How to plan for an intelligent SharePoint solution?

The benefits of the intranet are endless. That’s why organizations look for building an intelligent SharePoint intranet that can benefit the organization in the maximum sphere possible-starting from internal communication to marketing. But hardly a few organizations get managed to use their intranet to their full potential. This article will see how to plan for an intelligent SharePoint solution without hassling too much. Let’s get started.

Careful Planning

The key to a successful SharePoint implementation is careful planning. The plan for an intelligent SharePoint intranet solution includes the following stages:

Analysis: An organization needs to hire a team of SharePoint experts with prominent knowledge about analyzing its business process and streamlining them using relevant SharePoint functionalities.

Design: This stage involves creating a customized business solution, such as developing an information architecture that matches the company’s content with specific sites.

Deployment: In this stage, the team decides how to deploy the solution into a digital environment. The team must decide whether to go for on-premises or cloud solutions. Companies can also implement data mapping for seamless data migration from older versions to new ones.

Configuration: The SharePoint team is responsible for creating custom sites, libraries, set up metadata, navigation, create security groups, etc. Simplified features like built-in site templates, including several unique out-of-the-box features of SharePoint, offer great benefits of intranet that saves money and time and resources.

Testing: In this stage, the team tests their created SharePoint solutions through a group of users. Then the team collects honest feedback and makes changes accordingly.

Training: After a successful deployment, end users are given training on adapting the benefits of intranet in their day-to-day activities.

Support and update: This is the last stage of the SharePoint solution where the IT team monitors the activities and fixes issues, followed by making upgrades to the UI, UX, etc.

Precise Scheduling

Besides the project’s deadline, the company must also consider the timeframe to achieve each milestone. Usually, a SharePoint project takes around 3 to 6 months to complete. The whole process can be further divided into stages:

Discovery and analyses: 2–4 weeks

Design and deployment: 4–6 weeks

Testing: 4–5 weeks

Training: 1–2 weeks

Support: 4 weeks

Deciding the deployment Model

Organizations can deploy a SharePoint intranet solution in three ways: On-premises, cloud, and hybrid.

On-premises:

In on-premises deployment, companies need to focus on hardware and maintenance. For hosting, one needs to acquire the right number of servers considering the number of contents, users, etc. Besides, to keep the server running flawlessly, regular maintenance is also crucial. For this, organizations have to hire an in-house IT team or outsource them as well.

Cloud:

This is a reasonably priced option to host an intranet solution. In the cloud model, companies don’t have to invest heftily in servers or hiring IT teams. All they have to do is subscribe to SharePoint Online or Office 365. Since SharePoint Online is deployed in dedicated data centers, users can access information even on their mobile devices anywhere in the world.

Hybrid:

The hybrid model comprises both on-premises and cloud deployment. This is ideal for companies who prefer storing common documents in the cloud and sensitive documents on-premises.

Establish Clear Governance

Content management remains the prime issue while implementing a successful SharePoint solution. Too much irrelevant content, lack of proper content structure, duplicate content, etc., are some of the most complaints from end-users while using an intranet platform.

That’s being said, maintaining a SharePoint environment is a tedious and brain-draining task. Therefore, organizations need to hire skilled IT specialists and establish clear governance rules. Companies need to establish a centralized SharePoint control center and allot specialists to monitor and fix hardware, infrastructure, content management, etc.

Consider the Cost of Implementation

The average cost to implement a SharePoint solution can range from $20,000 to $250,000. The price depends upon various factors such as the type of solution used, the project’s scope, customizations, the complexity of integrations and many more. Apart from the cost of the development, organizations must also consider the related expenses that include cost for:

• Software licenses
• Security tools
• Hardware and Infrastructure
• IT staff
• Third-party software integrations

Deploy Compliance Policy

The need to comply with the regulated industry standards is unavoidable. While planning a SharePoint intranet solution, companies must ensure to enforce a compliance policy and best practices. This ensures that the system is running efficiently while staying on legal grounds. For example, organizations must ensure that certain documents should only be accessed and downloaded by authorized parties or people.

End Thoughts

Yes, it is indeed challenging to find a custom intranet solution that meets all these above-said ideal features. You have to spend lots of hours researching your way through search results to find the best service provider that can offer service without burning a hole in your pocket. But you can save your time with Hello-Intranet- a SharePoint intranet in-a-box solution provider with prebuilt SharePoint Intranet Templates to meet your demands with ease. Their pricing is affordable, yet they have a good name for their SharePoint Intranet Templates quality in the market. Give them a check today!