Every company has seen a bad intranet. It launched with a splash, got a week of polite traffic, and is now the place policy PDFs go to die. The difference between that and an intranet people open every morning isn't budget or luck — it's a handful of design decisions most teams never make deliberately.
We build and rescue SharePoint intranets for a living, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. The intranets that get used all do the same seven things. The intranets that get ignored are all missing at least three of them — and it's almost never a technology problem, because the failing intranet and the thriving one run on exactly the same SharePoint.
Here are the seven patterns, what each one looks like when it's done properly, and why intranets fail without it. Score your own intranet against them as you read.
01News people actually read
Audience targeting beats broadcastingMost intranet news fails for one reason: everything is published to everyone. The warehouse team scrolls past a finance system update, the Dubai office reads about a car park closure in Sydney, and within a month everyone has learned the same lesson — this feed is not for me.
Modern SharePoint fixes this with audience targeting. News web parts, navigation links and even home page sections can be filtered by Microsoft 365 group, so each person sees the announcements that apply to their role, site and department — and nothing else. Company-wide news still goes to everyone; the noise doesn't.
- Target news posts to departments, locations or roles, not "all staff"
- Keep one clearly-labelled channel for genuine company-wide announcements
- Let section owners publish their own news instead of routing everything through one person
Once people decide the news feed is noise, they stop reading it entirely — and then they miss the one announcement that actually mattered. Attention is the intranet's only currency, and untargeted news spends it fast.
02Navigation by task, not org chart
Nobody knows which department owns the formThe most common navigation mistake is mirroring the org chart: a menu of department names, each leading to a departmental site. It feels logical to the people who built it — they know where everything lives. It's useless to everyone else, because the person hunting for the expense form doesn't know, or care, that Finance owns it.
Great intranets organise the menu around what people are trying to do. The difference is stark when you put the two side by side:
| What someone needs | Org-chart navigation | Task-first navigation |
|---|---|---|
| Claim an expense | Finance → Accounts → Forms library | "Submit an expense" — one click from home |
| Book annual leave | HR → Policies → Leave → Request form | "Book leave" in the quick links |
| Find the logo files | Marketing → Shared documents → Brand → Final | "Brand assets" under Resources |
| Report an IT problem | IT department site → Contact us | "Get IT help" — visible on every page |
The department sites can still exist behind the scenes. But the menu, the mega-menu labels and the home page should speak the language of tasks.
Org-chart navigation breaks every time the org chart does — a reorg renames the menus and strands every bookmark. Worse, people who can't find things stop looking and go back to asking colleagues, which is exactly the habit the intranet was meant to replace.
03Search that finds documents, not noise
Findability is a content job, not a search settingWhen staff say "search doesn't work", SharePoint's engine is rarely the culprit. Search is only as good as what you feed it — and most organisations feed it duplicate copies, retired sites nobody archived, and files named final_v2_USE-THIS-ONE.docx. Ask for the travel policy and you get six versions from four sites, with no way to tell which one is current.
Fixing search is mostly fixing the content behind it:
- One authoritative home per document — everything else is a link, not a copy
- Archive or delete retired sites so they stop polluting results
- Use promoted results and acronym answers so common searches surface the official answer first
- Name files and pages the way people actually search for them
Search is the intranet's trust anchor. The first time someone acts on an outdated policy that search served up, they stop trusting every result — and go back to emailing colleagues for files. Once that happens, the rest of the intranet barely matters.
04A home page with live data
A dashboard, not a posterA static home page — a hero photo, a welcome message, a link to the staff handbook — gives people no reason to come back. It's a poster, and nobody checks a poster twice. Great intranet home pages behave more like dashboards: something on the page is different, and useful, every single day.
SharePoint's modern web parts make this straightforward. A strong home page usually combines targeted news with personalised quick links to the handful of tasks each person does weekly, upcoming events, and live figures pulled from an embedded Power BI report — sales this month, open tickets, project status — so the page answers a question people already have.
- Quick links curated per audience, not one generic list for everyone
- An events web part fed by real calendars, not a manually updated page
- One or two live metrics that matter to the whole company
If nothing on the home page changes, visiting it is pointless — and people are quick to notice pointless. A home page with live data gives staff a daily reason to open the intranet, and every other section benefits from that traffic.
