
What is the SharePoint platform?
Intranet is a key solution for facilitating communication and collaboration among employees. It enables information sharing, resource management and document sharing in a secure, controlled environment. In an era of digital transformation and the need for quick access to key data, the Intranet has become an indispensable tool in many enterprises. The SharePoint Online platform is one of the popular solutions for creating such solutions, which integrate with other cloud services and offer a wide range of functionality.
At the time of solutions built mainly in local server rooms, SharePoint was also popular, however it often caused many problems at the stage of implementation itself as well as adaptation by users. This was often due to the peculiarities of the platform - quite a lot of features had to be created completely from scratch or existing features were significantly modified. In the end, such functions were able to effectively delay the implementation of the Intranet or sometimes block it completely.
SharePoint has undergone a very big transformation in the era of cloud solutions and now offers a lot of off-the-shelf components. The amount of necessary modifications is now low and often an Intranet can be created completely from ready-made components.
Key features of SharePoint Online
Below, I will demonstrate some of the most important elements of SharePoint Online that significantly accelerate the creation of an Intranet while offering modern features.
1. graphics/design
The intranet should be nice and readable. One can argue over this, however, graphic customization of the portal has been and will continue to be a very important element. SharePoint offers some interesting features that provide quite a bit of freedom to customize the color scheme and design.
Graphic themes allow us to customize most elements of the Intranet to our needs (captions, buttons, text, etc.). We can freely change the themes depending on the period or special events.
Automatic scaling of pages and content allows the Intranet to be displayed legibly on various devices without the need for additional customization of the portal.
An image bank and ready-made icons additionally help create nice pages and present content without the need for graphic design specialists.

2. news
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An intranet is all about communicating with employees, so creating and publishing news or updates is the most important function for many companies. SharePoint offers several ready-made features that are worth knowing.
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News editing
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Creating news is the first step in the process of editing and publishing new content. SharePoint allows you to create pages with content, multimedia, graphics, tables and other embedded elements. An automatic versioning mechanism helps keep control over changes to pages and for quick restoration of previous versions.

Publishing news
Content publication can be done manually (the author publishes his page or news item when it is ready) or automatically through a built-in scheduling mechanism. This allows you to schedule publication for a longer period of time.
Displaying news
There are several options for displaying news and content. On the main page of the Intranet or department, we can display the latest content in the form of a "carousel" with banners. In addition, we can also display them in the form of a list or tiles and additionally filter them according to the parameters we set.
In the case of a hierarchical structure (the main site and the departmental sites connected to it) then we also have a mechanism for displaying news from the sub-sites (for example, on the main site we will display content from the HR site).

3. documents
The intranet is also about documents - guides, company policies, templates, presentations, forms, excel calculators, photos of company outings and much more. All this, of course, should be categorized and made available to users accordingly.
SharePoint has heavily developed mechanisms for storing, editing and sharing content. We can describe Intranet files using metadata, group them into folders and then share them with designated users. All changes to documents are versioned and we can quickly restore the previous version.
In addition, SharePoint allows you to store large files (up to 250GB per document) and share them outside the company (e.g. for partners or colleagues).

4 Search engine
Searching for content on the intranet must work quickly and efficiently. SharePoint Online allows you to search by both published content (e.g. news, content) and documents posted on the portal. What's more, the search engine is integrated with Microsoft 365, and regardless of where we use it, it will search all the content available to us (our file and content permissions are automatically checked - if we don't have read rights, the search engine won't show us such data).

5. video content
Video publishing is becoming an increasingly important part of Intranets - video tutorials, training, project materials or recordings of company meetings. For a long time, Microsoft Stream served as a corporate YouTub, but it had several limitations and integration with SharePoint was not complete. Today, SharePoint has taken over Stream's functions and acts as a place to store and play videos. In addition, it has been enhanced with additional features such as, full integration of video content with Microsoft 365 and creation of playlists. We can embed videos on any Intranet page as links or ready-to-view videos.

6. integrations with business applications
The Intranet also includes business applications - both those built on Microsoft 365 and external applications. With full integration with Microsoft 365, SharePoint provides support for other services (e.g. Power Apps, Power BI). This means that we can embed finished applications built in these tools directly on the Intranet, and we can exchange data between the Intranet and other services. In addition, an action on the Intranet (e.g., adding a contract to the appropriate folder) can result in the automatic launch of a business process (e.g., contract workflow). Such processes can move within Microsoft 365 as well as connect to external services (e.g., the company's SAP) and provide additional functionality.

SharePoint extension
What if built-in webparts and features are not enough for me? Here, SharePoint Framework comes to the rescue - a dedicated programming framework that allows building dedicated webparts and components. Such components can have any of our logic and functions that we lack in SharePoint. Custom components can also connect to other Microsoft 365 services and display aggregated data to users. E.g. we need a calendar view with advanced filters and visualizations - we can achieve this by creating a webpart using the described framework.Â
Microsoft is constantly supporting and expanding the capabilities of the SharePoint Framework, so it has more and more capabilities and features.Â
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New features in SharePoint
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1.Copilot in SharePoint
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AI is making its way into SharePoint. Microsoft has already announced several versions of Copilot - from dedicated ones in Teams or Dynamics 365 to generic ones like Copilot in Microsoft 365. SharePoint will also get its dedicated AI module which will be responsible for content generation and site creation.Â
Copilot will be able to create content on its own on the basis of provided documents - for example, we will point it to a company presentation and on this basis it will create us a page with content and graphics from this presentation. Once generated, we will be able to modify or improve such a page.
The second main application is site creation - for example, we will ask Copilot to prepare a site for the HR department based on the indicated documents. AI will prepare the site, embed content and webparts with graphics and links. Using the built-in chat, we will be able to point out elements for improvement or modification.

2. coauthoring in pages
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Currently, pages in SharePoint can be edited by one editor at a time. This is one of the biggest limitations of the platform - if we want to correct something and someone else is already editing the indicated page, we have to wait until they finish their work.
The new feature will allow several editors to work simultaneously on 1 page. Exactly the same as with Word - we will be able to see who is editing the page besides us. This is a very big convenience for larger companies.
3. Microsoft Lists
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Lists, next to libraries, is the basic element in SharePoint for storing data. Currently, it already provides a great deal of functionality useful in an intranet, and visually it can be easily customized. Upcoming features will further improve the operation of lists - a faster user interface, grouping in grid view, adding images by dragging, expanded forms (without the use of Power Apps) or improved filters.

Advantages of SharePoint Online
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SharePoint Online has many built-in features that can be customized very quickly. Ready-made components make it much easier not only to create, but also to maintain and further expand the portal. Modern design, support for mobile devices, graphical themes or video support are just a slice of SharePoint's capabilities. Integration with Microsoft 365 makes it possible to use data from other services and build business applications running on the platform.
If that's not enough for us, we can always use dedicated solutions and expand the functionality according to our needs.
- Support and development of Microsoft and Nintex based applications
- Application design and development including digital processes
- Invoice management
- Requisition management
- Contract management
- Modern Intranet
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