Habanero helps organizations modernize internal communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a push to modernize outdated and unsupported intranet experiences coupled with a continued emphasis on digital workplace transformation initiatives.
Hybrid work has certainly had an impact. It’s shown how important digital experiences like intranets and enterprise social are to keeping employees informed and connected to their organization’s purpose, values and culture – and each other.
We’ve also seen a shift away from highly customized on-premises intranets in favour of out-of-the-box SharePoint intranets or off-the-shelf intranet products like our GO Intranet platform.
The push to modernize intranet experiences surfaced some consistent capability areas that organizations tended to prioritize in their business cases. Here are eight of the top intranet trends communicators are looking for in a modern intranet.
Top intranet trends
1. Personalized experiences
Nobody wants more noise. Instead, organizations want to curate intranet capabilities and content. With a modern intranet, communicators can target information to an individual’s department, role, job function, work location and much, much more.
The only challenge is that not all companies have their Entra ID in order to enable rich content targeting. As well, not all internal communications teams know what content to direct to each individual audience. In these situations, it helps if your modern intranet gives employees the ability to self-select and personalize their own experience, ensuring the news, events, announcements, apps, tools, links and even policies and procedures are relevant.
2. An integrated digital workplace
Organizations once expected the intranet to be a one-stop-shop for all content and interactions. Now, they want their intranet to be the main foundation of an integrated and thoughtful digital workplace experience – a central hub that ties everything together. This can mean greater interoperability with Microsoft 365 as well as other key enterprise applications and systems.
Integration with Microsoft 365 can look like:
- Aggregating content and/or comments from Viva Engage
- Embedding a PowerBI dashboard, including documents stored within a SharePoint library
- Making your intranet available within Microsoft Teams
Organizations also want to integrate content and data from enterprise applications outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, like ITSM or HRIS systems such as ServiceNow and Workday.
The goal of integration is to give people easy access to essential data, not to replicate everything they do in other systems. For example, it’s extremely useful to show an employee’s vacation balance or the status of their IT service requests within the intranet.
3. Omnichannel communications
There are so many tools and applications that make up today’s digital workplaces that many organizations are now publishing the same message across multiple channels to make sure it’s seen.
With modern intranets, however, communicators are leveraging the strengths of each platform. They can publish content on the intranet, increase reach by promoting it via email newsletters and increase engagement through conversations on the topic within Viva Engage. In addition, new tools like Viva Amplify are designed to make the management and measurement of omnichannel communication campaigns easier and more effective.
4. Meaningful and actionable analytics
Internal communicators need to know how effective they are at reaching and engaging with a varied set of employees. Modern intranets must include robust analytics that include actionable insights to help communicators determine the efficacy of their communications and content across channels. Having access to meaningful analytics beyond simple vanity statistics gives them the insight and evidence they need to make informed decisions on what is valuable for employees.
5. Generative AI
Many organizations are keen to take advantage of emerging AI capabilities. In an intranet context, this means helping users find content faster or reducing the effort to complete certain tasks. An example of this would be an AI-driven chatbot within an intranet used to query content repositories. However, the accuracy and trustworthiness of AI-driven content and answers are subject to much debate.
AI could also help content authors by automating site or page creation, suggesting metadata and creating draft content. Microsoft’s focus on integrating CoPilot AI capabilities into SharePoint Online and across the Microsoft 365 suite means that we’ll continue to see broader application of these capabilities, which will be made accessible through simple configuration.
6. Engaging and social experiences
Organizations are looking for intranets to serve as a medium to better engage employees with compelling content, authentic conversations and polls and surveys. Different audience groups can participate in these interactions, which provide new opportunities for employee connections, ideation, knowledge sharing and direct engagement with leadership.
With a modern intranet, employees can also generate their own content through photo galleries, peer recognition or membership in community-of-practice knowledge-sharing sites.
7. Robust, unified search experiences
Organizations still want to get more out of search. Modern intranets must offer search capabilities that span platforms and connect applications to help employees quickly and easily locate answers, content, people, applications and conversations.
The modern Microsoft 365 search offering uses Microsoft Graph and machine learning to continuously improve search effectiveness and relevance. Search connectors can connect to external knowledge repositories like a ServiceNow knowledge base, creating a unified search experience. Organizations can also create custom search experiences tailored to common scenarios such as finding a person or locating a policy or procedure.
8. Mobile-first experiences
A great mobile-oriented experience is a must-have, especially for organizations that want to better engage their frontline teams or fieldworkers. Thankfully, the vast majority of intranets are now cloud-hosted, which simplifies access by removing the need to authenticate through a VPN. However, you’ll still want to understand what mobile access looks like and how you can make it as seamless as possible.
Identifying your own priorities
Although it’s helpful to understand these broader trends, the best intranet will be one that addresses your organization’s unique needs and culture. If you’re not sure where to start, reach out and we’ll share real life examples of modern intranet scenarios and capabilities.
