15 Oct
15 SharePoint Intranet Examples and Free Templates
“What are the modern SharePoint intranet capabilities?” “What are some good intranet design examples of SharePoint Online, 2019, 2016?” “What are the popular SharePoint templates for companies?”
“Can you show some examples of SharePoint intranet homepages and landing pages?” “Are there any easy-to-deploy and free SharePoint templates?”
These are some questions that clients usually ask us when they’re deploying or modernizing a SharePoint intranet for their organization. Along with SharePoint, the intranets based on it also have evolved to a great extent.
So, in this article, we would like to share various examples and free templates of a modern SharePoint intranet and discuss the latest capabilities you should be aware of.
Without further ado, let’s explore some awesome examples of a SharePoint intranet like Mesh 3.0 and out-of-the-box templates provided for free by Microsoft.
(Click here if you’d like to jump directly to the templates section )
SharePoint Intranet Examples
1. Home Page
Here’s an example of a SharePoint intranet home page – the place where your employees land as soon as they login to the intranet. Personalization is the lifeblood of modern intranets and it should be reflected across the homepage.
Right from company news, management speak, HR policy updates, helpdesk requests to recommended articles, videos, events, documents and the right people to connect with – everything should be personalized to users’ role, location, preferences, and interests.
2. Human Resources
As you can see in this example of a SharePoint HR site, employees will have a one-stop hub for all HR tools. Employees can raise HR requests, apply for PTO, access information related to employee benefits, check career development opportunities, get HR documents and more!
In the top sections of the site, you can add content about latest company news, changes to HR policies, updates, and upcoming holidays.
3. Cognitive Enterprise Search
Enterprise search is a key functionality of a digital workplace. Modern intranets like Mesh provide a Cognitive Enterprise Search capability that provides information from all your third-party business apps with high search relevance. No need to spend hours switching apps to search for information.
Like in the example given above, you can get personalized recommendations on the documents to refer and people to connect.
Learn More: Amazing Benefits Of Enabling Enterprise Search In Your Intranet
4. Intranet Content Management System
SharePoint intranets provide an easy-to-use content management system with which content authors can create and publish content in just a few clicks. You can use intuitive tools to publish different types of content including stories, blogs, news, polls, announcements, images, videos and more!
Using content targeting tools you can push content to a specific group of audience based on departments, locations, roles etc. All this can be done with zero reliance on the IT department.
Learn More: A Guide For Mastering Intranet Content Management And Strategy
5. Business Intelligence and LoB Hub
Did you know that you can now access your business analytics dashboards and reports within an intranet? SharePoint intranets like Mesh integrates with your Line of Business (LoB) apps and Business Intelligence (BI) apps like PowerBI, Tableau, Qlikview and so on.
This means you no longer need to open these apps to monitor your business KPIs or fetch reports. You can do this at the convenience of your intranet. In addition, alerts can also be enabled to notify you on the changes in your KPIs.
In the above examples, you can see an employee headcount dashboard for HR executives and an incident report for IT helpdesk staff.
6. Navigation
Navigation is a critical feature which impacts an intranet’s usability. A Quick Links module can help users navigate through sites easily. This module needs to have site links which are common for any user e.g helpdesk, HR services, and people directory as well as links to sites which the user prefers or visits the most.
Watch These Capabilities In Action.
Presenting World’s Best Employee Experience Platform – Mesh!
Liked the above-mentioned capabilities and examples? They’re a part of Acuvate’s Employee Experience Platform – Mesh!
Mesh breaks down app silos and acts as a central digital hub to collaborate, communicate, search and share information.
Get in touch with us to see a demo.
9 Free SharePoint Templates You Should Explore
Struggling to design your intranet?
Thanks to the ready-to-use and free SharePoint templates provided by Microsoft, building a well-designed SharePoint or Office 365 intranet has never been faster or simpler. Microsoft provides 20+ free templates for SharePoint Online, 2019 and 2016 which you can deploy out-of-the-box.
You can find these in the Microsoft Lookbook site and add to your tenant from there.
In the section below, we’ll explore some templates which we loved and their interesting capabilities.
1. Leadership Connection
The Leadership Connection template is aimed towards keeping employees connected with the leadership team. You can add content related to leadership news, goals, events, articles, videos, announcements and more!
2. The Perspective
This free SharePoint template is designed to deliver the latest news and personalized content and drive engagement. The Perspective comes with a host of features including background, mega menu, and compact header.
3. Crisis Communications
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the creation of the Crisis Communication template. This site lets you keep people informed, engaged and up-to-date with the latest announcements.
4. Benefits
Benefits is another interesting SharePoint template available for free. The page provides all of the information employees need to learn about their financial, medical, insurance and other types of benefits they may be entitled to.
5. Global Marketing Hub
With the Global Marketing Hub, your marketing teams can have a central hub to access branding information, collaterals, best practices, creatives, Office documents and everything they need to get their job done.
6. Team Communication
The Team Communication site lets you communicate with your peers through document sharing, resources, conversations and news. It also shows the relevant people and contacts to connect with.
7. Collaboration Team Site
The Collaboration Team Site enables you to collaborate at a team level. It has many components including latest news, quick links, documents, activites.
8. Mark8 Project Team
Need a robust project management portal? Using PowerBI, Planner and other project-related web parts, the Mark8 Project Team site provides you everything you need from project planning and progress, to tracking results.
9. New Employee Onboarding Hub
With 4 different site templates, The New Employee Onboarding Hub streamlines your onboarding process both at a corporate and departmental level.
Get Started With Your SharePoint Intranet
These are the top SharePoint intranet examples and templates of SharePoint for free. These templates can be further customized and defined based on your organizational requirements when you’re deploying a SharePoint intranet like Mesh.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate has been helping several large and medium enterprises in their SharePoint initiatives. If you need help in deploying your intranet or redesigning an existing one, please feel free to get in touch with one of our SharePoint experts for a personalized consultation.
Further Insights:
Sareen Madupu is a Product Manager for Mesh at Acuvate. He has around 9 years of experience in Usability and User Experience of Digital Interfaces. He has been with Acuvate for 7 years and worked on concepting UX of 30+ intranets.
Sareen Babu