved Experiences Since Office 365 is a connected suite of experiences and capabilities by building your Intranet with Office 365, you can take advantage of those experiences and integrate them to provide more usability and connectivity for your users.
3.3.1. Rapid Application Switching Doing things like ensuring users can quickly switch between Outlook and OneDrive for Business from the Intranet is much easier when it’s powered or running on Office 365. Consider how easily a user can trigger an instant message via Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams from anywhere in your Intranet where a person is referenced. Empowering not just email, but the ad-hoc discussion that can turn into recordings which can be exposed or connected to the Intranet in Microsoft Stream.
3.3.2. Integrated Contextual Experiences It also makes it much easier to integrate contextual experiences where they can add value based on where the user is interacting in the Intranet. As an example consider how referencing a document on your Intranet can expose related ‘Yammer Conversations’ or ‘Teams Conversations.’ Enabling users to author and share comments socially while viewing a document in the Intranet can save time and empower more users to interact and engage in the Intranet through social.
3.3.3. Better Mobile Experiences Not only are continued investments being placed into responsively designed pages (news) and sites but there is already an incredible wealth of mobile experiences that are targeted and work across platforms for Office 365 users. From Skype for Business to OneNote apps to some of the new app experiences like Microsoft Teams and Modern SharePoint sites. When your Intranet is powered by Office 365 many of these app and mobility experiences tie into how users can manage, author, or collaborate in an employee Intranet.
3.3.4. Richer Integrated Ecosystem The number of vendors who support Office 365 integration is staggering. It is arguably the most integrated SaaS service on the market today and is considerably easy to integrate with as well for other SaaS or enterprise vendors. Whether you are looking to integrate common enterprise systems like your ERP, CRM or HRIS you have many options from first-party
Page 23 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know integration via Flow, web parts, and add-ins to common alternatives like sync based integration with vendors like Layer2. As a systems integrator by trade, our staff has worked with hundreds of integration projects, and there is no question that on average Office 365 integration projects are cheaper, more reliable/easier to maintain and faster to implement than historic server- based alternatives.
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4. PLANNING FOR AN OFFICE 365 INTRANET Almost every customer we work with has suffered from a few problems with their SharePoint and Office 365 Intranet or Portal. These are a few examples of the challenges we see (especially when customers haven’t built their Office 365 intranet with our guidance/advice):
• Trying to build a high-value and effective Intranet without sufficient SharePoint and Office 365 expertise or when architect and developer resources are scarce. • Building an Intranet without sufficient or good requirements from the business. • Not embracing or understanding Office 365 experiences or feature sets, leading to redundancy, conflicting experiences, or confusion. o Often an issue here is having insight into the Office 365 roadmap and what’s coming. • Providing consistent and connected experiences across the distributed organization. o Primary issue areas are navigation, discovery, and integration. • Effectively leveraging and maximizing social collaboration and communication. o Intranets should be interactive, personalized and dynamic. • Driving and guiding adoption of Office 365 and the Office 365 Intranet.
The good news is that we help many customers with each of these challenges. What follows is a breakdown of challenge areas and high-level recommendations. 4.1. Authentication & Identity There are some significant benefits to leveraging Office 365 for your Intranet when it comes to authentication and identity. One of the biggest is that authentication can happen securely from anywhere at any time and any device.
4.1.1. Access Without A VPN For many Intranets just being able to access the Intranet from home, remote offices, customer sites and on the road can be a big benefit. This is enabled with no additional effort.
4.1.2. Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication Office 365 provides security and authentication features that many customers have not had available for previous iterations of their Intranet. This was often due to high cost or complexity of implementing them. As an example, Office 365 supports multi-factor authentication at no additional cost and is extremely easy to administer and implement.
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To be clear, this is a feature that may not be necessary. But for some organizations, they implemented Office 365 Intranets without knowing it was available or sometimes have held off moving to Office 365 because they didn’t know this was possible (and easy).
Multi-factor authentication increases the security of user logins for cloud services above and beyond just a password. With Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or an app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password. Only after this second authentication factor has been satisfied can a user sign in.
After being enrolled for multi-factor authentication, the next time a user signs in, they see a message asking them to set up their second authentication factor.
Any of the following options may be used for the second factor of authentication.
• Call my mobile phone. The user receives a phone call that asks them to press the pound key. Once the pound key is pressed, the user is logged in. • Text code to my mobile phone. The user receives a text message containing a six-digit code that they must enter into the portal. • Call my office phone. This is the same as Call my mobile phone, but it enables the user to select a different phone if they do not have their mobile phone with them. • Notify me through the app. The user configured a smartphone app, and they receive a notification in the app that they must confirm the login. Smartphone apps are available for Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android devices. • Show one-time code in the app. The same smartphone app is used. Instead of receiving a notification, the user starts the app and enters the six-digit code from the app into the portal.
Once a user is signed in they can change their second factor of authentication.
4.1.3. Branding The Sign In Experience You can customize the sign on experience so that when users are prompted for access, you have an opportunity to share key messages and continue to re-enforce your brand.
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When you spend so much time and energy on the branding for your Intranet it would be silly not also to implement this kind of improved experience that not only improves your Intranet sign-in experience but all of the Office 365 sign in experiences (such as for OneDrive, Planner, Video, Delve and Outlook Online).
4.1.4. Planning For Secondary Users When using SharePoint Online and Office 365, there may be additional planning needed around secondary users or users that are not part of the Intranet membership. As an example, if you have a large enterprise, it is entirely possible that you have multiple businesses within one Office 365 tenant.
If this is the case for your business, you will need to set the right expectations early that some experiences like people search (often considered part of intranet planning) may not necessarily be isolated to your business group from the broader organization. While you can create custom search pages and tailor search results to show only users from your organization we recommend caution here as there are many ‘global’ wide search experiences throughout the Office 365 apps that are connected to your Office 365 Intranet.
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4.1.5. External Users & Extranets Most Intranets don’t necessarily include a strategy for external users and external sharing. However, it is important to understand how you will handle and tackle external sharing and whether the entire Intranet collection will have external sharing disabled.
Things like MFA for external users is supported via Azure B2B and Azure AD Premium options, and you can even explore some of the latest innovation that allows you to do external user lifecycle management in Azure.
NOTE: We highly recommend downloading our External Sharing guidance whitepaper. Within it, you will discover guidance and insights based on our experience working with hundreds of customers in a wide variety of industries and organization sizes. Find it at http://Office365Extranets.com.
4.2. Availability & Outages One concern people share is that they are concerned that there could be availability issues or outages that impact their organization. Considering the critical nature of an intranet, this is an important risk to evaluate.
Microsoft provides a commitment to delivering at least 99.9% uptime for Office 365. They have maintained that commitment. Microsoft also provides historic uptime tracking.
To date the world wide uptime for Office 365 can be found in the trust center and has been:
2014 2015 99.95% 99.98% 99.99% 99.99% 99.95% 99.98% 99.98% Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
4.2.1. How Does Microsoft Communicate Around An Outage? During an outage, Microsoft communication has significantly improved over the past few cycles. Microsoft communicates outages through seven channels today.
1. Via the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard 2. Via the Office 365 Message Center
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3. Via the Office 365 Admin App 4. Via the Office 365 Service Communications API 5. Via the System Center Operations Management ‘Management Pack’ For Office 365 6. Via http://Status.Office365.com 7. Via Microsoft Employees (Who Use Internal Tools/Systems)
Microsoft has also invested further into incident service communications.
They are working on making the communication even timelier:
• Red Alert monitoring & SHD automation. • Closure Summary and Enhanced Post Incident Report (PIR) process. • Increased listening systems: support “Big Red Button.”
They are working on making the communication even more targeted:
• Authenticated SHD • Tenant level posts • Critical Functionality Loss (CFL)
They are working on making the communication even more accurate:
• Provide more technical detail. • Share new fields like: o Estimated time to restore. o User workaround. o Percent of users are impacted. o User experience. o Customer impact. 4.2.2. Can We Recover Intranet Content Or Back It Up? For most Intranets the most relevant backup capabilities are out of the box capabilities such as versioning and recycle bins. This solves most concerns about backup and recovery when combined with Office 365’s high availability.
Restoring Individual Pages, Lists, Libraries, Items, Or Documents When you delete an item from SharePoint team site library, or from a list, it isn’t immediately removed from SharePoint. Deleted items go into the recycle bin, where they stay until they’re automatically removed approximately 90 days later. Within that time, you can either restore the files to their original location or remove them to free up storage space.
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When you delete an item from a site recycle bin, it automatically goes into the Second-Stage Recycle Bin (Site Collection Recycling Bin) where it remains for a set period until it’s completely purged from SharePoint. This gives you greater control when users delete files, versions of files, list items, libraries, lists, and folders from a SharePoint site by providing a two-stage safety net before an item is permanently deleted from a site.
When an item is restored, it is restored to the same location that it was deleted from. If you restore an item that was originally located in a deleted folder, the folder is recreated in its original location, and the item is restored in that folder.
The behavior of items in the first-level (Site) Recycle Bin:
• Items in the Recycle Bin count against site quota. • The site collection administrator can see all items deleted by any user from any site within the site collection. • Non-administrator users can see the items they deleted from the site. • Items in the Recycle Bin can be sent to the Second-Stage Recycle Bin by the user or the site collection administrator. • All items re automatically deleted approximately 90 days after they were originally recycled.
The behavior of items in the Second-Stage Recycle Bin:
• Items in the Second-Stage Recycle Bin don't count against site quota. • Items in the Second-Stage Recycle Bin can only be seen by the site collection administrator. • Items in the Second-Stage Recycle Bin can only be restored or deleted by the site collection administrator. • All items are automatically deleted approximately 90 days after they were originally recycled. • All items are automatically deleted when the total storage for the Second-Stage Recycle Bin exceeds 200% of your site collection quota.
Restoring Entire Site Collections The Recycle Bin in SharePoint Online in Office 365 for business provides a safety net when an entire site collection is deleted. When a SharePoint Online administrator deletes a site
Page 30 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know collection, it is placed in the Recycle Bin, where it is kept for 30 days before it is automatically permanently deleted.
As a SharePoint Online administrator, you can view and manage deleted site collections from the SharePoint Online Administration Center Recycle Bin page. From this page, you can view site collections that are currently in the Recycle Bin, see how many days are left before the site collection is permanently deleted, and restore a deleted site collection without contacting Microsoft Support.
Advanced Backup & Restore Options For the latest information on Microsoft’s backup and disaster recovery capabilities beyond recycling bins and versioning see the online service description.
Data protection services are provided to prevent the loss of SharePoint Online data. Backups are performed every 12 hours and retained for 14 days. This describes the data backup services as offered when SharePoint Online is available. You can recover components of Site or Site Collection.
SharePoint Online has set an RPO and RTO in the event of a disaster:
• 1 hour RPO: Microsoft protects your SharePoint Online data and has a copy of that data that is equal to or less than 1 hour old. • 6 hour RTO: Organizations will be able to resume service within 6 hours after service disruption if a disaster incapacitates a hosting data center.
To restore from this method you need to contact the Office 365 support team.
SharePoint Online 3rd Party Backup Options Lastly, for some special circumstances, you may want to evaluate third-party tools. Many of these have offerings that extend to other areas of Office 365 providing advanced archiving and backup/recovery options. However, consider bandwidth and data transfer volume if you have larger sites depending on the third party option you are evaluating. 4.3. Performance While uptime may be meeting expectations often, performance is much more complex.
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4.3.1. Bandwidth & Connectivity Planning for bandwidth is important for any Intranet that is accessed over the internet from employees at home, traveling, at customer sites, or from a remote office.
Microsoft has consolidated many suggestions to support planning in this article entitled “Plan for network devices that connect to Office 365 services”.
There are only a few ways to potentially improve the performance or make the performance more predictable for SharePoint Online (where an Office 365 Intranet would be hosted).
• Optimize Proxies, Firewall Devices, & Network Settings • Purchase & Use WAN Accelerators • Purchase & Use Azure ExpressRoute For Office 365
You can use hardware and software load-balancing devices to ensure availability of AD FS or Exchange in hybrid deployments and for SharePoint Online hybrid deployments, but that is more of availability than performance benefit.
While Microsoft Office 365 does use Content Delivery Networks already (you get the benefits from that), customers cannot use their CDNs to cache content on local networks (though that may change).
Optimize Proxies, Firewall Devices, & Network Settings Ensure proxy and firewall devices are sized to handle the additional traffic. The additional traffic going to Office 365 results in an increase of outbound proxy connections as well as an increase in SSL traffic.
If your outbound proxies require user authentication you may experience slow connectivity or a loss of functionality. Bypassing the authentication requirement for the Office 365 domains can reduce this overhead.
If your filtering outbound connections from computers on your network, bypassing this filtering to the Office 365 domains will improve connectivity and performance.
Some customers find internal network settings may affect performance. Settings such as MTU sizes, network auto-negotiation or auto-detection, and sub-optimal routes to the internet are common places to look.
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WAN Accelerators Microsoft Office 365 does not require you to use WAN Optimization Controller devices (also known as WAN acceleration and caching devices) or traffic shaping/inspection devices (also known as packet shaping/inspection devices).
Customers may decide to use such devices to increase performance under conditions of high latency or low bandwidth for Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online.
There are great WAN devices and options out there that work well with Office 365, but keep in mind that you may need to optimize your network device or devices to ensure that your users have a consistent experience when accessing Office 365. Confirm with the vendor or your technical team if the device can handle appropriate traffic (such as how Office 365 services encrypt some Office 365 content and the TCP header information).
