Editorial
Enterprise Microsoft 365 office suite customers have the option to host their intranets on SharePoint Online at no additional expense. Will this be a game changer for the intranet market?
Intranets today have moved well beyond static content repositories toward fully functional digital workplaces. In recognition of this evolution, ClearBox Consulting grouped the Microsoft intranet offering SharePoint Online with Viva Connections and Viva Engage in their comprehensive annual intranet product review at the end of 2022. Their summary at the time suggests that it is best suited to smaller organizations as scaling and governance could be an issue for larger, more complex organizations.
"SharePoint out of the box lets you create simple and attractive intranets quickly and easily. Viva Connections adds an extra dimension to Teams, but at a corporate scale SharePoint and Connections can both be challenging to govern," they wrote.
How Are Organizations Really Using SharePoint Online?
We at SWOOP took a deep analytics dive into seven organizations using SharePoint Online for their intranet. These organizations installed our SWOOP SharePoint Online analysis software for the exercise. Two of these organizations would be considered large — one had over 40,000 and another over 20,000 active users, and over 12,000 intranet pages. We were therefore well-placed to test Clearbox’s assumptions.
Overall we analyzed the SharePoint intranet usage patterns of 92,717 employees across over 36,400 intranet pages, including 14,271 intranet news pages, across the seven organizations.
While our sample was small our analysis was comprehensive, assessing each page for:
- Number of Visitors
- Visit Time
- *Health: Engagement
- *Health: Experience
- *Health: Quality
- Page Creator/Editors
- Date/Time created/modified
- Page ID
- User ID
- Date/Time Viewed
- Page length, words, paragraphs
- Device used to access
*Health scores were assessed for quality (content currency, broken links, spelling, grammar etc), experience (readability) and engagement (time on page).
Related Article: How to Argue That You Need a New Intranet
Some Surprising Insights
The variation in performances across the different dimensions assessed is in general reflective of the early use of SharePoint Online. Organizations are still working out what works best. That said, we did identify some surprising insights:
What devices do employees use to access the intranet?
Their desktop.
Our benchmarking found 99.76% of employees access the intranet via their desktop. Only 0.22% of employees access the intranet via their phone and 0.02% by a tablet.
How long should an intranet news article be?
500 words or more.
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The top ranking 20% of news articles averaged around 500 words, which appears to be the sweet spot. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t a big drop off in readership if an article stretches to 1,500 words but news articles with 300 words or less had the least engagement.
How much time do employees spend visiting and reading the intranet?
17 minutes a day, on average.
Employees in our benchmarking cohort spent, on average, 17 minutes visiting the intranet. Visiting time ranged from a low of 11 minutes to a high of 22 minutes per work day, per employee. The average time spent reading news pages ranged from 4-16 minutes per day.
News page editors can expect to have an average 10 minutes per workday of an employee’s attention. For maximum impact, think about what key messages you would like to prioritize for the small window of attention available.
Related Article: The More Intranets Change, The More Intranet Needs Stay the Same
How Disruptive Might SharePoint Online Become?
While it’s still early days, there's little evidence that suggests SharePoint Online intranets could not be successfully introduced by organizations of all sizes. We typically find that larger organizations have lower participation/engagement rates than smaller organizations; but this is not restricted to intranets — it's the case for most digital platform applications. That said, being small also does not guarantee success. We had examples of small organizations that also had poor intranet engagement levels.
Governance at scale is always a challenge. Step Two founder and intranet guru James Robertson has identified that SharePoint Online’s distributed information architectures are significantly different to the traditional hierarchical information architecture adopted by traditional intranets. However, he shows how decades of intranet best practices can be adapted to support SharePoint Online installations.
Having “decoupled” digital workplace modules like Viva Connections and Viva Engage also work to SharePoint Online’s advantage. It means that online discussions do not have to be fragmented between say intranet content discussions, social media and social networking.
Overall I think that SharePoint Online will indeed have a disruptive impact on the existing intranet marketplace. I look forward to tracking its future as more organizations trial and/or adopt SharePoint Online as their intranet platform.
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