05Mobile parity via Viva Connections
Meet people where they already areA large share of the people who most need the intranet — field engineers, drivers, retail and warehouse staff — rarely sit at a desk. If your intranet is effectively desktop-only, you've excluded the exact audience that has no other way to see company news, book leave or find a policy.
Viva Connections solves this without a separate app or licence for most Microsoft 365 plans: it surfaces your SharePoint intranet inside Teams, on desktop and mobile, with a card-based dashboard designed for quick tasks on a phone. Your people already have Teams open; the intranet simply appears where they are, instead of asking them to remember one more URL.
- The same news, targeted the same way, in the Teams app on any device
- Dashboard cards for the top mobile tasks — leave, shifts, tickets, approvals
- One intranet to maintain, not a desktop version and a mobile afterthought
An intranet only deskbound staff can reach isn't a company intranet — it's a head-office intranet. The frontline learns it isn't for them, communication splinters back into notice boards and group chats, and leadership loses its one reliable channel to everyone.
06Clear content ownership per section
Every page needs a name on itAsk who owns the HR section of a failing intranet and you'll get a shrug. Content without an owner has no one responsible for keeping it accurate, so it quietly rots — the policy from two versions ago, the phone number of someone who left, the "new" starter guide describing a process that changed long ago.
Great intranets assign a named owner to every section: a real person, not a team inbox, who is responsible for accuracy and empowered to publish. Give owners a lightweight review cadence and page-level accountability, and staleness stops being anyone's-job-so-nobody's-job.
- A named owner and a deputy for every section of the site
- Review dates on evergreen pages, with reminders owners actually receive
- Owners trained to publish themselves — no bottleneck through IT or comms
It only takes one confidently wrong page to poison the well. The moment someone follows a stale instruction and gets burned, they treat every page as suspect — and an intranet nobody trusts is just an expensive file share.
07Governance that keeps it clean after launch
Launch day is the starting lineMost intranets look great at launch. The question is what they look like two years later — and without governance, the answer is sprawl: orphaned sites, permissions nobody understands, three libraries doing the same job, and a slow slide back to the chaos the intranet was built to fix.
Governance sounds bureaucratic; in practice it's a short set of standing rules that are enforced from day one. Who can create sites, and from which templates. How sites are named. How permissions are granted — through groups, never one person at a time. When inactive sites get archived. Who reviews usage analytics, and how often. We've written before about where files should live and how Microsoft 365 fits together, and every one of those decisions belongs in this rulebook.
Without governance, entropy wins by default — every new site, copy and permission tweak adds a little disorder, and none of it ever gets removed. Two years on, you're budgeting for a "relaunch" that will meet exactly the same fate.
Score your intranet, then fix the biggest gap first
Seven patterns: targeted news, task-based navigation, trustworthy search, a live home page, mobile parity, named owners and standing governance. Most struggling intranets are missing several — but you don't fix them all at once. Score honestly, pick the gap causing the most daily pain, and fix that one properly. In our experience navigation and the home page usually come first, because they change what every employee sees tomorrow morning.
If you'd like to see what this looks like in practice, our case studies walk through real intranet builds and rescues — and our intranet design and migration service covers everything on this list, from information architecture to Viva Connections rollout. Prefer to talk it through? Get in touch.
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Book a free 30-minute intranet review. We'll score your current site against these seven patterns, show you the quickest fixes, and give you a straight answer on rebuild versus repair — no obligation.
Book a free intranet review →Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build a great SharePoint intranet? +
The build itself is rarely the slow part — modern SharePoint sites go up quickly. What takes time is content: deciding what to keep, who owns each section, and how navigation should work. A focused launch with a strong home page and a few well-owned sections beats an everything-at-once rollout that arrives late and half-finished.
Do we need Viva Connections for a mobile intranet? +
SharePoint sites are responsive on their own, so a phone browser will render them. Viva Connections goes further: it puts your intranet inside Teams — the app your people already have open — with a card-based dashboard built for quick tasks on a small screen. It is included with most Microsoft 365 plans, which makes it the practical route to real mobile parity for most organisations.
Our intranet already exists and nobody uses it. Rebuild or fix? +
Usually fix. Audit the existing intranet against the seven patterns in this article — in most cases navigation, the home page and missing content ownership account for the bulk of the problem, and all three can be repaired on the site you already have. Rebuild only when the information architecture is beyond saving, and never without governance, or you will recreate the same mess on a fresh site.