Direct Connection Via Azure Express Route For Office 365 You can add a direct network connection to Office 365 for selected Office 365 network traffic. Azure ExpressRoute offers a direct connection, predictable performance, and comes with an uptime SLA of 99.9% for the Microsoft networking components. An internet connection is still required for workloads that are not supported over Azure ExpressRoute.
In addition to internet connectivity, some customers may choose to route a subset of their Office 365 network traffic over a direct connection that offers predictability and a 99.9% uptime SLA for the Microsoft networking components. Azure ExpressRoute provides customers this dedicated network connection to Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services.
Regardless of whether you have an existing MPLS WAN, ExpressRoute can be added to your network architecture in one of three ways, through a supported cloud exchange co-location provider, an Ethernet point-to-point connection provider, or through an MPLS connection provider. See what providers are available in your region. The direct ExpressRoute connection
Page 33 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know will enable connectivity to most Office 365 applications including SharePoint Online. Network traffic for all other applications and services will continue to traverse the internet.
4.3.2. Service Degradations There have been service degradations for customers in Office 365. These are communicated via the Office 365 service health dashboard. They rarely impact your organization or users in a meaningful or notable way, but it is worth noting that these do happen from time to time.
When a service is noted as having service degradation, it means that it can be slow, sluggish or occasionally unresponsive for brief periods.
How might you experience this? We have seen situations where the search crawler is delayed on indexing new content, where site provisioning can be delayed, or where access or the managed metadata service might be unavailable. 4.4. Security Office 365 reduces the burden of performing routine IT management tasks such as keeping security updates current and performing back-end upgrades. So naturally, an Intranet on Office 365 may be more secure with less overhead from an IT management perspective.
It’s important to understand continually improving security management and security enhancing features that are delivered to Office 365.
4.4.1. Dynamic Group Membership & Rule Based Security One very common requirement in SharePoint and other Intranet solutions is to have the ability to target content to a dynamic audience of users and similarly secure information based on dynamic rules.
Traditionally we have done content targeting with Audiences in SharePoint. An Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time, the rules of the Audience are evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content. Office 365 Groups are powered by Azure Active Directory and support something called Dynamic Membership.
This enables group membership and content or collections within the Intranet to be secured based on dynamic rules and not just based on traditional group membership. A powerful
Page 34 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know innovation and pattern for security that is enabled based on the integration between Office 365 and Azure Active Directory.
To learn more about this feature be sure to read this article on using attributes to create advanced rules. 4.5. Support & Escalation Microsoft provides support for Office 365. There are also premier support options for Office 365. Lastly, you can pay vendors (like 2toLead – that’s us!) to provide additional support and troubleshooting and issue resolution around Office 365 issues.
An initial support request can be done in two ways. Save time by starting your service request online in the Office 365 admin center or call in. Get the support phone number for your country or region.
The initial support path will connect you with a support engineer who can assist callers with basic end-user features and admin scenarios. It is highly probable that you may need to escalate your support request some times until you get a sufficiently senior engineer.
What we have found is that these senior-level engineers are quite capable. They have been open to communicating directly which has often helped us rapidly build an understanding of customer specific issues and the best solution(s).
When you are interacting with a support engineer, note that there are a few ways to expedite support escalation to get you a senior-level engineer.
• You can use premier support options for Office 365. • You can work with a partner (like 2toLead) who has access to escalated support paths. • You can ask the engineer to escalate you. One technique for this is to request a business impact statement when you have a critical impact on your business (as this leads rapidly to the escalation of an issue). 4.6. Privacy & Regulatory Issues There are some privacy-related sub-topics that can be relevant when planning an Office 365 Intranet. The legal and regulatory needs of an organization can be complex and often vary based on organizational needs.
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As you are probably aware of, the strict requirements of North American and international data protection laws and their national implementations are difficult to reconcile with several aspects of Cloud computing. Particularly problematic aspects relate to:
• the cross-border transfer of personal data; • the very broad definition of personal data and the potentially very wide definition of sensitive personal data; • the reduced level of control that can be exercised by customers, due to the decentralized approach and the dependency on the service provider;
There are some things you will want to consider when exploring Office 365 with your organization for powering your Intranet. Keep in mind that even in a Hybrid state with SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2019 that if you are unifying the index then, your content will be contained in Microsoft Office 365 datacenter(s).
Most of these considerations are part of a broader analysis of privacy in Office 365. Looking at this from an intranet perspective should help simplify the conversation as many issues get more complex when dealing with mail/Exchange.
You will want to work with Microsoft and reliable expert to answer questions like:
• How might you migrate to a different provider or back on premises? o This isn’t your first choice, but having the ability is important. o There are some great options here depending on the content/technology you are looking at migrating. For an Intranet, this is something that while extremely rare is done with relative ease using proven third-party tools that have relatively low costs. • Who owns the data? Who is liable in the case of data loss? • How is termination of the contract handled? What happens to the data? o Keep in mind that SharePoint online provides encryption of the data. Additionally, Microsoft has disclosed that they intend to provide customers the ability to ‘bring their key’ which enables more options around who can ‘effectively see the data.' • What laws are different based on different jurisdictions on access to data for your organization? • How are the data centers secured? What policies are in place? • What compliance auditing does Microsoft support?
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• How would server seizure be handled and what are the implications for all parties involved? 4.7.1. Microsoft Compliance & Privacy Policies Office 365 is a multi-tenant service (meaning your data is present on some of the same infrastructures as other Microsoft customers). Office 365 is verified to meet requirements specified in ISO 27001, EU Model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA. All of those have privacy rules that Microsoft must follow and indicate that Microsoft is making a considerable investment on a continuous basis in compliance and privacy. For a comprehensive view of the privacy policies Office 365 follows you should review the Office 365 trust center and request the latest audit reports as needed from your Microsoft team.
In short Microsoft provides an extremely strong privacy policy and at last count, there are over 300 people focused on data privacy, including Software Engineers, Scientists, IT Pros, Marketing and Lawyers at Microsoft. So they probably have better privacy protection than many organizations concerned with privacy regulations and rules. There is a significant benefit gained from Microsoft taking on the auditing and compliance costs as they relate to some of these kinds of challenges.
4.7.2. Encryption & Bring Your Key While your data is encrypted at rest automatically in Office 365, you can further encrypt content with Azure Information Protection (AIP).
Azure Information Protection (sometimes referred to as AIP) is a cloud-based solution that helps an organization to classify, label, and protect its documents and emails. This can be done automatically by administrators who define rules and conditions, manually by users, or a combination where users are given recommendations.
The protection technology uses Azure Rights Management (often abbreviated to Azure RMS). This technology is integrated with other Microsoft cloud services and applications, such as Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. It can also be used with your line-of-business applications and information protection solutions from software vendors, whether these applications and solutions are on-premises, or in the cloud.
This protection technology uses encryption, identity, and authorization policies. Similarly to the labels that are applied, protection that is applied by using Rights Management stays with the documents and emails, independently of the location—inside or outside your organization,
Page 37 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know networks, file servers, and applications. This information protection solution keeps you in control of your data, even when it is shared with other people.
For example, you can configure a report document or sales forecast spreadsheet so that it can be accessed only by people in your organization, and control whether that document can be edited, or restricted to read-only, or prevent it from being printed. You can configure emails similarly, and also prevent them from being forwarded or prevent the use of the Reply All option.
These protection settings can be part of your label configuration so that users both classify and protect documents and emails simply by applying a label. However, the same protection settings can also be used by applications and services that support protection, but not labeling. For these applications and services, the protection settings become available as Rights Management templates.
The overall tenant key that you use for this encryption can also be controlled by you. Managing your tenant key is also referred to as bring your own key, or BYOK.
The Azure Information Protection tenant key is a root key for your organization. Other keys can be derived from this root key, such as user keys, computer keys, and document encryption keys. Whenever Azure Information Protection uses these keys for your organization, they cryptographically chain to your Azure Information Protection tenant key.
There is a lot of confusion around BYOK so keep in mind this is for Compliance regulations, additional security, and control over all lifecycle operations. For example your key must be protected by a hardware security module (HSM).
Remember that through the use of techniques like SharePoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Azure Information Protection and its existing Information Rights Protection capabilities you could automate the discovery of key privacy data and encrypt it with Rights Protection enabling deeper levels of security and protection beyond the encryption and protection offered at the container level (site, library, tenant level).
4.7.3. Data Residency You should understand whether Office 365 is available in the region you plan to host your tenant from. Microsoft provides a data residency option to existing Office 365 customers who are covered by the datacenter geos listed in the table below.
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While this may ensure your data is within that region, there is a separate offering that you can pay for from Microsoft to enable multi-geo support and still support data residency requirements. This can ensure OneDrive data or SharePoint data is stored in the appropriate geography. For large scale global Intranets this could be a significant benefit worth exploring. 4.7. Search Search matters. Search is an integral part of any Intranet or Employee Portal. In many cases, the search experiences are more robust when you build your Intranet with Office 365 because you have access to machine learning assisted results and the latest discovery and integrated search options available.
4.7.1. Usage Of The Highlighted Contents Web Part & Content Search Web Part Search based roll-ups and aggregation is a corner stone of many Intranet design patterns and shows up in all key Intranet pages.
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Highlighted Contents Web Part The highlighted contents web part is a new modern web part available in modern pages/sites. It is an extremely powerful and versatile OOTB control for rolling up content onto modern Intranet pages.
You can use this web part to dynamically display content from a document library, a site, a site collection, all sites, targeted sites in a hub or all sites in a hub.
By default, this web part shows your most recent documents, but it can be configured to show other types of content including:
• Pages • News • Videos • Images • Events • Issues • Tasks • Links • Contacts • Other Content Types (you add them) • All
Once you have selected your content source and type, you can set filter and sort options to narrow down and organize the content.
Lastly, you can choose how the content will be displayed. This control today supports four layouts including cards, list, carousel and filmstrip with control over the number to show and whether to show the web part if no items are detected.
This is the preferred OOTB control to use for most rollups in a modern based SharePoint Intranet but if you have specialized look and feel considerations (for the way it should display)
Page 40 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know then you may want to build your variant of this control using the modern SharePoint framework with whatever additional look and feel styles you would like to see.
Content Search Web Part Throughout many Intranets content dynamically displays based on search. To do this often, the Content Search Web Part (CSWP) was leveraged which still works in Office 365. Whenever possible try to use the modern highlighted content web part as this option is only valid for ‘Classic Pages’ or classic sites that are not using the new modern page capabilities (or SharePoint framework).
When visitors browse to a page that contains a CSWP, the Web Part automatically issues a query. The search results are displayed within the CSWP. In most cases, visitors won't even know that search technology is being used to display the content they're viewing. To them, it'll look and feel like any other web page.
By configuring a query in a CSWP, you can define which content visitors will see when they browse to a page that contains a CSWP. By default, the query in the CSWP is configured to show the three most recently changed items on the site. By configuring the query, you can change the number of items that are shown in the CSWP and which content is shown. For example, you can configure the query so that the CSWP will show nine list items from a particular list, or the last six documents the visitor created in a document library.
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SharePoint Online Search Limitations If you are using the Highlighted Content or Content Search Web Part heavily in your Intranet design, it is important to understand whether immediate results or items being added to the index will have an impact on user expectations or the design itself. In Office 365 content can take anywhere from less than 15 minutes to 6 hours (in extreme circumstances) to show recently updated data based on search.
While this may not be an issue for some components within the Intranet for things like news or announcements urgency may be more important, and a REST API call may be recommended over using search.
It is important to understand that Microsoft controls the Office 365 crawl schedules, and you have limited control or influence beyond options they have enabled. Microsoft has continuously crawling enabled on each tenant. This means that content is continually being added to the index.
The default interval for continuous crawls is every 15 minutes. Unlike a SharePoint on-premises environment, the interval of continuous crawls cannot be reduced within the SharePoint online environment. This doesn’t guarantee that content will be indexed and available in search results within 15 minutes as the volume of tenant data may also play a factor as will usage volume/patterns.
Search crawls occur continuously to make sure that content changes are available through search results as soon as possible. Recently uploaded documents may not immediately be displayed in search results because of the time that's required to process them. SharePoint Online targets between 15 minutes and an hour for the time between upload and availability in search results (also known as index freshness). In cases of heavy environment use, this time can increase to six hours.
Beyond the timing of crawls, it may be important to understand other search limitations that are different from SharePoint on-premises or that can have an impact on your Intranet planning.
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4.7.2. SharePoint Hybrid Search If you are looking at a Hybrid scenario with SharePoint on-premises and your Intranet in the cloud, you can unify the search index for Office 365 and SharePoint on-premises by using something called the Search Service Application. This provides ways to leverage modern Office 365 search and the Intranet search along with any legacy or highly customized content on premises.
One of the key considerations here is that it reduces the server footprint for search on- premises which can save quite a bit of money for larger organizations. On the other side of cost for every 1 million items in the index 1TB of storage is required in Office 365 (this is just how the costs for indexing large corpuses are managed from a price standpoint – it does not add to tenant storage). This doesn’t add up to much in potential added costs, but for smaller organizations with millions of items, it can be worth understanding. The US costs per GB per month today is $0.20 so 1TB or 1 million items per year is approximately $2,400.00 more a year. Keep in mind you get your first TB free and then get storage based on the number of users you have.
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4.7.3. Predictive Search, Zero-Term Search & Surfacing Search Results Together Your global search should provide ‘search as you type’ previews of what the user is looking for to reduce the need for them to go to another search page if it’s a typical/common search. The good news is that this is built into modern search experiences in SharePoint, and even in classic sites could be enabled with a minor amount of code.
The downside is that these modern experiences are limited today based on how they have been implemented. While you can see a preview of search results, it may not be all the results you would like to show and you can’t control the experience/display in modern search.
