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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:13]:
There we go. New episode.
David Bowman [00:00:15]:
Welcome, welcome. Hello, Jarbas. Howre you doing?
Jarbas Horst [00:00:18]:
All good, David. How's it going?
David Bowman [00:00:20]:
Pretty good, thanks. Pretty good. You've kicked us off for this episode of why is my SharePoint a mess?
Jarbas Horst [00:00:25]:
I can't understand why we're asking that. That surprised me, actually, because you're so tidy. Well, our SharePoint looks good. Let's say that. But short introduction. I'm Jarbas Horst. I'm a senior Product Manager for Fresh.
David Bowman [00:00:37]:
And I am with David Bowman, Product Director for Fresh.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:40]:
That's great. Well, welcome everyone to Fresh Perspectives this episode. As David mentioned, we'll be handling this, I think. Tricky question. Why is my SharePoint a message? And maybe, David, we can start talking actually, about your trip to the US you have just returned from Chicago. How was the trip and why did you go there?
David Bowman [00:01:01]:
It was for work. I wasn't taking any time off. I spent most of it inside a hotel working very hard. Just in case there's anyone from Advania listening. We were there at a conference, sponsoring, exhibiting, running a workshop at the Reagan Employee Communications Conference. That's the one, yes. And that was three days over last week on an exhibition stand, having lots of conversations with mostly people from internal communications roles at a range of organizations mostly headquartered in the US really good conference. Loads of good topics.
David Bowman [00:01:37]:
Reagan run a, you know, really good series of events across cities in the U.S. cool.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:41]:
That's good. And so how well was the SharePoint theme represented across the event?
David Bowman [00:01:47]:
As we've talked about before. Right. Do you use SharePoint, do you love SharePoint in the kind of introductions to any conversations with people? And I think almost everybody that we talk to at those events is using it. I actually had two people that tell me that they were Google Houses at that conference, which is an interesting conversation because it is unusual to meet people that are kind of explicitly Google and 100% not Microsoft. So the conversations really are with people that are either using SharePoint and using it for intranet, or using SharePoint and something else for Intranet. So loads of great conversations with people about the challenges of doing all those things and talking about the reasons why people don't love SharePoint.
Jarbas Horst [00:02:26]:
What were the themes you identified kind of across these discussions?
David Bowman [00:02:30]:
There's kind of a mix of things in what people say in response. Right. Search, analytics, branding, as examples of areas of people not getting what they want out of the product. Too technical, overwhelming, underwhelming in some instances. Unfortunately, underneath it all, people just aren't doing SharePoint correctly, in my view. And that's an easy thing to say, but going about something like SharePoint that's so big in this ad hoc way, without really any structure underneath it or even a vague plan, in some instances, taking no time to understand the impact of the changes that you're making and then complaining about the fact that you can't find anything or it doesn't work, it's kind of a crazy situation. Everybody, I think, is guilty of perpetuating this problem. Microsoft, IT departments, IT consultancies, expensive contractors, everyone is fixing their problem in SharePoint without really considering the totality of what's going on in the box.
David Bowman [00:03:27]:
It's rare that any one person is in charge and it shows, right? So people just keep piling more stuff on top and saying, I can't find anything or I know what will solve this. More technology. Let's put another, another product, another platform in place.
Jarbas Horst [00:03:39]:
I think SharePoint is easy to start with, isn't it? So assuming that you have the permissions, the license, of course, with that foundation, you can go and create your site and you start adding content to that site. And then, as you mentioned, if you don't have a plan, this grows, right?
David Bowman [00:03:56]:
It's really easy to pilot something in there. It's really easy to proof of concept something in there. It's easy to just start creating sites that don't belong to anything else. And unfortunately, all of that stuff ends up turning up in people's search results or in web parts or in emails that are being generated automatically without some level of planning and consideration. You've got all of these overlapping things colliding with each other under the hood.
Jarbas Horst [00:04:22]:
Yeah, well, talking about kind of new additions to SharePoint, we have kind of noticed one, I think, common theme emerging from all of those new few functionalities that Microsoft has released recently, which is the aspect of governance. How do you see that?
David Bowman [00:04:38]:
Yeah, well, you know, look, I think it's possible to turn anything into a mess when you haven't got a plan, right? The idea of governance, of just having some level of planning, a discussion, some consideration for we've got this thing that we need to do and it's going to create some new stuff in SharePoint. What are we doing with it? What's our plan to make sure it's not then colliding with everything else we've got under the hood. There's a kind of a good example of what to do when you think about Viva Engage as a solution. Right. Viva Engage is a Microsoft 365 application that has a pretty limited scope Right. You could list out the use cases pretty easily, maybe even on the fingers of both hands, right? Of here's what it does, here's the problems that it can solve, here's the things that it can fix. It's quite a nice kind of tidy, self contained application with a defined set of use cases. It is a workload for providing enterprise social features and functionality to your employees.
