SharePoint has been compared to a college library where an immense amount of information is available and people come together to work towards a common objective.

An intranet needs to be an information sharing channel in an organization. Almost all organizations use email to communicate to their associates and some still have hard copy newsletters distributed to their teams. An intranet could, and should, be used to centralize all of this information, along with other topics associates need to be made aware of, to excel in their job. An intranet is a powerful communication channel that allows different areas of the company to communicate as a dynamic organization.

Here are some simple, yet powerful components of intranets to consider:

• Company News - Ditch the email blast that gets sent to the entire company and move your news to your intranet. Make sure you keep the information fresh and relevant or it will quickly be ignored.
• Executive Blogs - Blogs are a great way to keep your executive leadership in front of all associates while exposing a personal side to them. This is a great use for video as well. Videos are a wonderful way to convey real emotion and are effectively used in situations where tough decisions or big wins have been made. Allowing associates to comment on the posts is also a great way to empower them with direct access to an executive to contribute to the success of the organization.
• Finding Experts - An organization is made up of people and those people need to be in contact with each other to get results. An intranet needs to ensure people and expertise can be easily found when needed.
• Lunch Menus - It sounds silly to say that publishing your lunch menu to your intranet is a big deal, but let's face it, everyone has to eat. This is an excellent way to drive users to your intranet and reduce the number of menus that are printed. What could be better for consistently relevant content than a constantly changing menu!
• Metrics - Key performance indicators and metrics come in all shapes and sizes and implementation can be as simple as a static diagram, or as complex as a full data warehouse with drill-down capabilities. The important part here is to make sure people know how the company is doing and how they contribute to success.
• Universal Access - The intranet should be available both internally at the organization and available to your associates when they are working from home. It also should be an associate portal to bring both information and business applications together. For example, company news from Human Resources can be combined with a blog entry from the CEO along with the lunch menu from Food Services to give employees a place they can count on for relevant, up-to-date information.

Along with sharing information, an intranet should assist in process efficiency to generate a solid return on the investment.

• Team Collaboration - Intranets should help bring your associates together to create strong, productive teams. Departmental teams, project teams, committees and any other group being formed should have a consistent place to work together electronically.
• Forms/Templates - Putting common forms used in your organization in an easy-to-find location on your intranet can bring about powerful results.
• Workflow - Automation of routine and repeatable tasks is important for an organization to survive and grow in this economy. An intranet needs to make internal processes effective and reduce the need for human labor to be able to focus those resources on other value added opportunities for the company.

Why SharePoint?

Put simply, SharePoint is a productivity platform used to solve business problems. Microsoft explains SharePoint 2010 using the six pillars behind the capabilities. This is a good way to understand how the product can be used to create world-class intranets. The six pillars are:

• Sites - SharePoint 2010 provides advanced authentication features to make logging in as secure and easy as possible. Cross-browser support and a multi-lingual user interface allow SharePoint to be available to a large audience.
• Content - Managing documents is a key strength of SharePoint 2010 and features like Document Sets, Document IDs, Content Types and Managed Metadata build a robust platform to store and manage critical content for your organization. Rich media, like videos, can now be managed and delivered effectively in a SharePoint 2010 environment.
• Insights - SharePoint 2010 can become the key delivery component of your Business Intelligence strategy and can put dashboards, metrics and key performance indicators directly in the hands of those that need the information to do their job.
• Search - Having great information is still worthless if people can’t find it. SharePoint 2010 offers an enterprise scale search solution that incorporates features like Best Bets, Federated Search, Metadata-driven Refinement and Thumbnails and Previews to find what you need. People and expertise can also be found throughout the organization with the ability to search through user profiles for relevant information.
• Communities - SharePoint 2010 offers important social capabilities in your organization to allow individuals to connect. Blogs and wikis are available to share content. My Sites and the Organization Browser help associates understand each other and connect throughout the company.
• Composites - Not all solutions to business problems are going to funnel through a centralized department like IT.  SharePoint 2010 recognizes this fact by offering powerful self-service capabilities to allow any associate, with the appropriate access, to pull information together and integrate with other applications. InfoPath forms and workflows can also be used to help automate those repetitive and time consuming form-based processes of an organization.

Another aspect of intranets on SharePoint is the incredible personal productivity you’ll gain right out of the box. No longer do you need to email an attachment to a small team working on a project only to find out it has been modified by different people and you now have multiple versions. The document management features of My Sites and SharePoint can give people access to a single source of truth behind your work.

Getting Started

Now that you can see what SharePoint 2010 can offer for intranets, you might be overwhelmed with the breadth of functionality available and not know where to start. This is common and why we recommend the crawl, walk, run strategy to get started.

Start with good information architecture and design for your new intranet that maps to the capabilities you need, but don't be afraid to build it and roll it out in smaller releases. Each successful rollout strengthens the overall intranet and also helps your associates from being overwhelmed by all of the new capabilities at once. Don't wait for your intranet to be "done" before releasing any of it. An intranet is a dynamic portal. It’s always changing and being extended so realize the benefits of sections as soon as possible.

Intranets come in many varieties and should be mapped to the needs of each specific organization, but SharePoint 2010 offers a powerful platform that can be used to meet many needs. The key is understanding the business objectives of the intranet, mapping those to SharePoint capabilities and then releasing new functionality early and often.