The modern search box is scoped based on the hub site you are viewing or the site you are viewing (depending on if the site is a member of a hub site). As a result, the only global search box with this functionality today is surfaced on the SharePoint homepage of your tenant which may not be a page users navigate to often.
You can, of course, build your own global navigation (recommended in the navigation section). This global navigation could have a predictive search as you type experience along with zero-term search results (meaning before they type anything we could show things like the most recent or popular results).
Users may be searching for a person, a document, or a site/group/team. Instead of forcing the user to choose initially when searching or navigate to a results page and further refine their query we can provide a combined set of results for them to meet the vast majority of common search scenarios in that same rich preview.
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4.8. Navigation In Office 365 Intranet’s act as portals to many key areas of interest within the business. The navigation should be personalized and dynamic for the Intranet to improve relevancy and usage.
In SharePoint Online Classic sites just like in SharePoint Server environments, you can choose between two OOTB navigation methods: structural navigation or managed navigation. Structural navigation is based on site structure. Managed navigation is based on term sets.
One of the advantages of SharePoint Online is that you can also create hub sites. These hub sites can have a ‘hub navigation’ which can be shared across site collections. This hub navigation can also be structured or managed term set based.
There is also a third method for managing navigation where navigation is based on search.
While the global or top navigation is often the main discussion point for an Intranet, often sub menus and navigation components will exist (such as tools or apps). Be careful not to develop some navigation capabilities that Office 365 already provides out of the box.
4.8.1. Structural Navigation Patterns of designing the top navigation to follow the organizational hierarchy of the business often suggest that not enough time or energy may have been placed in planning the usability and efficacy of this navigation key component. This is rarely done, instead, often navigation may be patterned based on the Intranet’s structure itself.
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When using this approach to Navigation, it is important to understand its shortcomings. While easy to train and understand since it mimics the structure of the SharePoint site and often automatically shows content as it is created it often is difficult to modify without the creation or modification of the underlying structure.
4.8.2. Using Managed Term-Driven Navigation In some scenarios, you may wish to design your navigation to be driven by terms or topics rather than by the structure of your site. The managed navigation feature allows you to keep up with changes and trends in your organization and provide great navigation around important business concepts, all without changing the structure of your site.
Managed navigation lets you define and maintain your site navigation by using term sets. With managed navigation, it's not the location of your content that defines where in the navigation your content will appear, but how you tag your content with terms from a term set. For example, in previous versions of SharePoint, if you wanted to add a new page under "About our company," you had to add that page under the "About our company" branch within your content. With managed navigation, you can add a page to the branch that makes the most sense to you. By tagging that page with a term, and using Search Web Parts, it will appear in the correct place in the navigation.
You still have to organize content in SharePoint in the same way we have for years (based on site structures) but with metadata driven navigation you, in essence, can create a layer that sits on top of the site structure that enables users to go directly to content or content categories that would have been buried deep in the site structure.
Lastly managed navigation creates friendly URLs. In previous versions of SharePoint, the URL to a page contained a reference to the Pages library and any folders within that library, for example, http://www.contoso.com/pages/products/cameras/camera-accessories.aspx. With managed navigation, URLs are based on the terms in the term set that drives your site navigation, for example, http://www.contoso.com/cameras/camera-accessories. These friendly URLs are much easier for users to recognize and remember.
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4.8.3. Search Based Navigation (Custom) One pattern we have found that can work well is to develop a custom navigation that is powered by search. If your navigation items often do not need to appear immediately this approach could enable the flexibility of navigation that is always growing, can be easily personalized and one that can be enhanced in a variety of ways to improve the user experience. Since Office 365 is always crawling new content the only downside is the potential delay of content or navigation items displaying upon creation or modification (awaiting re-indexing which can be immediate or can take quite a few minutes (with highs of hours depending on the tenant usage patterns at play).
NOTE: It is important to have a site and page creation process that establishes key metadata for each site or page to improve search results and to allow for personalization and targeting of sharing the site or page. A search based navigation is dependant on controlling the site provisioning process or page creation process and ensuring sites and pages are tagged appropriately to show up in various locations within the global or top navigation.
Since many Intranets customize their global or top navigation by enabling it to function like a multi-mega drop-down menu empowering this experience with search requires less effort. While common navigation elements like locations/offices, divisions, departments, and others rarely change some elements of the navigation may frequently change like tools or sites. Since sites themselves can be across the broader organization, it may be important to provide things like recent sites, favorite sites or other ways to navigate site structures.
4.8.4. Modern & Classic Navigation While Modern sites have a navigation menu via hub sites that gives you the ability to create a navigation that can be used across site collections, it has some limitations. It doesn’t work across your classic sites today, if you have more than one hub site you can’t have a consistent navigation across those sites as easily and the OOTB navigation control is also quite simple and
Page 47 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know doesn’t support mega menu’s, search- based navigation, or content roll up into the navigation itself which are all patterns used in many Intranet’s today to improve the navigation experience.
For most organizations investing in a custom global navigation that goes across your entire environment can be extremely useful. When you create a custom global navigation menu, you should base it on client-side/JavaScript code and implement it within the top configurable area of SharePoint modern sites. This can then be used in classic sites (since it’s just code you can add) so that you have a consistent global navigation experience across all sites (classic and modern).
This should use a subtle and small initial layout to use less of the modern pages real estate as it will push the content of the page downwards.
4.8.5. Incorporate The App Launcher There are common components built into Intranets. One such component is to create a bunch of tool links for common applications users need to access. This makes it easier for users to find the relevant sites, apps, and resources to do their job. While there are still situations where it may be necessary to have a custom component or roll-up of tool links it bares careful consideration in Office 365. Consider how some of these needs can be potentially met through the use of the Office 365 app launcher. The app launcher (unlike a tools/links component on the Intranet) is available throughout Office 365. Whether the
Page 48 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know user is viewing another user profile or reading an email in Outlook Online. It is always one click away for the user.
The app launcher contains links for apps that have been promoted or pinned, from the My Apps Page. The My Apps page includes all of the apps you get with Office 365 as well as custom apps that you add from the SharePoint Store or Azure AD. Each user can personalize this app launcher by selecting what is pinned within the app launcher.
The app launcher can be used to not only provide users with access to key suite capabilities in Office 365 but can also be setup to include access to 3rd party SaaS solutions or key applications that Azure AD has been set up to provide single sign-on access to.
Lastly, administrators can create custom app links that users can pin to their app launchers. These custom tiles can point to SharePoint sites, external sites, legacy apps, and more. In our example, 2toLead’s Intranet app link is used to access our organization's Intranet.
This experience may not be what you are looking for when it comes to users being able to create their links or the format and style you want users to have for navigating across tools and apps in your digital workplace. This feature gap in the ability to tailor or extend this launcher today is one of the main reasons you may still need a custom tools/links/apps component in your Intranet.
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4.8.6. Incorporate The Sites/SharePoint Homepage The new SharePoint home creates a space for SharePoint on the web within Office 365 that allows you to quickly find and create sites. And just like the SharePoint mobile app, the SharePoint home web experience enables you to easily find and discover the places, information, and people you need to be productive.
Users simply click the SharePoint tile from the Office 365 app launcher—formally the Sites tile but with the same logo—to launch a redesigned, modern and responsive user experience with intelligence and site activities front and center.
Once in your SharePoint home, you’ll see the sites and portals you are most active in alongside recommended sites per the Office Graph and company-wide sites promoted by your company, the entire intranet of an organization.
This gives you unified access to all of your sites—online and on-premises—and lets you navigate seamlessly through your intranet, as well as catch up with activity across your sites with just a glance.
The most important thing to understand with the sites/SharePoint page is to understand how this will work with any Intranet site directory or site listing you may have been considering building. Since this is constantly being updated with new features, it makes sense to integrate and leverage this to support site navigation throughout the Intranet and broader digital workplace. 4.9. New Site & New Page Provisioning Often there is a need for users to quickly and rapidly build new Intranet subsites or pages.
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Creating new pages and having those pages have a consistent feel, look, and edit experience is something that is easily attained with SharePoint Online. This is done through the use of page layouts and could even be potentially done without customization.
Within Office, 365 new Intranet subsite provisioning can be more complicated than when done on SharePoint Server. Here are some reasons provisioning can (and will) be more complicated:
• You cannot reliably use site templates or web templates. There are many reasons at play here. Since these would cause significant maintenance challenges due to complete replacement of the out of the box site definition, wouldn’t be usable when certain features are enabled and is generally not an effective way to provision sites in SharePoint Online. If you are going to use one then maybe use web templates, but this also has a poor site collection creation story so it won’t scale as effectively. • You cannot use feature stapling, server-side provisioning, or custom site definitions, mainly because they aren’t supported in Office 365. • You can take a manual approach and create the site and then run PowerShell or manually activate features and configure the site. • The only option for reliably automating the site creation process is to use a technique called remote provisioning. This requires having code running outside of SharePoint Online that handles queue management and the site creation and configuration process.
4.9.1. Manual Approach You can still provision sites using the manual approach in Office 365. By using the out of the box interface to provision a site and then apply a template (you can create sites without a template) or you can create a site directly based on an existing Microsoft template. You can even automate this to a limited degree by using PowerShell to accelerate the speed of your provisioning. However, often PowerShell scripts that provision sites, configure sites, and provision appropriate site assets need to be regularly maintained.
4.9.2. Remote Provisioning Intranets are often contained in a single SharePoint site collection (except search centers). As a result, you can use an approach where you override the out of the box sub site creation process or experience and take ownership of the site provisioning. https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Provisioning.SubSiteCreationApp
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You can extend this technique by using CSOM to provision site collections. https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Provisioning.SiteCollectionCreation
You can also use an approach where you get a template from an existing site, save the template using an XML provider, load the saved model and apply it to an existing site. Using this technique people can update the template sites that are used in the provisioning process giving more control to the business.
Additionally, you can queue requests or use other advanced techniques to improve the site provisioning process. https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Provisioning.Cloud.Async.WebJob
There are more advanced approaches that you may wish to leverage, and this is an area of continued investment from Microsoft. With the new SharePoint framework, a new site creation (site designs) experience is one of the investments Microsoft is making that may help meet some organization site provisioning needs or act as a great base for your custom site
4.9.3. Site Designs Building on remote provisioning you can also use site designs and site scripts to compliment this approach and provision your own custom configuration of modern SharePoint sites.
When people in your organization create new SharePoint sites, you often need to ensure some level of consistency. For example, you may need proper branding and theming applied to each new site. You may also have detailed site provisioning scripts, such as using the PnP provisioning engine, that need to be applied each time a new site is created. Perhaps you might also want to trigger this kind of interaction when a new site is added to a hub site by appliying them to previously created modern site collections (for more information see the REST API and PowerShell articles).
Site designs are like a template. They can be used each time a new site is created to apply a consistent set of actions. They can also be applied to existing modern sites (group-connected Team and Communication sites). Most actions typically affect the site itself, such as setting the theme or creating lists. But a site design can also include other actions, such as recording the new site URL to a log, or sending a tweet.
Available actions include:
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• Creating a new list or library (or modifying the default one created with the site) • Creating site columns, content types, and configuring other list settings • Applying a theme • Setting a site logo • Adding navigation • Triggering a Microsoft Flow • Installing a deployed solution from the app catalog • Setting regional settings for the site • Setting external sharing capability for the site
For a complete list of available actions and their parameters, see the JSON schema. 4.10. Branding & Design When planning effective branding and design in Office 365, there are a few things we believe must be taken into account.
• Responsive design is a must. • Leave the Office 365 suite bar alone. • Branding the personal site (especially with Delve people profiles) is challenging and often not recommended if it can be avoided. • Avoid site templates unless you are actively updating them over time. • Navigation should use best practices like managed metadata (performance impact). • Keep in mind that branding often must be provisioned across many site collections to provide a unified design experience, so the provisioning process is also important. 4.10.1. Responsive Design Is Not Optional Office 365 is meant to be available anywhere, at any time, and from any device. Your Intranet should also be relevant and accessible from mobile or touch-based devices. While you may need to enhance classic sites to make them more responsive new modern sites and lists/library views are all responsive by design.
4.10.2. Leave The Office 365 Suite Bar Alone The Office 365 Suite Bar should be incorporated into your Intranet design. This also means understanding that customizing the Office 365 Suite Bar is not recommended.
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One of the common customizations is to reposition the company logo to be left aligned when viewing the page on a laptop or desktop browser. If this minor customization is done when you navigate to other areas within Office 365 where you cannot customize the suite bar you will see the logo of the company shift back to the center position. This also has an impact on the responsive design since the suite bar has been designed to adjust and is regularly updated by Microsoft.
Another gap here is often creative designs, or even wireframing doesn’t take the suite bar into account. This is something you always want visible and incorporated into any design from the beginning. Ensure the suite bar is part of each wireframe or creative design for your Office 365 based solutions and Intranet.
4.10.3. Incorporate The Office 365 People Card & User Profile Experience By building your Intranet on or with Office 365, it means that you are embracing the Office 365 user profiles that are continually being improved by Microsoft.
What are some of the great features you get in Office 365 profile pages today?
• The profile contains the rich fields you may already be familiar with if you have built or used an Intranet based on SharePoint. • Many fields are interactive: o The phone number field can be selected to dial out to the individual using Skype for Business. o The email address is enabled with a mailto: to make it easy to start an email with the user. • Profiles contain recent documents from the individual, and documents trending around them. • Profiles share free/busy insight to help get in touch with an individual more easily.
