Visionaries driving digital transformation and creating the modern workplace know the intelligent intranet is the heart of a digital workplace. The intelligent intranet delivers experiences that provide shared content and solutions for collaboration, drives employee engagement and communications, and harnesses collective knowledge by connecting people and content.
Microsoft recently announced SharePoint home sites, the latest innovation for the intelligent intranet, powered by Microsoft 365.
SharePoint home sites are the landing sites for your organization that bring together news, events, content, conversations & video to deliver an engaging experience that reflects your voice, your priorities, and your brand. Homesites are built on top of familiar communication sites.
Home sites are natively responsive, so you can rest assured that every page will be beautiful, fast, and accessible on any device. Coming later this year, a dedicated home button will allow one touch access to your home site in the SharePoint mobile app. You can also configure your company logo in the Office 365 navbar to link to your home site. Doing this means your home site will always be one click away in any of the Microsoft 365 web applications.
Admins can configure a custom Microsoft 365 theme for their organization so that their company logo, i.e. Contoso Electronics, will take employees back to the home site from many Microsoft 365 web application. Support for larger images and additional file types has recently been added.
News can come from many different sites in your organization but often you want to have an “official” or “authoritative” site for organization news. Home sites allow you to balance organization news, which is distinguished with a visual cue, with personalized, relevant content that can be targeted to employees.
Engaging experiences are key to the intelligent intranet and home sites allow you easily embed conversations, video, and content from Microsoft 365 and more so you can connect with the information and activities that matter to you, across all your devices.
Building a great looking home sites shouldn’t have to take months. With the new organization design for communication sites, you have a great starter to get you going fast. New page options, like a vertical column, and ever-increasing list of out of the box web parts provide additional design options to meet your needs with less development time.
Once you have built your communication site how you like it, as the admin you can make it a home site with a simple PowerShell command. That PowerShell command will automate all the essential configurations for you:
- The site is configured as an official organizational news site.
- Search scope is set to tenant wide for the home site.
- Enables one click access from the SharePoint mobile app.
- Automatically connected to the SharePoint start page.
The SharePoint start page is connected to your home site with the My SharePoint link, and carries your home site branding to allow your employees to transition seamlessly between their “we space” and their “me space” with the “My SharePoint” link. Having personalized and relevant content is key to the success of the home site and SAT making it easy by providing several out-of-box user personalized webparts and the integrated experience with SharePoint start page.
SharePoint home sites empowers you to create beautiful, fast, natively mobile, digital experiences for organizations, divisions or functions with just a few clicks.
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