A SharePoint intranet is a set of SharePoint Online sites — built on the licence you already pay for in Microsoft 365 — that gives staff one place for news, policies, documents and people. Build it around how people actually work and they use it daily. Build it as a digital filing cabinet and it dies.
Most Melbourne businesses already own SharePoint and don’t realise it. If you have Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium, the intranet platform is sitting there, unused, while staff email each other PDFs and hunt through a network drive nobody has tidied since 2019. The technology is rarely the problem. The decisions you make before you build it are.
What a modern SharePoint Online intranet actually is
Forget the old picture of a clunky 2010-era SharePoint server. The modern version runs entirely in the cloud, looks like a clean website, works on a phone, and is made of three building blocks: communication sites, team sites and hub sites. You assemble those into an intranet rather than installing a single “intranet product”.
The point of the thing is to answer the questions staff ask all day: where’s the current leave policy, who do I call in accounts, what’s the new client onboarding process, has anything changed this week. When those answers live in one searchable place that people trust, you stop losing hours to “do you know where the…” messages.
Communication sites versus team sites
This is the first decision that trips people up, so get it straight early. The two site types do different jobs.
| Aspect | Communication site | Team site |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Broadcast to many — news, policies, company-wide content | Collaborate within a group — a team’s files and tasks |
| Audience | Most people read, few people publish | Everyone in the group reads and edits |
| Connected to | Standalone, no Microsoft 365 Group | A Microsoft 365 Group, so it pairs with a Teams team |
| Typical use | The intranet home page, HR hub, IT hub | The Marketing team’s working files, a project workspace |
In plain terms: your intranet’s front door and its polished, company-wide pages are communication sites. The messy day-to-day work — drafts, working documents, a project’s files — happens in team sites, which are the same thing that gets created every time someone makes a new team in Microsoft Teams. Most organisations need a handful of communication sites and a growing number of team sites.
Hub sites tie it together
On their own, a dozen separate sites are just a dozen separate sites. A hub site is what makes them feel like one intranet. You designate a site as a hub, then associate other sites with it, and they inherit shared navigation, a consistent look, and rolled-up news and search across everything connected.
A practical structure for a mid-sized business: one hub as the company intranet home, with the HR, IT, Operations and Sales sites associated to it. Staff get one top navigation bar across the lot, news from any connected site surfaces on the home page, and search spans the whole hub. You can re-associate sites later, so the structure isn’t a one-way door — but planning it up front saves a painful reorganisation six months in.
The pieces staff care about
An intranet earns its keep through a few core features. None of them are exotic; the difference is whether they’re set up deliberately or thrown together.
- News — SharePoint News posts are how you communicate. A short post about a policy change or a new starter beats an all-staff email nobody reads, and it stays findable afterwards.
- Document libraries — where files live, with version history, check-out, and metadata so you can filter and sort rather than scroll. This is what replaces the network drive.
- Policies — a single authoritative home for the employee handbook, the leave policy, the WHS documents. One current version, not eleven copies in eleven inboxes.
- Staff directory — pulled from your Microsoft 365 user accounts, so people can find who does what and how to reach them.
Integration with Teams and Viva Connections
This is where SharePoint stops being a website you have to remember to visit. Every Microsoft Teams team is already backed by a SharePoint team site — the Files tab in any channel is a SharePoint document library. So your collaboration sites are reachable without leaving Teams, where most staff already spend their day.
Viva Connections takes it further: it surfaces your intranet home page, news and resources directly inside Teams as an app, on desktop and mobile. For frontline and on-the-go staff who never open a browser, that’s often the difference between an intranet they see and one they forget exists. If you’re already invested in the Microsoft stack, our Microsoft 365 support covers wiring these pieces together so the intranet meets staff where they work rather than asking them to come to it. For a fuller picture of what the platform includes, our rundown of what Microsoft 365 support covers is a useful companion read.
The decisions that make or break adoption
Information architecture is the unglamorous part everyone skips, and it’s the part that decides whether the intranet works. Information architecture means how you structure and name things so people find them without thinking.
The mistakes are predictable. Folder structures fifteen levels deep that mirror the old network drive. Navigation built around your org chart instead of around tasks — staff don’t think “I need the People & Culture division’s content”, they think “where’s the leave form”. Twenty different document libraries with no naming convention. Search left to fend for itself with no metadata to work with.
Get the architecture right and the platform does the rest. The questions worth arguing about before you build anything are: what are the ten things staff look for most, what should the top navigation be, what’s a hub and what’s associated to it, and how do you name and tag documents consistently. An hour of disagreement in a planning meeting saves a rebuild later.