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These profile pages in Office 365 cannot be customized. One of the common design and development patterns for Intranets is to customize the look, feel, and content of user profile pages. In Office 365 instead, you can only configure minor things today.
You can add user profile properties which can be a great way to improve the people search experience and the profile experience for users. Each user can theme their profile by changing the cover photo, and there are more customization options that are coming.
Another reason we no longer customize profiles is that Microsoft does a great job of bringing profiles forward (giving users one less place to have to navigate to). This is done today by popping out a people card whenever you hover over someone’s name or picture throughout Office 365. My clicking the show more link a complete profile will slide in from the right. This profile not only contains contact details, your notes about this person, information about this person such as their past projects or expertise, org charts/who they work with, their recent files, but even more in the future such as LinkedIn details about the user (based on opt- in and org config).
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4.10.4. Embrace The Modern SharePoint Pages & SharePoint Framework Powered Experience Office 365 has rolled out an entirely new set of pages based on responsive and modern web patterns. These pages or news make the editing experience easier and consistent whether you are on a tablet or a computer.
Modern Page Advantages These pages have quite a few advantages over classic pages.
• An improved out of the box experience for authors and readers. The layout of the modern page uses sections and is responsive by design. This not only makes consumption of this page great on mobile or tablet devices but is also optimized for authoring on smaller tablet devices as well. Authoring is also faster as there is no longer page reloads when editing controls on the page. • Modern pages that are created as news pages surface in more places. The news isn’t just in SharePoint the SharePoint site it is created in. It can roll-up in the hub site, show up in the SharePoint home page, be found in the SharePoint mobile app, and more (with much more coming). It’s not just the improved visibility and consumption options that are important here. Many of these experiences also have special features oriented around the experience. Here are a few simple examples:
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o News that shows up in the SharePoint mobile app can be saved/bookmarked to be read later. o When an important relevant news article is posted by someone in your close sphere of work - derived from the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph, you will receive a notification on your mobile device, from SharePoint within your device’s notification tray. When you click on the notification, you are taken directly into the SharePoint mobile app to view the news article. o News posts can be shown automatically within a Microsoft Teams channel as part of a channel conversation. • More web part options to get authors started on making compelling page content. The modern page has some unique web parts that are available to it that are not available in classic pages. In fact, every one of them has a streamlined authoring experience and even those that are similar to classic controls (about 4 of them) they have different display experiences/interactions (example Events allows a user to add an event to their calendar). While there are powerful controls out of the box in classic pages, they are not as easy to use or as intuitive to work with as these new modern controls. o Some classic web parts were easy enough to deal with, but others required arcane knowledge of XSL style sheets, display templates, and other outmoded web technology. The new web parts are much easier and more intuitive to set up, and don’t require any special technical know-how.
What follows is a simple summary of the 40+ modern capabilities that are currently available in modern pages and news that are not available (or as easy to use/intuitive) in classic pages (as of May 2018):
Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Page Title While the image can be removed to leave only the title at the top of the Layout Image page a simple and easy to use interface allows users to set a focused image to go along with the heading of their modern page’s content.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Sections Modern pages can be broken up into sections. To do this, the user simply Layout hovers over or selects the space between existing sections and can add the preferred section layout of their choice. These sections are designed responsively to flow the layout appropriately when the screen size changes. It is also extremely easy to move web parts from one section to another.
Move & You can reorder your page any time when editing it. This works across Layout Reorder browsers. Just click on the web part you want to move and drag it to the + position in the section of your choice.
Improved Users can share useful articles or pages by email which includes a link, Engagement Sharing thumbnail preview, description and optional message to one or more people.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Audience By the end of 2018 news can be designated as an organizational news Engagement, Targeting & source. As news rolls up to people across their SharePoint home in Office Roll-up Categorizing 365, or via the news tab in their SharePoint mobile all, the news that comes from “organizational news source” sites will get special visual treatment bubbling up to the top of one’s view.
Additionally, you can better define what news articles and pages appear on the home experience of your site by configuring what is visible to specific groups. Each person will have a unique experience that complies with what you wish them to view without creating multiple audience-specific sites, you can serve them all from within a more centralized location with a personalized, targeted experience. Audience targeting support will be enabled in news, pages and other web parts so that you can define and target who best to reach with content and site experiences.
Copy News If you have a series of pages you’ve created with a similar layout and design, Engagement Post/Page you can now go to an existing page and use it as a quick start to create a whole new page – but with a head start. From an existing page, click New and then select Start with a copy of this page. The service will create the new page and you simply jump into updating with new text, images and content updates, with layout, design and common text already in place.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Email A News Users can even send email a news digest. (Roadmap item 21047). Increase Engagement Digest the reach of and combine select news articles into one consolidated email update. From the full list of news articles, select specific news items, click Send news digest to send an email to a group or individuals with clean previews and links to the full news articles.
Save / Before the end of 2018 you can now save news articles to catch up on later, Engagement Bookmark right from the Web interface of your intranet - as you can today on mobile. News Simply click Save for later from the bottom of the news article and it gets added to your saved list, accessible from the Me tab in the SharePoint mobile app. You will also be able to access your saved list from SharePoint home.
On the SharePoint mobile app users can take pages that have been published as news and save them for review later (using the bookmark icon).
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Comments, On each page, in the footer, a like option, comments, and the view count Engagement View Counts & are visible (if commenting is activated) for the page. The comments support Liking basic threading (you can reply to a comment, but you cannot reply to a reply). The view count is also surfaced in certain pre-built experiences such as the news web part.
By the end of 2018, like in Outlook conversations, it will be possible to @mention someone within the comments of a news article and they will be notified and brought into the discussion.
Bing Maps Use the Bing maps web part to add a map to your Reference page. Simply enter an address or a well-known name, and your map will appear. You can choose a different map type, such as road or aerial. You can also change the zoom level or give your map pin a friendly name.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Connectors With the Connector web part, you can get Roll-up, messages, alerts, and notifications from your Integration favorite external services on a group-connected team site page. For example, you can show updates from services like Trello and Facebook; alerts when something new is published in an RSS feed; notifications from JIRA or GitHub; or even summaries from Salesforce and Google Analytics.
Divider Use this to web part to insert a line between other web parts to help break Layout up your page and make it easier to read.
Document The Document Library web part allows you to display a document library Roll-up Library and customize it with your title, view, and even size. Users with appropriate permissions can view or edit files directly from the web part or can go the full document library by clicking See all.
Embed You can display content on your page from other sites like YouTube videos. Integration, Depending on the site, you can either use the site's address or embed code Reference that the site provides.
Events The Events web part allows you to add and display upcoming events on Roll-up your page. You can even include more beyond just the time and topic such as a map with the location, online meeting information, a category, and more. This control has a visual presentation style that provides users with a quick and easy way to add a specific event to their calendar.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
File Viewer Use this to insert a file on your page. File types you can insert include Excel, Reference Word, PowerPoint, Visio, .PDFs, 3D Models and more.
Keep in mind that this does not support every file type. So while it supports many rich interactive file viewing experiences, there may still be some file types that do not work with this control today (it will not let you select those files and will not show them in the navigation as it filters for only files that would render appropriately).
Today Microsoft supports over 300 file types in with rich previews, but that capability is in document libraries, within search, and OneDrive for Business today and is different from this rich interactive file viewer.
Group Calendar The Group calendar web part allows you to put an Office 365 group Roll-up, calendar right on your page so that it is easily visible to your readers. Integration
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Hero The Hero web part allows an author to bring Navigation focus and visual interest to your page. You can display up to five items in the Hero web part and use compelling images, text, and links to draw attention to each. The Hero web part is included by default on Communication sites, but you can also add the Hero web part to other pages.
Highlighted Use this web part to dynamically display content based on content type, Roll-up Content filtering, or a search string. You can also set the scope of the search to a site or site collection, and sort the results.
This is one of the most powerful controls provided today in the modern experience.
Image Use this to insert an image on the page, either from your site or your hard Reference drive. This can also allow authors to put text as an overlay over an image.
Image Gallery Use the Image gallery web part to share collections of pictures on a page. Roll-up Simply select your images with the file picker or drag them onto the web part. Once you’ve created your collection, you can drag and drop the images to reorder them as needed.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Kindle Instant Have a book you want to recommend or promote on your page? You can Reference Preview share a preview of a Kindle book using the Kindle instant preview web part.
Link Use the Link web part to add a link to an internal or external page, video, Reference image, or document.
List The List web part allows you to display a list and customize it with your title, Roll-up view, and even size. Users can view the list, or go the full list by clicking See all.
Microsoft Use the Microsoft Forms web part to create Integration, Forms surveys, quizzes, and polls on a page. You can also Reference collect responses to your forms and/or show your form results.
News You can keep your team in the loop as well as engage them with important Roll-up or interesting stories by using the News feature on your page or site. You can quickly create eye-catching posts like announcements, people news, status updates, and more that can include graphics and rich formatting.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Office 365 Use this to display a video right on the page from your organization's Office Reference Video 365 Video portal.
Stream This web part allows you to display a video right on your page from your Reference organization's Microsoft Stream video portal. Before the end of 2018 there will be channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.
People The People web part allows you to display a selected group of people and Reference their profiles on your page. It can be used for contact information, team information, presenters, and more.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Planner The Planner web part allows you to add your team's tasks and assignments Integration, on a page using Microsoft Planner. Reference
PowerApps PowerApps is a service that lets you build business apps that run in a Integration, browser or on a phone or tablet, with no coding experience required. Once Reference you have created or customized an app using the service, you can add it to your SharePoint page with the PowerApps web part. Just enter the app’s web address or the app ID, and then resize the app to fit the page.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Power BI The Power BI report web part allows you to easily embed an interactive Integration, Report Power BI report on your page. The embedded reports are fully secure, so Reference you can easily create secure internal portals.
Quick Chart Use the Quick chart web part to add simple charts to your page. Enter your Reference data points, add labels, pick your chart type -- column or pie -- and publish.
Quick Links Using this web part, you can "pin" items to your page for easy access. Navigation
Site Activity This web part automatically shows recent activity on your site, such as files Roll-up uploaded, edits made, lists and libraries created, and so on. Just add the web part, and the latest activity is pulled in automatically.
This new capability is extremely useful for keeping teams informed as they collaborate on a site together.
Sites The Sites web part allows you to showcase sites on a page. It will Navigation, automatically show sites associated with a hub site, or if you are not using a Roll-up hub site, you can select specific sites to show by searching for them or choosing from recent or frequently-used sites.
This does not just provide a quick link to targeted sites; it also presents the most recent user updates and views under each site card.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Spacer This web part allows you to control vertical space on your page. Layout
Text Use the Text web part to add paragraphs and tables to your page. Reference, Formatting options like styles, bullets, indentations, highlighting, and links Layout are available.
When a user clicks the “…” additional options such as table creation, indenting, highlighting and more.
Twitter With the Twitter web part, you can show tweets that are relevant to you or Integration, your audience right on your page. Reference
Yammer If your organization has an active Yammer network (for example Integration, www.yammer.com/2toLead.com), you can enhance collaboration by Reference, embedding Yammer conversations on your page. Roll-up
Keep in mind that this allows you to target a groups conversations (top conversations, latest conversations, or targeted conversations), or a feed of discussion based on any group, person, topic or the home feed.
This also now supports richer feed interactions like liking, @mentioning, adding content, and more.
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Capability Web Part Description Purpose
Weather Site owners and members will now be able to show the current weather on Reference their site home page, within sub pages and/or within a news article on team sites, communication sites and hub sites. Simply add the web part to your page or news, add a location and select from Fahrenheit or Celsius (°F or °C). The web part pulls up-to-date information from MSN Weather. (Roadmap Reference 27740.)
Modern Page Challenges (As Of May 2018) While modern pages should be the default and preference for your Intranet content where possible there may still be reasons for using page layouts and classic pages/classic sites for certain Intranet needs.
• Modern pages do not allow you to create guaranteed or consistent page designs once you enable someone to modify the page contents. o Unlike page layouts that would enable a contributor to update some sections of a page but be unable to move certain web parts around, or have certain areas be read-only for them, in SharePoint modern pages the entire authoring canvas is made available to an editor, and this kind of control at a page layout level is not possible today. o The way to address this with modern is to approach the design differently. Since you can add customizations to SharePoint modern pages you can still ensure in
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the custom global navigation, footer, or via a hover like effect that can snap into the window (always on the right or left etc.) you can still have key areas of the page that you control and are read-only or streamlined for editing, while respecting the full control an author has on the page itself. If you would like any help here, don’t hesitate to give us a shout at [email protected] as it is much easier to show you portfolio examples or work with you on a design that fits your needs more clearly. • Modern pages do not support all publishing and approval processes today. Modern pages have the same versioning process (and previous edits can be restored), they support a save as draft option, the ability to discard changes, and the back end library settings support advanced configuration here. What is not connected (yet) is a UI for modern pages that natively support’s approval flows before publishing. o This is being addressed before the end of 2018. ▪ You will be able to establish a new and custom Microsoft Flow flows for approval. Simply name your flow, add the person who will approve your page, save it as a draft, submit for approval. Once approved, the page status gets updated to “published” and is visible to your intended readers. Approvals for news posts work out of the box thanks to integration with Microsoft Flow. Of which, you, too, can further customize your workflow to meet the needs of your specific approval process.
• Adding columns or properties to pages today is supported only through REST API, JavaScript, or PowerShell. o Today modern pages do not allow you to edit the content type associated with them. Adding columns in the site pages library works but does not allow you to update the modern page without code or without inheriting from the site pages content type that is used. o This is being addressed before the end of 2018. ▪ This will enable you to better organize your pages in libraries, and influence how they are viewed based on specific criteria (metadata) that
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you apply to the page itself. You choose what region or role, what page type or page status – and then present views that make it possible for people to see, or not see, the page based on how they meet that criteria.
