How to Plan a SharePoint Intranet for a Small Business

1. Start with the jobs, not the pages

Before you open SharePoint, list the things staff actually come looking for. In most small businesses it's the same handful:

• Policies and the staff handbook
• Forms and templates
• Company news and announcements
• Who's who and how to reach them
• Department documents and procedures
• Quick links to the tools people use daily

Rank them by how often people need them. The top three belong on the home page. Everything else goes one click away.

2. Choose the right site types

SharePoint has two modern site types, and mixing them up is the most common structural mistake.

• Communication sites are for publishing to many readers: the intranet home, HR, policies, news. A few people edit, everyone reads.
• Team sites are for collaborating: a department or project where everyone edits files together. Every team site is connected to a Microsoft 365 group, and usually a Team in Microsoft Teams.

A typical small-business setup is one communication site as the home page, a communication site for each department that publishes to everyone, and team sites for groups that work on files together.

3. Connect everything with a hub

Make the home site a hub site and associate the department sites with it. Hub sites give you shared navigation across every site, a consistent theme, and news and search that roll up from all associated sites.

Keep sites flat. Avoid subsites: modern SharePoint is designed around separate sites joined by hubs, which are far easier to restructure later.

4. Plan permissions around groups

Decide who can read and who can edit each site before you build it, and grant access to groups, never to individuals.

• Use the site's built-in Owners, Members and Visitors groups.
• Add Microsoft 365 or security groups to them instead of named people.
• Avoid breaking permission inheritance on individual folders and files. If a library needs different access, it usually belongs on its own site.

This one rule makes onboarding and offboarding a matter of adding or removing someone from a group.

5. Use metadata instead of deep folders

Deep folder trees are why people can't find files. Add columns to libraries instead, such as client, document type, status or year, and create views that filter and group by them.

Content types take this further: a 'Contract' content type can carry its own columns (vendor, start date, expiry date, owner) and template wherever it's used.

One or two levels of folders is fine. Five is a sign the structure should be metadata.

6. Launch it properly

1. Move the important content in and remove outdated copies elsewhere, so the intranet is the only source.
2. Pin the intranet in Teams and set it as the browser start page if you can.
3. Name an owner for each section who keeps it current.
4. Post news weekly for the first month so people get into the habit of checking it.
5. Ask for feedback after two weeks and fix what confuses people.

An intranet is never finished. A quarterly 30-minute review of what's being used and what isn't keeps it alive.