Permissions and governance
The fastest way to ruin a SharePoint intranet is to let permissions sprawl. Out of the box it’s easy to share a file or site with one person, then another, until nobody can tell who can see what — and a staff directory or HR site with leaky permissions is a privacy problem, not just a tidiness one.
The disciplined approach is to manage access through Microsoft 365 Groups and security groups rather than one-off shares, keep company-wide content readable by everyone and editable by few, and set a clear policy on who can create new sites. Left unchecked, “anyone can spin up a team” produces hundreds of orphaned sites within a year. Governance also means deciding retention, external sharing rules, and a content owner for each site so pages don’t go stale. Conditional access policies sit underneath all of this, controlling who can reach the intranet, from which devices, and under what conditions — important when the same platform holds your policies and your client files. This kind of structure is part of broader cybersecurity hygiene, not an optional extra.
Migrating off file servers and network drives
Most intranet projects are also a migration off an ageing file server or a mapped network drive, and that’s where the real effort lives. You don’t just copy files across — you decide what comes, what gets archived, and how it’s structured on the other side.
A law firm in Hawthorn we work with had a 600GB shared drive built up over a decade, with matter folders, duplicates, and files three people swore were the master copy. The temptation is to lift-and-shift the whole thing into SharePoint and call it done. That just moves the mess to a new address. We sorted what was still live, archived closed matters, agreed a folder and metadata structure that matched how the firm actually worked, then migrated in stages so nobody lost access mid-week. The migration tooling matters — SharePoint has document size and path-length limits the old drive didn’t — and so does timing it around the firm’s quieter periods.
If your file server is also your backup and disaster-recovery weak point, moving to SharePoint changes that equation too — though “it’s in the cloud” still isn’t a backup strategy, which is why our backup and recovery approach covers Microsoft 365 data as well.
Why “build it and they won’t come” happens
The most common SharePoint outcome in Australian SMEs is an intranet that was built with enthusiasm, launched with an email, and abandoned within two months. It happens for clear reasons: nobody owned the content so it went stale, the structure mirrored the org chart instead of staff tasks, the launch was a one-off announcement with no follow-through, and leadership didn’t use it themselves.
Driving adoption is mostly non-technical. Put the things people need daily — the leave form, the phone list, this week’s news — on the front page so there’s a reason to visit. Move a real workflow onto it, like leave requests or IT support requests, so people have to use it. Surface it in Teams via Viva Connections so they don’t have to remember a URL. Name content owners who keep their corner current. And get the leadership team posting news, because staff follow what management actually uses. An intranet that’s the easiest path to the answer wins; one that’s a chore loses.
Realistic effort
Setting up a basic intranet — a home site, a few hub-connected sites, news and document libraries — is days, not months, for someone who knows the platform. The work that takes time is the thinking: the information architecture, the permissions model, the migration off the old drive, and the change management to get people using it. A sensible mid-sized rollout runs over several weeks, with a planning phase, a build, a staged migration, and a launch backed by training rather than an email. Trying to compress all of that into a weekend is exactly how you end up with the abandoned version.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need extra licences to build a SharePoint intranet?
Usually no. SharePoint Online is included in Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium and most enterprise plans, and Viva Connections is included as well. If you already run Microsoft 365 for email and Teams, you almost certainly have everything you need to build the intranet on your existing licences.
What’s the difference between SharePoint and Teams?
They’re two views of the same data. Teams is where you chat and meet; SharePoint stores the files and pages behind it. Every Teams team has a SharePoint site underneath, and the Files tab in a channel is a SharePoint document library. An intranet adds the company-wide communication sites and hubs on top.
How do we stop the intranet becoming a mess of duplicate files?
Agree a structure and naming convention before you migrate, use metadata and search rather than deep folders, manage permissions through groups, and control who can create new sites. The discipline is in governance and information architecture, not in the platform itself.
Can staff access the intranet on their phones?
Yes. SharePoint sites are mobile-responsive, and Viva Connections puts your intranet home page, news and resources inside the Teams mobile app — which is how frontline and on-the-go staff actually reach it, since most never open a browser at work.
Getting it built properly
A SharePoint intranet is one of the best-value things you can do with Microsoft 365, because the licence is already paid for and the payoff — less time hunting for documents, one source of truth for policies, cleaner communication — compounds. The risk is doing it without the architecture, permissions and adoption work, and ending up with abandoned space. TechAssist is a Melbourne-based MSP, founded in 2014, with 13 Australian-employed engineers — no offshore helpdesk — and per-user fixed pricing, so a project like this is scoped properly rather than billed by the hour. If you’d like to turn the SharePoint you already own into something staff actually use, explore our cloud services or get in touch for a straight conversation about it.