▪ According to the public roadmap this will be released shortly (roadmap item 27251). Allow customers to add custom metadata to modern SharePoint pages and news articles. This gives you the ability to create prescriptive information architecture and solutions that use the pages/news' metadata for dynamic grouping and organization. • Today modern pages do not allow you to define some to be full width (to hide the left navigation area). It is a decision made at the site level instead. o There is often some confusion around full-width layouts. Modern sites will have a left navigation area if they are provisioned with the Team Site template where Communication Sites will have a full-width layout. o In classic sites, we could have a variety of page layouts and other methods to give more control over when and how things like the ‘local’ left navigation would display.
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Keep in mind that Microsoft is well aware of the challenges and gaps with modern pages and will work hard to earn the right to shift organizations over to modern experiences from classic experiences, whether that be libraries, lists, pages or sites. If you want to know more about when and how they plan on working against these challenges speak to a trusted advisor who works closely with the product team or tune into their announcements and sessions in May and September.
Should We Still Build Things In Classic Sites/Pages? In the modern page challenges section, we highlighted why you might use classic pages still. There are still reasons to use the classic model of MasterPages and Page Layouts when you need to control or customize the experience further and are not comfortable with the more limited (but still effective) UX approaches in modern (top, bottom, and overlay).
What’s important is that if you still build page layouts and classic experiences ensure you design your articles, news, and content experience to have consistency with this new modern page pattern. As an example, using a hero image at the top of each of your classic page layout’s for news or article page designs and leveraging a column/sectional layout to improve responsive fluidity and flow are both great ideas to connect more with modern approaches.
There may be some controls that are not available in modern but are available in classic that would improve the user experience. This can be another reason to use classic pages.
Additionally, it is still very common to create custom web parts that will work in both modern and classic experiences. This can be important for creating your display templates/styles for roll-up scenarios, adding personalization or additional logic that the out of the box news or existing web parts don’t support, or even building streamlined experiences for Intranet based solutions like classifieds, employee milestones and more.
We regularly build controls for customers that improve the Intranet experience, integrate other systems, or better meet the needs of Intranet authors and each time we always test and ensure it renders and works appropriately in classic. For some organizations, there are many sites that may take months or years to transition to modern based on how many Intranets they have, or the scale of their Intranet today. Keep in mind if you have a hybrid environment that you must determine if that will be part of the design initially (as this can determine how the controls are built).
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4.11. Mobility & Intranet Apps Microsoft has had mobile views and ways to interact with SharePoint on mobile devices for years. However, in Office 365 the mobile experience is even better.
4.11.1. The SharePoint Mobile App There is a SharePoint mobile app that enables your users to stay connected to important content, sites, portals and people from your intranet while they are on the go.
Every organization should embrace and encourage the usage of this app, and integrate their mobile investments in a complimentary way (if your organization is up for building app experiences).
This app is infused with intelligence from the Office Graph to help users navigate more quickly to content and people that matter to them the most.
• The news tab shows you personalized news from your sites. • The Sites tab takes users to their Sites, Recent sites, and Followed sites, where they can keep up with site activity, navigate using quick launch or see recent files. • The Links tab takes users to sites and portals programmed for everyone in the company. • The People tab gives users access to the people they work with and visibility into what they are working on. • Search is available throughout with clean results filtered by sites, files, and people.
Microsoft is delivering on the promise of a true enterprise content services app experience in your pocket. An app experience that isn’t just about the Intranet but integrated with the broader digital workplace your company is embracing.
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4.12. Personalization There are many personalization spaces in SharePoint and Office 365, but these often require you to navigate to them. Here are a few: My Recent Documents, My Pinned Documents, Documents Shared With Me, Sites I Follow, Recommended Files, etc. Many show up in the “Office home” experience or within a user’s OneDrive.
Today there are very few ways to surface some of those personalized experiences in SharePoint or Microsoft teams. SharePoint modern sites have a control called “Highlighted content” which you can filter to the current user. In this way, it can show targeted content like the most recent documents (or any items) that were modified by that user within all sites associated with a hub site, or a particular site.
The Notification Pane, indicated by a bell, to notify users of important information regardless of what app you’re currently working in. Currently, you can use it to get notifications on new emails, task deadlines, group likes, upcoming calendar events, and new apps.
Users can also adjust the settings for this notification pane via their Office 365 settings.
In addition to this notification pane, the app launcher pane also rolls up a user’s most recent documents highlighting the top few documents from your recent documents feed in Office home or OneDrive for Business. 4.13. Social Integration Every modern and engaging Intranet needs to embrace social collaboration and social networking. How your organization integrates social into your Intranet experience on Office 365 is up to your organization.
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We have many recommendations here as we have been a long-standing social collaboration and networking services partner.
The absolute most important thing is to embrace a social platform. If you are embracing Office 365, you may already be aware that Office 365 includes an industry-leading enterprise social platform called Yammer.
When you integrate this into your Intranet experience it doesn’t just mean embedding Yammer into key pages; it means planning carefully for the right patterns and taking full advantage of the platforms capabilities. As one example consider using the following or a specific topic/hashtag when embedding Yammer on the Intranet homepage. By using a topic/hashtag like #YourIntranetName it allows users to self-curate the key posts they want to display on the site. Do not under any circumstance just slap/embed the all company feed on the Intranet homepage. The all company feed is often misused and doesn’t contain good content that should be prioritized on a typical Intranet homepage.
As another example in the image shown here, you can see a Yammer feed embedded within an Intranet page. This feed has a poll which is something Yammer natively supports. This is the kind of advanced social interaction that Yammer supports beyond a flat news feed.
Caution On Comments
Unfortunately, modern sites and social integration does suffer from one key investment you will have to navigate. Today the comments engine for modern news and pages is a simplistic experience built into the page itself. This can be turned off, and you can add a Yammer web part targeted to a feed that represents the associated page/topic, but this requires manual effort or customization as the out of the box experience does not connect the social comments or likes on news/pages with Yammer today.
We still recommend encouraging and using yammer where possible for comments over comments in a page as these comments are unlocked, made more visible/available across the
Page 76 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know organization, discussions are easier to share and involve others, and we find that it increases overall visibility and engagement. Keep in mind that many organizations also still build their own modern news roll-up control (to combine classic and modern news, or to tailor the layout/author experience). If you build your own, you can also have web part surface things like Yammer comment counts in the experience itself to further encourage engagement even in the previously published articles/pages. 4.14. Development & Debugging Every Intranet we have ever helped customers with has had some custom development (even if that was just scripts to help configure or set things up). So be sure to understand the best practices and patterns for developing in Office 365.
Development patterns in Office 365 use a few approaches:
• Client-side web parts • SharePoint Framework Extensions o Application Customizers ▪ Adds scripts to the page, and accesses well-known HTML element placeholders and extends them with custom renderings. o Field Customizers. ▪ Provides modified views to data for fields within a list. o Command Sets. ▪ Extends the SharePoint command surfaces to add new actions, and provides client-side code that you can use to implement behaviors. • The SharePoint app model (Provider & SharePoint Hosted) • Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and REST APIs • Office 365 APIs • CSOM API via PowerShell or C# • TypeScript • WebPacks • Webhooks
The development follows a better model in Office 365. It’s more scalable, sustainable, and easier to support.
Debugging and troubleshooting issues when developing customizations for Office 365 may be done with developing capabilities into what is delivered as well as using what Office 365 provides.
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We could easily create an entire whitepaper on development methods, so hopefully, this will help as a starting point for many organizations looking to improve upon what Office 365 provides out of the box. 4.15. Migrating To Office 365 There are three approaches we often see taken with Intranets.
1. The first approach is to take the Intranet that has already been built on a similar platform like SharePoint Server and migrate it to SharePoint Online and Office 365 for some of the benefits mentioned throughout this whitepaper. In this model, the site structure, site assets, as well as the content of the Intranet may need to be migrated. 2. The second approach is to migrate a considerable amount of content from source systems to the new Office 365 Intranet. In this model, the sites and structure in SharePoint Online must be prepared, and then the content (documents, files, and key articles/page content) will be migrated into the new structure. 3. The last approach is one where the Intranet is a new experience, and most articles and page content is re-written for the new environment. The only thing that needs to be migrated in this scenario is some source content where the modified, created dates, and other key metadata or permissions are meant to be retained from the source system(s).
4.15.1. Migrating From Classic To Modern The model out of the box for ‘migrating’ or transforming modern sites when possible should be to recreate the site using a modern site template (such as the communications or team site template) and then migrating the content from the classic site to the modern site. You will then rebuild pages using the modern site pages and modern web parts.
Focusing on the most active sites first makes a lot of sense as these sites benefit most from modern features like recent documents, or activity rollups within the site. You can determine what sites are most actively used based on a few reports. The easiest is to look at this at a site
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admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/AdminHome.aspx#/siteManagement
Technically you can enable modern pages (and those controls) in a classic site. You do this by enabling the modern “site pages” feature on the targeted site. Then create a new modern page in the “site pages” library. While this is possible where you can try to recreate the site using the new template to ensure you get continued updated/features in case there are dependencies in the future on capabilities associated to a group connection such as the Planner web part working/being available for that site page you created.
Today modern list and library experiences are quite robust, and there are only a few reasons remaining to use classic experiences (such as external columns, etc.). So be sure to make your default the new modern list and library experience across the tenant, and set out of the box lists and libraries (where appropriate) to modern whenever possible as the default experience for users in each site.
One of the biggest challenges in migrating to modern sites is tackling where sub sites (not site collections) are used, since modern SharePoint works on a site collection basis (in the root), and Microsoft is moving toward a flat, one-site-per-collection structure. This may require more
Page 79 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know thought on how to optimize the information architecture and better connect sites across a collection (or hub).
4.15.2. Migrating Articles & Page Content For migrating articles and page content, some organizations re-write it or do a more manually intensive copy/paste model. The reason for this is that it ensures that the content is read and provides an opportunity for minor formatting changes or improvements.
If you want to automate the migration, there are options available to you. However, most require customization or the use of a 3rd party product depending on where you are migrating from.
While many organizations may look for the simpler path for a migration from SharePoint server to SharePoint online be sure to map and migrate as much as possible to the modern site template based sites. Otherwise, in future months or years, you will to re-migrate again from classic to modern.
Keep in mind that page content doesn’t migrate from classic to modern and will require rebuilding. So if possible try and use patterns/provisioned setups of modern SharePoint sites that provide the key components/web parts and sections most sites will leverage. By doing this only minor re-organization or optimization of pages is needed which can be scaled and led by business units/leads.
4.15.3. Migrating Documents & Files The good news here is that the migration pattern of an Intranet migration of documents and files is the same pattern we use for migrating from any other store or collection to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, or Office 365 Groups. We need to determine if a tool is needed and then plan out the migration.
Do we need a 3rd party tool to support migration?
First off this is the absolute easiest decision in the migration process. Unless you have very little content, and you don’t care about metadata (like originating author, or created date, etc.), then you will use a migration tool at some point. The only ways to natively migrate at this point are via mapped network drives or the explorer interface. You may offset the migration tool costs if you are migrating from previous versions of SharePoint, or you might offset costs on migrating content from another source system by supplementing with lower cost methods, but you
Page 80 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know always use a tool to help in the migration process (trust us it’s worth it). If you are in an
extremely unlucky scenario where there is no product offering that supports migration from your source system – then you will need to build migration tooling yourself or with the support of a partner.
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5. INTRANET METRICS & ANALYTICS This section contains useful material around Intranet metrics and analytics. 5.1. Key Intranet Questions What follows are questions that should regularly be asked and suggested ways in which the answers could be measured.
5.1.1. Which features of the intranet are most important? Knowing which pages are most used can help to prioritize which pages should be improved or developed. You can also see which business units are the biggest intranet users and which business unit’s content is used the most.
Measure this by looking at… Visits Reports, Unique Users Reports, Page Views & Item View Reports & Time On-Page/Site
5.1.2. Which features are not being used? If certain pages have low usage numbers, it is an indication that either the page is not very popular, and therefore should be a lower priority to develop, or that people are just not aware of its existence (which might be a communications or "promotion" problem).
Measure this by looking at… Page Views & Item View Reports & Document Downloads
5.1.3. Is the site navigation effective? A high number of hits on a page that is not easily accessible from the main page indicate that the popular page should be moved up in the hierarchy.
Search results for no hits present opportunities to both promote content and search suggestions.
Measure this by looking at… Page Views & Item View Reports
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5.1.4. Which Intranet pages/sites should be archived or deleted? Sites and pages that have not been accessed in the past 12 months might be candidates for archival or deletion if the content is no longer useful. By reducing these unused sites, it can improve navigation, search, and improve the perception of content being more current/fresh.
Measure this by looking at… Visits Reports, Page Views & Item View Reports
5.1.5. What are the peak/low usage times? Monitoring usage trends may help identify patterns or problems and potentially can alert the owners and administrators of an Intranet or site of potential user or performance issues. Ideally, before they become a problem. In Office 365 this becomes less relevant or important because performance optimization is typically handled by the platform dynamically based on usage.
Measure this by looking at… Visits Reports
5.1.6. How is usage trending? It is important to understand how usage is trending over time. Consider comparing against previous year results if you have multi-year detailed trend analysis available.
