With SharePoint and Microsoft 365 comes an easy-to-use range of templates that assures you meet your business needs. Once you begin to create an on-premise SharePoint site, you can choose several templates. Its extensively rich features anchored by predictable navigation is streamlined for creative and user-friendly page layouts that make the employees use the intranet seamlessly.
With SharePoint having a supportive vision for optimizing work management and department productivity, it allows you to define the relevancy of features supported by it. SharePoint comes loaded with a large site of templates for you to get started using them. Every single template offers value to assist easy collaboration and thereby enhances efficiency. For instance, the team site template includes document libraries and calendars, and the blog site template includes company announcements and idea boards. This saves a lot of time and reduces a considerable amount of cost. You can always customize your SharePoint by hiring either a company’s team or services with expertise with SharePoint customizations. Also, by signing up a monthly subscription for a SharePoint template or an intranet-in-a-box, you can start working on enhancing your collaboration and business productivity. These are no fancy bells or wonderful gizmos! The key to such a seamlessly accomplished SharePoint solution lies in its Functionality. Once there is a clear understanding of the client’s requirements. The real work begins by identifying what needs are to be constructed through the SharePoint platform by mapping a strategy that encompasses not just SharePoint but also interconnecting technologies of Microsoft 365.
No two organizations’ intranet solutions are alike. Therefore, your intranet content and its functionalities must respond to the needs of your users and organization at large. To ensure that your employees feel that they are using their own intranet and not feel like using some software’s brand per se, it must visually feel like their own enterprise tool.
Nowadays, organizations aim to buy an intranet-in-a-box solution instead of building their own from very the scratch.
Why is Intranet- in-a-box a popular choice?
Intranet in a box makes life easier, and the idea is to have your product that has its own R&D team. In changing times, companies have realized that it becomes outdated as soon after they design, develop, and implement a solution. So, instead of investing time and resources to build a custom solution, they prefer to use a pre-built SharePoint intranet.
A closer look into Intranet-in-a-box:
Instead of trying to reinvent the intranet, it is comparatively easier to work with Microsoft SharePoint’s principles, which works best symbiotically.
Let us be clear that Microsoft has never claimed that it offers an intranet solution. SharePoint, which is a platform and not a package of solutions on which a whopping proportion of solutions are built every year have some valid considerations for turning towards intranet-in-a-box:
Earlier this year, intranet expert James Robertson predicted that within 1-2 years, 80%-90% of SharePoint intranet solutions would be out of the box, with only a small number of organizations choosing to build custom solutions from the ground up.
If cost is a concern?
For an SMB, managing out of limited resources and still trying to harbor through productivity gains is a significant concern. Thus, building a custom SharePoint is costly. As is most experienced, you may have many design iterations, development, testing, and documentation requirements. You will still have a product but at the expense of time and money that could have been put to better use.
In fact, a turnkey intranet offers benefits compared to a custom alternative to lower costs, more straightforward ongoing maintenance, and a better adoption rate at relatively less deployment time.
Why use a ready-to-go, intranet-in-a-box?
It is a pre-configured intranet solution that can be easily deployed within an organization and is designed to allow users to accomplish tasks that can significantly reduce your collaboration burden, where support, maintenance, and updates are the responsibility of the intranet provider.
If your resources are limited:
A good choice for a small team that is devoted to supporting and maintenance is a ready-to-go intranet, particularly when with a small team you tend to lack the necessary bandwidth for the lengthy process involved in custom intranet design.
If your company is dynamic & you can deal with changes:
Suppose the structure of your organization is likely to change over time, with the core responsibility for intranet upkeep changing from one place to the other. In that case, a ready-to-go intranet is the best possibility to resolve your business collaboration complexities. Besides, with the ready-to-go intranet, you can easily start with a fundamental and flexible product that is bound to enhance incrementally as users determine which features are most valued.
If you don’t want to upgrade all the time:
When you have an intranet as a service solution, you tend to mark and evolve, without a predetermined timescale for upgrading, while with the traditional approach, you have to go through the pain of building and launching your platform and then focusing on maintaining it, until a few years when you upgrade to the latest intranet trend.
