Advantages and Disadvantages of a SharePoint Intranet

SharePoint, a Microsoft’s platform is still one of the most popular intranet platforms worldwide, because it gives access in creating intranets with very strong business and social features.

Now we are going to discuss about pros and cons of SharePoint intranet so that it will help you in choosing the best for your business requirements, collaboration patterns, and budgeting strategy.

1. Out-of-the-box SharePoint features

This SharePoint features analyzes default capabilities of your intranet and its potential for further extension and changes

Advantage – Rich set of features are obtained

When the Out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet portal is deployed, a variety of features ensuring document and SharePoint workflow management, SharePoint content management, enterprise-wide and team collaboration, task and issue management, learning management, and more are obtained. Out-of-the-box SharePoint features helps in processing the task faster with less effort.

Advanced SharePoint features provides you a new dimension for your SharePoint Portal through mixed reality technology called SharePoint Spaces. This helps the customers to view and interact with content in 3D, also visualize and manipulate data and product models in real- time. This also brings a brand-new opportunity for interaction, collaboration and employee training.

Content collaboration is done through AI capabilities in SharePoint. AI is an advanced technology which helps in building the understanding of what, how and with whom you work to expedite your job-related activities, with this user productivity is increased due to focusing on the required activities.

Disadvantage – Too many features can cause confusion

Choosing the best and fitting features to your business requirement leads to less confusion, because SharePoint has variety of built-in features and one should know and understand the priority of the SharePoint features.

To fix this, one should understand the business needs, employees` requirements and collaboration habits on the relevant SharePoint for intranet features.

2. Design of SharePoint intranet portal

This feature analyzes how willingly the employees are going to use an intranet.

Advantage – Leverage SharePoint modern experience

SharePoint modern experience provides creating a beautiful, flexible, and adaptive sites out-of-the-box. Modern sites always stand out when compared to old sites because they avoid stale layout techniques, typography, etc. with high speed and they are mobile responsive.

Disadvantage – SharePoint modern sites have limitations

SharePoint modern sites do have limitations, because they are created as site collections and impossible to implement a sub-site with a modern site template. They always have classic templates for creating sub-sites. One of the major drawbacks is you can`t change the master page and access the site using SharePoint Designer.

3. Customization of SharePoint intranet

The intranet adaptability analyzes how easily and deeply one can change out-of-the-box features to get an optimal result for your enterprise.

Advantage – Create a unique SharePoint intranet

Not all organizations work with out-of-the-box SharePoint, as it can’t fit a business context. Customizing SharePoint intranets by adding corporate branding and developing custom add-ins and full-fledged solutions to complete a specific activity is always required by the organizations. One of the major SharePoint intranet advantages is, you can develop an exclusive solution that covers a variety of process, which purely depends on ready-made task-oriented solution.

One thing to remember is that cloud intranet customization differs from on-premises intranet tuning and has its own limitations, many organizations tweak their cloud solutions.

Disadvantage – Time and costs customization

SharePoint intranets customization will require time and investments, but they are user-friendly. The bigger you want to customize your intranet, the bigger the investments would be.

4. SharePoint intranet with enterprise systems integration

This is an integration capability which will determine the place of intranet among other enterprise systems, also influence the quality of collaboration.

Advantage – Enabling cross-department collaboration

One of the major advantages of SharePoint is it can be easily integrated with CRM, ERP, BI, ITSM systems and other software.

Disadvantage – Integration requires more development effort

SharePoint integration related issues should be considered as very important, because they include time and cost to your project and in case of failure, employee’s productivity will be impacted. Each integration case has its own features, if you tend to use a custom ERP system, you`ll have to create another custom solution to relate your ERP system with a SharePoint intranet.

5. Services of SharePoint for your intranet

Workforce availability analyze SharePoint intranet vitality and its performance. This is very crucial for companies that don’t have SharePoint teams and as a result they look for outside SharePoint services.

Advantage – Users can address multiple service providers

Finding a SharePoint service providers are very easy, and they will maintain customized intranet solution, including customization, migration and 24/7 support.

Disadvantage – Quality of service may vary

Since you don’t have your own SharePoint team, you will be dependent on different service providers to address different issues. Each service provides will they have their own approaches in solving the issues. To avoid this, you will have to choose one or two permanent service providers to work with you continuously.

6. SharePoint intranet cost

There are minimum three SharePoint deployment models (example: on premises, cloud and hybrid) and the cost of the models varies.

Advantage – Deciding best pricing model

In the initial stage, there weren’t many options to choose and the pricing consists of infrastructure licenses and service. Currently Microsoft has diversified their options with various cloud plans and payment schemes.

Disadvantage – Final bill varies

The major investments should be invested is On-premises intranets including infrastructure, licenses and customization. Comparatively cloud based intranets leads you in cost cutting in infrastructure but monthly subscription payments will be included. Hybrid solution requires investment in both on-premises and cloud SharePoint.

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