Measure this by looking at… Visits Reports, Unique Users Reports, Page Views & Item View Reports & Time On-Page/Site 5.2. Key Intranet Metrics Analytics have the ability to give intranet stakeholders amazing insights into their internal activity, but often it’s not obvious what metrics are most critical. The wealth of intranet information that analytics solutions provide can be overwhelming. There are a handful of metrics you can begin using immediately to analyze, engage, and enhance your intranet portal. Here are the basic ones you should be reviewing, sharing and acting upon.
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5.2.1. Unique Users Reports The total number of individual users who visit a site during a specific period, not counting repeat visits by the same individual.
How is this used? Unique user data shows if your content is successfully driving users to the intended sites. An upward trend over time is indicative of a useful intranet to users. If your unique user count is stagnant, you may need to reassess your intranet strategy or perhaps offer to train to users with lower adoption rates.
5.2.2. Visits Reports This shows the number of times your visitors have been to your site (unique sessions initiated by all your visitors).
How is this used? Gaining access to the number of times a user accesses a site is an indication of how much traffic a specific site is attaining.
5.2.3. Page Views & Item View Reports Displays the number of page views for a specific intranet site or item.
How is this used? Utilize Page Views reports to understand which pages in the portal are attracting users, and what content is most popular. If you’re trying to drive users to a specific site/page, and you see they’re not accessing it, a new strategy should be implemented.
5.2.4. Unused Content Reports Displays the content that has not been viewed within a specific period (make sure your reporting tool can provide data on content with 0 page views).
How is this used? Once you understand which content is not being used, you can take action! If the content is not needed delete or archive it. If it's needed and users don't know how to access it, make sure you have linked to this content from your home page or other main pages.
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5.2.5. Recently Viewed Reports This report lets you see the recently viewed SharePoint pages or documents.
How is this used? Recently Viewed Reports are useful for understanding what areas of the portal are most relevant to users in the most recent period. If you see that many people are visiting a specific document, create a button for it on the homepage to assist your users in their portal experience.
5.2.6. Search Reports The top search phrases entered within the portal.
How is this used? Maximizing the effectiveness of your search engine is critical for enhancing the overall performance of your intranet. This report shows you exactly what users are searching for within the portal. Understanding the most common search terms can help you determine what content people are usually looking for and perhaps can’t find in an easy way. Leverage these insights to create navigation paths and easy ways for users to access popular content. Linking popular content from the intranet home page can save your users time.
5.2.7. Failed Search Reports The number of times a term was searched and retrieved 0 results.
How is this used? The failed searches report uncovers search terms that retrieve no results or so many that people are wasting lots of time browsing through hundreds of results. Once you can identify what searches are retrieving 0 results, you can optimize the search for these phrases. You may notice that searches return far too many results which may lead to selecting an option after scrolling through several pages. For these situations, you can modify the results to make sure the popular or key ones appear on the first page of search results and help save user’s time. 5.3. Intranet Reporting In Office 365 There are a considerable number of ways to report on data within Office 365. Since almost all actions within Office 365 are audited and tracked you can export the data for rich reporting,
Page 85 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know use third-party tools or customize reports based on the APIs available, or use the OOTB reporting options available.
It’s important to understand that the reporting capabilities in Office 365 continue to undergo improvements. One of our favorite features coming is the display of site statistics and the continued exposure of document popularity in the new site contents page.
5.3.1. Office 365 Reports This section outlines capabilities that exist in Office 365 for reporting and sharing data about usage.
Within the Protection Center site, you can view user activity reports such as sign-ins for SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Azure Active Directory.
Some potential reports that are actionable when sharing the impact and value of Office 365 are the Auditing Reports contained within the Protection Center.
Office 365 Audit Log Report You can search the Office 365 audit log for user and admin activity in your Office 365 organization. The report contains entries user and admin activity in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Azure Active Directory, which is the directory service for Office 365.
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Need to find if a user viewed a specific document or purged an item from their mailbox? If so, you can use the Office 365 Protection Center to search the unified audit log to view user and administrator activity in your Office 365 organization. Why a unified audit log? Because you can search for the following types of user and admin activity in Office 365:
• User activity in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business • User activity in Exchange Online (Exchange mailbox audit logging) • Admin activity in SharePoint Online • Admin activity in Azure Active Directory (the directory service for Office 365) • Admin activity in Exchange Online (Exchange admin audit logging)
You can search the Office 365 audit log for activities that were performed within the last 90 days.
File And Folder Activities The following table describes the file and folder activities in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
Activity Description
Accessed file User or system account accesses a file. When a user or the system performs an operation on a file, the file has to be located and accessed. This event indicates that retrieval action. Note that many file and folder related events will have one or more corresponding Accessed file entries.
Checked in file User checks in a document that they checked out from a document library.
Checked out file User checks out a document located in a document library. Users can check out and make changes to documents that have been shared with them.
Copied file User copies a document from a site. The copied file can be saved to another folder on the site.
Deleted file User deletes a document from a site.
Discarded file User discards (or undos) a checked out file. That means any changes they checkout made to the file when it was checked out are discarded, and not saved to the version of the document in the document library.
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Downloaded file User downloads a document from a site.
Modified file User or system account modifies the content or the properties of a document located on a site.
Moved file User moves a document from its current location on a site to a new location.
Renamed file User renames a document on a site.
Restored file User restores a document from the recycle bin of a site.
Uploaded file User uploads a document to a folder on a site.
Viewed file User views a document on a site. System accounts can also generate Viewed file events.
Sharing Activities The following table describes the user sharing activities in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
Activity Description
Created User creates a link to a shared file in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. sharing link This link can be sent to other people to give them access to the file. A user can create two types of links: a link that allows a user to view and edit the shared file, or a link that allows the user to just view the file.
Disabled User disables (permanently) a link that was created to share a file. sharing link
Shared file User shares a file or folder located in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business or folder with another user inside their organization.
Unshared User unshares a file or folder that was previously shared with other users. This file or folder event is logged when a user stops sharing a file with other users.
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Invitation And Access Request Activities The following table describes the activities when users share content by sending or requesting access invitations in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
Activity Description
Accepted The recipient of an invitation to view or edit a shared file (or folder) has invitation accessed the shared file by clicking the link in the invitation.
Access If a site administrator or owner doesn't accept or reject a request by a user request to access a site or document, the request will expire after 7 days. expired
Approved The site administrator or owner of a site or document approves a user access request to access the site or document. request
Created User requests access to a site or document that they don't have permission access to access. request
Created User sends an invitation to another person (inside or outside their invitation organization) to view or edit a shared file or folder on a site. The details of the event entry identifies the name of the file that was shared, the user the invitation was sent to, and the type of the sharing permission selected by the person who sent the invitation.
Declined The site administrator or owner of a site or document declines a user request access to access the site or document. request
Expired An invitation sent to an external user expires. By default, an invitation sent to invitation a user outside your organization expires after 7 days if the invitation isn't accepted.
Re-sent The user who created and sent an invitation to another person to view or invitation edit a shared file (or folder) on a site resends the invitation.
Withdrew The site administrator or owner of a site or document withdraws an invitation invitation that was sent to a user outside your organization. An invitation can be withdrawn only before it's accepted.
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Synchronization activities The following table lists file synchronization activities in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
Activity Description
Allowed computer User successfully establishes a sync relationship with a site. The sync to sync files relationship is successful because the user's computer is a member of a domain that's been added to the list of domains (called the safe recipients list) that can access document libraries in your organization. For more information about this feature, see Use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to enable OneDrive sync for domains that are on the safe recipients list.
Blocked computer User tries to establish a sync relationship with a site from a computer from syncing files that isn't a member of your organization's domain or is a member of a domain that hasn't been added to the list of domains (called the safe recipients list) that can access document libraries in your organization. The sync relationship is not allowed, and the user's computer is blocked from syncing, downloading, or uploading files on a document library. For information about this feature, see Use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to enable OneDrive sync for domains that are on the safe recipients list.
Downloaded file User successfully downloads any changes to files from a document changes to library. This activity indicates that any changes that were made to files computer in the document library were downloaded to the user's computer. Only changes were downloaded because the document library was previously downloaded by the user (as indicated by the Downloaded files to computer activity).
Downloaded files User establishes a sync relationship and successfully downloads files to computer for the first time to their computer from a document library.
Uploaded file User successfully uploads changes to files on a document library. This changes to event indicates that any changes made to the local version of a file document library from a document library are successfully uploaded to the document library. Only changes are unloaded because those files were previously
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uploaded by the user (as indicated by the Uploaded files to document library activity).
Uploaded files to User establishes a sync relationship and successfully uploads files for document library the first time from their computer to a document library.
Office 365 Adoption Pack Use the Office 365 Adoption content pack within Power BI to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365 to communicate and collaborate. It’s easy to setup and it’s free!
You can visualize and analyze Office 365 usage data, create custom reports and share the insights within your organization and gain insights into how specific regions or departments are utilizing Office 365.
The content pack gives you access to a pre-built dashboard that provides a cross-product view of the last 12 months and contains some sections. Each section provides you with specific usage insights. By clicking on the top level metrics, you can access more detailed reports. User-specific information is available for the last month.
The dashboard contains some reports, including:
• Adoption — offers an all-up summary of adoption trends. Use the reports in this section to learn how your users have adopted Office 365as well as how usage of the individual services has changed month-over-month. You can see how many licenses are assigned, how many of those are in active use by people in your organization, how many users are returning users and how many are using the product for the first time. • Storage use report — Use this report to track cloud storage for mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint sites. You can use this to make sure people in your organization stay within limits or to decide if you need to purchase more storage resources.
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• To view Exchange Online storage information, click on the report. • Communication report — You can see at a glance whether people in your organization prefer to stay in touch by using Yammer, email, or Skype calls. You can observe if there are shifts in patterns of use of communication tools amongst your employees • Collaboration report — See how people in your organization use OneDrive and SharePoint to store documents and collaborate with each other, and how these trends evolve month over month. You can also see how many people share documents internally or externally and how many SharePoint sites or OneDrives accounts are actively being used. • Activation report — Track Office 365 ProPlus, Project and Visio activations in your organization. Each person with an Office license can install products on up to five devices. Use reports in this section to see the device types on which people have installed Office apps. • Access from anywhere report — Track which clients and devices people use to connect to email, Skype for Business, or Yammer. • The content pack combines your user's usage date with the information of your users in Active Directory. Thus, in many reports, you can pivot by the following Active Directory attributes: location, department, and organization.
5.3.2. SharePoint Metrics & Analytics This section contains useful material around SharePoint metrics and analytics.
SharePoint has quite a few analytics that can be leveraged for planning, improving, and measuring how it is being used.
Breakdown Of SharePoint Metrics What follows are key metrics used in SharePoint and where applicable some basic guidance around those metrics.
SharePoint Admin Center Reporting The SharePoint admin center provides a few useful reports. Be sure also to check the Office 365 reports previously mentioned as there are many reports for common scenarios that have already been built for your usage/reference.
Site Management
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Borrowing from the modern List experience in SharePoint Online, the new Site Management page promotes ease of use and flexibility - a one-stop shop for viewing and managing some of the most important aspects of SharePoint Online sites. You can now sort, filter, and discover information about your sites and their activity.
Each site can show you insights about the site such as:
• The number of page views in the last 30 days • The number of files viewed or edited in the last 30 days • The date of the last activity on the site • The number of files • The amount of storage used • The properties of the site (template, O365 group or not, primary admin/admins, and the sharing status with external users).
Note: All these insights are available as columns in the site management list.
You can even contact site owners by selecting sites (based on filters you define) and then selecting email admins which will email a message to the primary admins for each site. Page 93 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
Viewing SharePoint Online Site Usage Data As a SharePoint Online site owner, you can view information that shows you how users are interacting with your site. For example, you can see the number of people who have visited the site, how many times people have visited the site, and a list of files that have received the most views.
To view usage data for your site, click Site contents in the left-hand menu and then click Site usage in the top navigation bar.
Lifetime stats are shown for sites created after February 2018. Sites created before this date will show stats from February 2018 forward. At this time, views are counted for internal, authenticated users only.
What's on the site usage page:
• Unique viewers o Shows the total number of unique viewers to your site for the last 7 days, last 30 days, and last 90 days. • Site visits o Shows the number of visits to the site over the last 7 days, last 30 days, and last 90 days. • Trending o Lists the files most viewed by visitors to your site over the past 2 weeks. • Shared externally
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o List of files you have access to that have been shared with users outside your organization through a sharing link that requires them to log in before they can view the file. Files shared with anonymous users or files available to users with guest permissions are not included.
SharePoint Classic Sites Usage & Search Reporting SharePoint 2013 and Classic SharePoint Online generate usage reports through Excel queries. Each report shows historical data on hits and unique users. It’s possible to view this data at a site collection and site scope. It is also possible to view this data for a specific document or page.
Accessing this data for the site collection and site is done through the site settings page.
For a specific page, you can access the popularity trends through the ribbon, under the “Share & Track group:
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Finally, it is possible to view reports via the SharePoint Admin Center (for SharePoint Online customers):
1. Sign into the Office 365 Admin Center as a search administrator. 2. Choose Admin > SharePoint. You’re now in the SharePoint admin center. 3. Choose search. 4. Choose View Usage Reports. 5. Click a link on the page to retrieve a report. The report opens in an Excel spreadsheet or in another program that you can find online.
SharePoint Online Classic Reporting Options Usage analytics alone do not directly measure business value, but they can be especially useful in guiding where users are getting value and helping spot content problems, risks, or areas for improvement.
The following are the available reports for SharePoint.
• Usage: This report shows historical usage information about the site collection, such as the number of views and unique users. Use this report to identify usage trends and to determine times of high and low activity. o Number Of Unique Users: This metric provides a proxy for adoption, which is a loose proxy for value. Initially, you will want to see the number of unique users go up each month after a launch. If you know the target audience size, you can compare this number with the total number of employees who should use the site to get an approximation of your success in visitor and participant diversity (typically expressed as a percentage of the total target).
