Using SharePoint as an intranet: what it can do, what it costs and how to start

Yes, you can use SharePoint as an intranet. It comes with your Microsoft 365 subscription and has the building blocks: communication sites, news, hub sites and document management. What it doesn’t have is a “create intranet” button. This guide covers what you get out of the box, what you’ll need to add yourself, what it costs and when plain SharePoint is all you need.

Yes, but SharePoint is a platform, not a finished intranet. You get the parts. Putting them together is up to you.

If your organisation runs on Microsoft 365, you’re probably using SharePoint already without noticing: Teams, OneDrive and your Teams recordings all sit on top of it. SharePoint started life as a document management system and it’s still excellent at that. The communication features came later.

Those features take you a fair way:

• Communication sites for publishing news, announcements and policies to a wide audience (Microsoft Learn).
• Hub sites that connect department sites (HR, finance, a local office) under one navigation, one look and feel, and search across all of them.
• Document management with version history, metadata and co-authoring.

So what’s the difference between SharePoint and an intranet? An intranet is what employees experience every day: the place where they read the news, find colleagues and track down the right procedure in seconds. To get there you need more than building blocks. You need a clear structure, simple navigation and agreements on who looks after what. Without those, SharePoint quickly turns into a collection of islands: news still goes out by email and nobody knows where the latest version of a document lives.

Curious about the upside? We listed the benefits of SharePoint as an intranet in a separate article.

You don’t need a separate licence to run an intranet on SharePoint Online. SharePoint is included in most Microsoft 365 plans. Extras such as Copilot are paid for separately.

The fact that SharePoint comes “free” explains why it’s so often the first choice. It also explains why you shouldn’t expect everything from it: Microsoft supplies the platform and leaves the rest to you or to a partner.

SharePoint gives you a solid technical foundation. In the conversations we have with organisations, the same three gaps come up again and again: search, reaching mobile employees and getting messages to the right people.

Each gap can be solved on its own. Together, they’re the difference between an intranet that works technically and one that employees actually use.

What comes after launch is covered in why SharePoint intranet adoption fails after go-live.

Start with a communication site as your home page, connect department sites through a hub site, and agree on who owns what before you add content. In broad strokes:

1. Start with a communication site as the home page of your intranet. Don’t use a team site: it’s built for collaboration and comes with a Microsoft 365 group you don’t want for company-wide communication.
2. Choose your structure. Connect department or location sites to a hub site. For many organisations, one central hub is enough.
3. Work out navigation and branding. Keep navigation short and logical for the people using the intranet, not the people who built it.
4. Use audiences, categories and metadata. They decide how well search works, and Copilot relies on them too.
5. Appoint owners. One person per site who keeps content up to date, and one person who looks after the whole.
6. Launch and follow up. Launch day is the start, not the finish line.

Technically, all of this is doable. The real challenge starts after go-live: who keeps the content current, who follows up on Microsoft’s updates and how do you keep employees coming back? We wrote separate articles on each of those:

• Modern SharePoint architecture: what IT needs to understand before building an intranet
• SharePoint intranet: build or buy?
• Why SharePoint intranet adoption fails after go-live

SharePoint is the layer your intranet runs on. Viva Connections makes that intranet visible inside Microsoft Teams. It doesn’t replace your intranet: a messy intranet stays messy, even when you show it in Teams.

If your colleagues spend their day in Teams, Viva Connections is a handy front door. How SharePoint Online, Viva Connections and Viva Engage fit together is explained in SharePoint Online, Viva Connections and Viva Engage as an intranet: when are they enough?

The licence is part of Microsoft 365, so on paper a SharePoint intranet is cheap. The real cost sits in the setup, the custom work and above all the maintenance afterwards.

That’s why it pays to compare the total cost over three years, not just the build: building, maintenance, governance and the months before you go live. How to make that calculation is covered in build or buy.

And a ready-made intranet? An Involv QuickStart costs less than €1.50 per user per month for an organisation with 1,000 employees, support included. The exact price depends on your number of users, the package, the scope of the setup and any additional services, which is why we always quote on request.

A simple communication site can be up in a few weeks. A fully custom intranet takes months, often longer. An Involv QuickStart goes live in 4 weeks.

With custom work, the timeline depends on the structure across departments, the number of workshops and the wishes that pop up along the way. For reference: the teams behind the best intranets in the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual 2019 took 14 months on average.

A QuickStart has a fixed scope, and therefore a fixed timeline: live in 4 weeks. What you prepare: your content and your employees’ details in Entra ID. For a larger Involv project, timing depends on the scope, as with any project.

Are you a smaller organisation that mainly publishes news and documents, with someone in-house who knows SharePoint? Then SharePoint’s communication sites will often do the job. Start there.

It gets tight when:

• you need to reach employees without a desk, such as technicians, care staff or production workers;
• you want to target news by department, location or role;
• several departments publish their own content and you want to keep an overview;
• employees can’t find what they’re looking for;
• nobody has time to retest custom work after every Microsoft update.

At that point you have three routes:

1. Standard SharePoint. A strong foundation, with the limits above.
2. Custom work by a consultancy or your own IT. Fully tailored, but you pay for the maintenance for as long as the intranet exists.
3. A ready-made intranet on top of SharePoint. Live faster, with search, mobile and audience targeting already built in.

Which route is right depends on who will maintain it two years from now. Ask yourself that before you start.

Want to keep the benefits of SharePoint without building everything yourself? Then choose an intranet that runs on top of SharePoint. Your data stays in your own Microsoft 365 environment, under your existing security and Entra ID.

Involv is a ready-made SharePoint intranet:

• More than sixty intranet modules that you configure instead of build.
• Search that works: AI search in plain language across all pages, synonyms and search suggestions you set up yourself, and insight into what employees search for.
• Reach employees without a desk with a mobile app with push notifications.
• Targeted communication: news automatically reaches the right audience.
• No custom code to maintain. Our development team follows Microsoft’s updates and tests the impact.
• A team that only does intranet projects, with technical specialists and people from internal communication.

What does a well-designed SharePoint intranet look like? Below are a few intranets built with Involv, each in the organisation’s own branding.

Find more examples in the Involv Lookbook.

Want to talk through what Involv could do for your SharePoint intranet? Book a short introduction.