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o Most Viewed Pages/Sites: This metric provides a proxy or indication for what content is most valuable. Sites/pages not being used help identify content that might either need to be promoted or deleted. • Number of Queries: This report shows the number of search queries performed. Use this report to identify search query volume trends and to determine times of high and low search activity. • Top Queries by Day: This report shows the most popular search queries. Use this report to understand what types of information visitors are seeking. This often identified “trending” content. Searches with good results suggest value for users and indicate adoption. Successful searches indicate that the portal is delivering content users need. These queries can also provide insights about what content should be promoted to the home page or a more visible location. • Top Queries by Month: This report shows the most popular search queries. Use this report to understand what types of information visitors are seeking. This often identified “trending” content. Searches with good results suggest value for users and indicate adoption. Successful searches indicate that the portal is delivering content users need. These queries can also provide insights about what content should be promoted to the home page or a more visible location. • Abandoned Queries by Day: This report shows popular search queries that received low click-through. Use this report to identify search queries that might create user dissatisfaction and to improve the discoverability of content. Then, consider using query rules to improve the query's results. This can also identify emerging business terms or concepts. • Abandoned Queries by Month: This report shows popular search queries that received low click-through. Use this report to identify search queries that might create user dissatisfaction and to improve the discoverability of content. Then, consider using query rules to improve the query's results. This can also identify emerging business terms or concepts. • No Result Queries by Day: This report shows popular search queries that returned no results. Use this report to identify search queries that might create user dissatisfaction and to improve the discoverability of content. Then, consider using query rules to improve the query's results. This can also identify emerging business terms or concepts. • No Result Queries by Month: This report shows popular search queries that returned no results. Use this report to identify search queries that might create user dissatisfaction and to improve the discoverability of content. Then, consider using query rules to improve the query's results. This can also identify emerging business terms or concepts.
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• Query Rule Usage by Day: This report shows how often query rules trigger, how many dictionary terms they use, and how often users click their promoted results. Use this report to see how useful your query rules and promoted results are to users. • Query Rule Usage by Month: This report shows how often query rules trigger, how many dictionary terms they use, and how often users click their promoted results. Use this report to see how useful your query rules and promoted results are to users. Most Popular Items To identify usage trends and find out at what times activity is high or low, you can view Popularity Trends reports for a site or a site collection. The reports show historical usage information, such as number of views (hits) and unique users per day or month. Popularity Trends for a page or an item in a library show how many views the page or item has had recently.
You can also view the Most Popular Items in a library. You’ll see which items have the most views, either recently or ever (from the first time the item became available.)
To access this functionality within a document library, click the “Most Popular Items” button in the ribbon:
Once you click this button, you’ll get search results for the document library which you can view by:
• Most Viewed: Which displays the results sorted by the number of times they have been viewed. This can be a proxy for helping identify the most valuable content. Page 98 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
• Most Viewed By Unique Users: This adjusts the sort order count to only count a user view once. • Most Recommendation Clicks (Based on Usage Patterns): This counts recommendations clicked (when a search returns a result) instead of just counting the views of content.
If you are going the custom solution route… Though it is rare (not everyone needs it), we do sometimes recommend investing in customized analytics solutions for your SharePoint Online Intranet. In particular, if the page and collaboration level analytics are not actionable enough out of the box or with advanced configuration/management.
Analytics should be built into custom solutions implemented in your environment (by the development team involved). However, the amount of effort required to develop an effective analytics solution for SharePoint Online is too prohibitive, especially considering the low-priced alternatives and continued investment coming from Microsoft in this space. As a result, unless it’s adding analytics to a custom global navigation we created with a customer, we don’t build our own analytics solutions and instead highly encourage the use of third parties.
If you are going the 3rd party route… There are some great reasons you might invest in 3rd party analytics and reporting. It often provides a more actionable and ready to go experience, it’s cheaper than building it yourself, and this is an area where there is incredible industry innovation.
IntLock CardioLog Analytics is designed for SharePoint (versions 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2003) and SharePoint Online. It enables to improve the usability of your intranet, drive portal collaboration, boost your ROI and enhance the overall productivity of your business. Features are:
• Built for SharePoint: CardioLog Analytics is designed specifically for use with Microsoft SharePoint sites - including intranet portals, extranet, and websites. • On-premises and on-demand solution: Can be used for on-premise and for SharePoint Online taking advantage of cloud-based resources. • Custom dashboards: User-friendly dashboards display summaries of reports in the form of widgets on a single page, allowing user to track various metrics at once
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• Content drill down: Drill deep into a specific section or sub-section of a site, even down to the level of single pages and documents, for a richly detailed analysis. • Integration with Active Directory and SharePoint user profiles: CardioLog Analytics automatically imports information on the employees and partners who use intranet portal from the data stored in Active Directory and SharePoint user profiles. This enables you to filter easily and control the scope of your reports and to create visitor segments that can be used to deliver personalized content.
Further Reading:
• http://www.intlock.com/intlocksite/productsandservices/cardiolog/cardiolog.asp • http://www.intlock.com/intlocksite/productsandservices/cardiolog/cardiolog-vs- sharepoint-reports.asp
Pricing: Free trial offering available to all enterprise organizations.
For more information, please check out their website, email [email protected], or try the free trial product available on their website.
DocAve Report Center DocAve Report Center for Microsoft SharePoint presents administrators, business stakeholders, and content owners a comprehensive understanding of their SharePoint platform or site's usage, topology, performance, and storage trends while generating customizable reports and alerts. These are the tools administrators need to obtain the knowledge vital for delivering optimal platform performance and successful strategic planning.
DocAve Report Center simplifies administrative and management procedures to enables more proactive and intelligent decisions by:
• Reporting on SharePoint sites, users, storage, and activity in real-time or on a scheduled basis • Producing actionable reports on SharePoint users, security, and content • Enabling administrators to configure customizable, proactive alerts to be notified immediately if activity, storage, or network usage thresholds are met • Monitoring access to, and usage of, SharePoint and its content, delivering vital compliance intelligence based on enterprise governance policies
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Further Reading:
• http://www.avepoint.com/sharepoint-reporting-docave/
5.3.3. Yammer Metrics & Analytics This section contains useful material around Yammer metrics and analytics.
Yammer Analytics Recommendations Over 2017, Microsoft has made significant progress on helping Office 365 admins gain insights on how people are using Yammer in their organizations through the Office 365 Usage Reporting Dashboard, Office 365 Adoption content pack and Microsoft Graph reporting APIs. These reporting capabilities provide and extensive view into Yammer usage and adoption at the user, device and group levels.
Group insights in Yammer help group admins and members by providing engagement metrics right within Yammer so that community managers and members can get a better understanding of their groups' engagement and activity. This, in turn, will help better inform efforts to improve, grow or execute campaigns in groups.
Yammer groups are open by default, allowing the knowledge and information created in them to benefit people regardless of their membership status in the group. Passive visitors may gain
Page 101 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know value from group conversations and apply the information elsewhere in their daily work. In fact, during early research, we discovered that in addition to understanding group member activity, community managers find it beneficial to understand the activity of visitors who are not members of the group. This is why group insights break down activity for both group members and non-members.
With group insights, you get an overview of activity for the last 7 days, 28 days and 12 months. This will help you:
• Know how many members and non-members are active in the group • Observe predominant activity - posting, reading or liking messages - of group members and non-members • Get a glimpse of how key metrics - for example, number of active people or the number of posted messages - have changed since the previous period
Group insights show you how posting, reading, and liking activities are trending over time. These visualized trends illustrate the contributions of group members and non-members to activity in the group.
You can track engagement with content from campaigns or initiatives hosted in Yammer. Identify spikes in activity over the course of the year, month or week so that you can report back to leaders and optimize efforts. All the data shown in group insights are available for download on a per-day basis for the last 24 months, which is particularly useful if you want to plot your trends over a custom timeframe.
If going the custom solution route… Yammer has high-level metrics, the ability to export data, and APIs that provide you with all the reporting you could need. To effectively use this, many administrators may want to look at taking the standard data export of Yammer and add additional detail/reporting. Back in the day approaches were used like this one from Richard diZerega who has written a sample export utility that can be hosted in Azure to export and provide additional details in a format more readily supported by Power BI and Excel. He also created a sample Yammer Power BI workbook that should help your IT team get started.
Read about how to get advanced Yammer Analytics data with Power BI from Richard
Download the pre-built YammerPowerBI.xlsx workbook
Download the code for the Yammer Export Processor as a Visual Studio solution Page 102 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
If interested, we can work with your IT teams to implement a solution like this.
However, it may be difficult to implement this solution as it requires advanced development techniques and the code will need to change as Yammer APIs undergo continued updates.
For many customers, it may be better to use 3rd party tools for this reason.
If going the 3rd party route… Microsoft works closely with the following partners to provide additional reporting and insight. Tryane, and tyGraph to fill the reporting void and give Yammer champions the granular metrics they've been so patiently waiting for. Both are available to begin using for free today in the Yammer App Directory. 2toLead is a partner with both organizations as well if you are interested in a deeper discussion on the vendors and their offerings. tyGraph tyGraph's proprietary Measure of Active Engagement (MAE Score) gives network admins a comprehensive understanding of network and group engagement. tyGraph also provides the option to combine your Yammer data with other data sets to provide more meaningful metrics (e.g., compare the engagement of EMEA's leadership team with APAC's). tyGraph is available as a hosted solution or as a private cloud. Lastly, tyGraph gives you the option to create custom reports so admins can design reports that matter most to them.
Pricing:
Any Yammer Verified Admin can use the full version of tyGraph free for 15 days. To learn more, please visit their website, email [email protected], try the freemium product available in the Yammer App Directory today. For a short video, please click here.
Tryane Tryane's analytics solution lets Yammer admins get more insights on their social activity. Unique to Tryane is the ability to easily grant access to community managers who will be able to analyze their groups’ key facts in depth. Using its proprietary algorithms, Tryane allows you to identify your true influencers based on their impact on other members rather than just their number of posts.
With Tryane, you will be able to assess adoption rates across departments, identify social champions, discover trending topics, get extensive group-level KPIs and much more. To help evaluate engagement across roles, Tryane also allows users to import their org models and benchmark users on any key performance indicator (KPI). Page 103 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
Pricing: Tryane provides Verified Admins access to all essentials KPIs. For deeper analytics, users need to upgrade to the premium version.
To get started, check out their website, email [email protected], join the Tryane customer network, try the freemium product available in the Yammer App Directory today.
Smarsh Smarsh enables a unified compliance and e-discovery workflow across all content types within an organization. Many organizations would like to take advantage of the increased cross- department collaboration and employee engagement that Yammer brings, but risk management considerations have loomed as too large of an adoption barrier. Smarsh enables organizations to archive and produce Yammer files and communications in support of e- discovery, compliance, and recordkeeping initiatives.
Through a direct relationship with Microsoft, Yammer content is ingested in its native format. Smarsh preserves and indexes each unique element or related object of a messaging type, rather than flattening or shoehorning non-email messages into the body of an email. By ingesting data intelligently, Smarsh introduces a series of advantages to the search and review process. The Archiving Platform also provides a contextual view – meaning users can view the full context of the conversation including comments and files added subsequently to the original post.
Pricing:
Smarsh offers a free demo that can be requested from their website. To learn more, please visit their website which includes a breakdown of pricing and features in the features and services matrix.
Feedcop (Now Wiretap) Feedcop offers security, compliance, and controls for your Yammer network. Feedcop discovers, manages and protects your enterprise's confidential data through always-on monitoring and policy enforcement for Yammer. Feedcop makes it easy to gain visibility into public or private conversations and files through round-the-clock monitoring which analyzes all Yammer traffic. Create policies that can automatically notify users, delete, flag or hashtag messages and files which match a pattern or keywords. Automatically route conversations to
Page 104 of 115 YOU WILL LOVE THE WAY WE WORK. TOGETHER. Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know internal teams, delete content that is against policy, add hashtags to messages or manage the use of Yammer files. Helps you demonstrate compliance with regulations by removing or flagging Yammer content that is against policy.
Pricing:
Feedcop offers a free demo that can be requested from their website. To learn more, please visit their website which includes a breakdown of pricing and features.
Breakdown Of Yammer Metrics What follows are key metrics used in Yammer and where applicable some basic guidance around those metrics.
Additional Yammer Metrics Available Via Custom or 3rd Party Solutions Due to the still limited nature of Yammer’s Analytics, it may be needed (and is recommended) to utilize 3rd party products or to use the data from an export to get additional insight into your Yammer network.
What can you do beyond what is described in the Yammer Apps above? These are just examples of the many things possible when you go beyond OOTB capabilities provided by Yammer and Microsoft. By extending them with exports and Power BI or 3rd party apps, you can:
• Yammer data can be reviewed over longer periods of time. o This can also include more trending information. ▪ Example: Are the number of messages per user or threads per user increasing or decreasing over the course of months or a year? • Tag mention counts can be represented in a variety of ways. o This can help identify popular #tags that are used within Yammer. o It is a critical metric when supporting campaigns, contests and other activities that use #tagging as a way to document successes, completion, or key activities/requests. • Count of Yammer likes and the ability to correlate this data. o While a weak engagement metric, it can indicate a volume of participation that is indicative of how much interaction might be going on in your Yammer environment. Many lurkers like content but don’t necessarily post a reply. This data is more useful when it can be determined based on a group, topic correlation, or based on the number of likes in total a user gets for their topics.
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• Yammer Group activity details that are invaluable for Group Admins such as: o The number of members of a Group. o The number of posts within a Group. ▪ Yammer posts by location (geographic distribution). ▪ Yammer post response times. • By showing the number of minutes, hours or days, it takes to reply it can help indicate the level of responsiveness for the Yammer network, group or about a monitored tag (like #Help). • Advanced analysis may also be possible helping outline message volume impact on time to respond. o The number of replies within a Group. ▪ Advanced analysis can also show how long replies take based on some correlations. o The number of likes within a Group. o The number of shares within a Group. o The number of attachments within a Group. o Identification of groups that are inactive. • Yammer user details that greatly help understand user growth/investment such as: o Yammer user praise count which can help identify the most praised users within a specific time frame. o Yammer user follower counts to help determine which users are most influential. ▪ Understanding who is following a user can also be useful information. By looking at users who are following and being followed additional insight could be provided such as common topics/subjects that they are liking or common users they praise and follow. o Total likes by username which can indicate how often this user reads or consumes other Yammer content. o Total shares by username which can indicate the amount that a user curates or shares posts/content with other groups or users. o The number of times a user is mentioned in Yammer posts. ▪ This can help identify users who are engaged more or are individuals who could use additional support around Yammer. • Yammer content details such as: o Content growth and contributions count. ▪ Keeping in mind that Yammer is great for “Official” content that will not need to change this can help understand whether additional guidance
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should be provided to encourage users to use collaborative platforms like SharePoint for content that undergoes more changes. o Content’s follower and share count which can be used to help determine what content may be the most influential. • External Networks Activity as OOTB this is not as robust. • Sentiment analysis of posts and content. o Potentially (if sentiment analysis is also used) it can also provide sentiment information based on Yammer posts. This can help share whether sentiment overall is positive, or sentiment is positive based on specific tags/groups. Recommended Yammer User Types Example breakdown of Yammer recommended user reporting:
• Inactive User: Inactive users are important as they are users who may need additional awareness support for Yammer. It is possible to identify a user as inactive if they have performed no new posts, liked, or visited Yammer in the last month. • Lurker: Lurkers may be important users as they visit and consume Yammer content but do not contribute actively to it. A lurker may be identified as a user who has visited Yammer within the last month but who has contributed nothing in the form of Yammer posts, likes, or content. • Active User: These users are important to track and encourage more participation. Active users contribute at least one message or have liked at least one thing in the past month. In some organizations, a further breakdown of Active User types is identified to better measure growth and the social network’s impact. • Very Active Users/Champions: These users are much more active and tend to be regular contributors. They make great champion or influencer targets. These users typically contribute more than ‘Active Users’. The amount or identifier for these users can vary, but as a baseline, they should contribute more than ten times in the last month.
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6. RECOMMENDED NEXT STEPS Many organizations are shifting towards a more connected, engaged and innovative workforce. This is made possible by investing in and enabling your workforce with digital workplace technologies and a modern Intranet experience.
Some businesses have a plan to enable this through various enterprise technology investments and organizational initiatives. However, engaging the workforce can take years and may be seen as a future initiative for some organizations. When so many organizations are firefighting or reactively responding to employee needs it can be difficult to provide employees with the kind of Intranet experience that enables that workforce to be successful.
As an example see the diagram below which might be a high-level representation of an organization's workforce goals for upcoming years.
One of the primary benefits of Office 365 as a proven digital workplace technology is that it can help accelerate and enable (with relatively low cost) the kind of digital experiences that modern users need. Instead of engagement and innovation being future goals for the business we have found that the deployment and adoption of Office 365 and a modern Intranet can shift the above timeline to months or quarters instead of taking entire years to accomplish many of the key technology changes and user behavior transformations needed.
The intranet is at the epicenter of many organizations, as the place where employees can get company news and information, plus search for people and content.
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Together we can make the intranet a more personalized experience, one that is where users need it when users need it. Spanning on-premises and Office 365, the mobile and intelligent intranet brings together the productivity of SharePoint team sites, the broadcast reach of publishing sites and portals, and the mission criticality of your most important business applications. All of this is done while being accessible from your desktop to your mobile phone. Lastly, Office 365 powered Intranets are powered by the Office Graph, so information finds your users, instead of your users having to find information.
Meeting modern workforce needs today is challenging. Keeping up with the demand and the needs of your future workforce is often seen as impossible.
An Intranet that is powered by Office 365, or that is implemented in Office 365 allows you to take advantage of the many related digital workplace enhancements Microsoft continually rolls out.
It’s not just that you have a cloud-powered Intranet. It’s that you have an Intranet that leverages, integrates and uses as much of what Microsoft provides as possible so that your Intranet remains continually up to date and able to take advantage of the continued innovation Microsoft produces.
Not only is it possible to embrace Intranets on Office 365, but with the guidance in this document or a trusted partner you should be able to do it in less time, and with less effort than almost any previously successful Intranet initiative you have undertaken.
The timing couldn’t be better for your organization to begin the shift, or further embrace Office 365.
NOTE: We tried throughout this Whitepaper to not highlight our services, but this is a subject we are passionate about and help hundreds of organizations with (and have won awards for). Please do not hesitate to give us a shout at [email protected] if you are interested in getting some additional advice or assistance from our team of experts. It never hurts to ask.
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7. RESOURCES In the writing of this whitepaper many additional pages were written but were broken out to help reduce the length. There is always more content out there, what follows are some examples and resources that compliment what is written in this whitepaper. 7.1. Our Whitepapers & Related Resources A few of our popular (and comprehensive) whitepapers:
• “When To Use What” In Office 365 – This 70+ page whitepaper is a guide to providing the right kind of enterprise user guidance for Office 365. • External Sharing With Office 365: What You Need To Know – This 30+ page whitepaper outlines all of the key decisions and how to make them when it comes to enabling external sharing in Office 365, and when/where you may want to configure or extend those capabilities. • Measuring The Business Impact & ROI Of Office 365 – This 60+ page whitepaper outlines many key considerations around how to measure the impact Office 365 has on a business, while also outlining the ways Office 365 provides effective reporting capabilities today. • Driving Office 365 Adoption & Usage: What You Need To Know – This 70+ page whitepaper outlines all of the key considerations when planning and improving Office 365 technology and end-user adoption.
Many other great resources and samples can be found and are regularly posted on our resource site at http://Office365Resources.com. 7.2. Recommended Industry Perspectives There are great reports and articles on what’s new in Intranets, what is innovative, and what makes for an award-winning Intranet. Looking for more interesting perspectives on what makes a good Intranet? Be sure to check out the latest trends in popular annual reports like Nielsen Norman report on Intranet design for 2018, Step Two’s report on Intranet Innovations, which is well worth a read. 7.3. Recommended Technology Reading What follows are technical references and resources that we suggest reading more about:
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• Site Provisioning o Use the Remote Provisioning technique to deploy your artifacts and IA to SharePoint (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/pnp-remote- provisioning) o Implement the PnP Partner Pack for a basic Site Provisioning sample (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Partner-Pack) o Provisioning can be done from PowerShell using the PnP-PowerShell Cmdlets (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-PowerShell), from a console application (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/provisioning-console- application-sample) or from a remote website (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/pnp_articles/site-provisioning-sharepoint-add-in) • Customize UI of your Classic SharePoint site o Use modern techniques to change the look & feel of your sites ▪ JavaScript Injection via CustomActions (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/pnp_articles/customize-your-sharepoint-site-ui-by-using-javascript) ▪ Use AlternateCssUrl for CSS (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Branding.InjectR esponsiveCSS) o Use Responsive Design to be available on any platform ▪ You can use the basic Responsive Framework of the PnP Partner Pack (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP- Tools/tree/master/Solutions/SharePoint.UI.Responsive) ▪ Responsive design is supported in the new SharePoint Framework and will incorporate in the SharePoint App (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) • Jobs and Long running processes o Go Asynchronous and manage your long running processes from Azure using components such as : ▪ WebJob ▪ Queues o Create a Remote Timer Job using CSOM in SharePoint (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/create-remote-timer-jobs-in- sharepoint) ▪ Can be used to enforce Governance rules. Here are a few examples: • 2 Administrators for every Site Collection • Enforce global branding • Mange site lifecycle policies o Instead of using the classic Remote Event Receivers that are triggered on list events, please start looking at the new webhooks that leverage a modern approach to this problem (https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev- samples/tree/master/Samples/WebHooks.List)
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• Search o Use search to do content roll-ups to get better (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/pnp_articles/search-customizations-for-sharepoint) ▪ Performance ▪ Maintenance ▪ Supportability by Microsoft o Leverage the search Community Display Templates framework for content roll- ups (https://github.com/SPCSR/DisplayTemplates/tree/master/Search%20Display%20 Templates) • Apps / Add-Ins o To inject your app in the context of a SharePoint page, start leveraging the SharePoint Framework (https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs) o Use Provider-Hosted apps hosted in Azure for anything else that would need more “power” (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/move-o365api- project-from-dev-to-prod) • Manage your user profiles o Keep your Hi-Def profile pictures in sync with CSOM to ensure the best quality possible in your SharePoint User Profile (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/pnp_articles/upload-user-profile-pictures-sample-app-for-sharepoint) o On your way to Office 365, migrate your profiles with he built-in APIs (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/migrate-user-profile-properties- sample-app-for-sharepoint) • Guidance o Don’t build or customize MasterPages. o Don’t build ‘classic only’ web parts whenever possible; it’s not worth the investment to not make it modern as classic will eventually be deprecated once modern pages have earned the right to replace them fully. o Do not use anything related to Sandbox solutions, especially anything with code. This was deprecated and will not work. Use the transformation guidance to move your code from Sandbox to the appropriate Office 365 solution (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/sandbox-solution- transformation-guidance) and ensure to grab all your sandbox solutions from your tenant (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP- Tools/tree/master/Scripts/SharePoint.Sandbox.ListSolutionsFromTenant) o The feature framework is being deprecated. Please use the Remote Provisioning techniques to publish your artifacts and use the PnP provisioning format (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/pnp-provisioning-schema)
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8. ABOUT 2TOLEAD 2toLead has been labeled as a generous Microsoft consulting company by its clients and employees. 2toLead employs trusted, passionate and experienced consultants who work hard to solve the most challenging business and technology problems that face our clients.
The Top 3 Ways 2toLead Helps Customers:
1. INCREASE ADOPTION by going far beyond just deploying things right and ensure your organization is being pro-active in getting the maximum value out of your technology investments. 2. LEVERAGE THE CLOUD to reduce costs, improve business agility and capabilities inside and outside of your organization by leveraging cloud technology like Office 365 and Azure. 3. IMPROVE EXPERIENCES & ENGAGEMENT by understanding where, how, and why users interact with your business while building world-class portals, social networks, and websites that your customers, partners and users love. The reason 2toLead is called a generous consulting company is that when we hire employees, it is extremely important to us that they are both passionate about technology and generous people. The generosity of our employees is a critical reason for why we are so successful. Most of our customers hire us to ‘give advice,’ and we believe the give portion of that statement is just as important as the advice portion.
For more information:
• Visit our website at www.2toLead.com • Follow us on LinkedIn • Like us on Facebook • Follow us on Twitter @2toLead
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9. ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kanwal Khipple
Kanwal, Founder & CEO of 2toLead, is a leading User Experience expert within the SharePoint industry, with experience in building award-winning portals and solutions that take advantage of Microsoft’s Cloud platform (SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure). Kanwal’s drive for success as the Creative and Technical Lead on projects has garnered him as a recipient of the Neilson Norman award for Top 10 Intranets (2014 & 2015).
Kanwal’s passion lies in continuing to push for user experience innovation when redesigning intranets for the majority of the largest brands in the world. He continues to preach on the importance of designing with usability as the primary focus. Kanwal’s thirst to share knowledge has made him a prominent figure within the SharePoint community. Because of his passion and his involvement in many community-driven events including launching successful user groups in Canada and the USA, Kanwal has been recognized as a SharePoint MVP by Microsoft (2009 to 2013) and most recently as an Office 365 MVP (2014-2018). He’s also co-authored a book on Pro SharePoint 2013 and Responsive Web Development http://amzn.to/sp2013rwd
Feel free to reach out to him if you’d like to discuss your project, want to run an idea by him or just want to reach out to a friendly technologist.
http://www.twitter.com/kkhipple +1-416-888-7777
www.LinkedIn.com/in/KanwalKhipple [email protected]
www.Slideshare.net/kkhipple
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RICHARD HARBRIDGE
Richard is the Chief Technology Officer and an owner at 2toLead. Richard works as a trusted advisor with hundreds of organizations, helping them understand their current needs, their future needs, and what actions they should take to grow and achieve their bold ambitions.
Richard remains hands-on in his work and has led, architected, and implemented hundreds of business and technology solutions that have helped organizations transform both digitally and organizationally. Richard has a passion for helping organizations achieve more; whether it is helping an organization build beautiful websites to support great content and social strategy, or helping an organization leverage emerging cloud and mobile technology to service better their members or the communities that they serve.
Richard is an author and an internationally recognized expert in Microsoft technology, marketing, and professional services. As a sought-after speaker, Richard has often had the opportunity to share his insights, experiences, and advice on branding, partner management, social networking, collaboration, ROI, technology/process adoption, and business development at numerous industry events in around the globe. When not speaking at industry events, Richard works with Microsoft, partners, and customers as an advisor to business and technology, and serves on multiple committees, leads user groups and is a Board Member of the Microsoft Community Leadership Board.
http://www.twitter.com/rharbridge +1-416-300-3678
http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/rharbridge [email protected]
www.Slideshare.net/rharbridge
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