David Bowman [00:05:36]:
It's pretty easy to turn on, you can switch it on, you can make it active, you can give everybody access. It often has a high initial impact, right. But without some level of management, adoption can drop over time. Even as a self contained thing, it needs a plan, it needs an owner, it needs some management and it needs monitoring. Right? It's meeting our objectives over time. Are people using it, are they getting what we thought that they would get out of it? And I think, you know, it's a great example of this self contained workload, small number of use cases that actually needs a reasonable amount of management and input to keep it on the rails.
Jarbas Horst [00:06:10]:
That's interesting because now if you Compare that with SharePoint that stands so open. If you think of the concept of the page, the page can serve so many different purpose. So it can be kind of a news post, it can be kind of a content page, it can be focusing on a policy. And that's just looking at the pages, right? So imagine how SharePoint as this entity, how many scenarios that can address. And now you're comparing that with VivaEngage, that's like this point solution for a specific use case.
David Bowman [00:06:39]:
We've talked before about thinking about things in SharePoint as individual workloads, right? Of making sure we've got some definition around. If this is our intranet, what is it that belongs to the intranet? What are the sites in the intranet? What content lives in the intranet? What's its purpose? Who's responsible for this workload in the intranet? And I just think trying to chunk SharePoint up into these workloads is maybe a kind of helpful concept for people to think about.
Jarbas Horst [00:07:04]:
Good point. Well, if we maybe like continue looking at SharePoint and we cover some recent additions, we have talked about that already, like I think in a previous episode and some additions that kind of connected to this aspect of governance and of this ongoing change because they're new things, right?
David Bowman [00:07:21]:
You've got kind of SharePoint as it is today of content pages, lists, libraries, sites. There's a level of governance that's needed for the stuff that exists in SharePoint today. And there are some New things that are going to introduce either an increase in the amount of content that you're creating in those existing SharePoint sites or are going to create new things that require some level of management.
Jarbas Horst [00:07:42]:
Yeah, well, just mentioned, right. So the additions, they are great. Microsoft has put a lot of investment in the past two years and if we look at the pages and how that has evolved, and also things like the brand center providing custom fonts, those are great additions. Right.
David Bowman [00:07:59]:
And in response to common customer feedback, right. It's easy to say, you know, Microsoft don't listen to what customers want in SharePoint. Well, these are examples of things that customers have been asking for. Fonts, design options, layout, branding, UI. These are some really powerful additions that can turn SharePoint into something that feels a bit more like WordPress. Right. You've got a lot of flexibility over how the page looks and works.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:24]:
Now let's take a few examples of those recent additions. One of those aspects, or think functionalities is design ideas. So design ideas is like an AI powered capability within pages that you can use to get AI suggestions for how content should be presented on a page.
David Bowman [00:08:42]:
So this is a bit like if you're in PowerPoint and you've created a new PowerPoint slide and there's a panel that comes up on the right hand side that says here's some suggestions for this slide.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:51]:
Exactly that, exactly. I think it's a very good comparison. So then you have that optional on SharePoint pages. Right. So kind of aligns with your, as you mentioned, like your experiences across Microsoft 365 with PowerPoint, for example. So you can reuse that now on a page, which is great, right? So you can focus on your message and you have maybe AI giving you suggestions for how that page can look like now also I think important to mention is that you need also to keep in mind there is a spec that you can go beyond what your organization wants in terms of look and feel for the page. Usually, especially when we're talking about workloads, we want the concept of the Intranet to be consistent to an extent of consistency.
David Bowman [00:09:34]:
The thing that we're driving for here is that a single user that is navigating around the intranet is feeling a kind of sense of familiarity in the content that it's looking at, that it's not jumping from something that is kind of loads of animation, bright green, to a page that's also in the intranet that is kind of maybe a bit more black and white.
Jarbas Horst [00:09:52]:
Well, yeah, like reflecting the corporate guidelines for branding. So I think that's, that's something that's important when you are creating of this consistency level across the intranet. So that's one thing to consider when you're using the design idea. So then we have flexible layouts so far. When you are creating the sections on a page, so you have kind of, you know, like the different columns that it supports, up to three columns.
David Bowman [00:10:15]:
For people that maybe aren't aware of this, when you create a new content page in SharePoint, you have a maximum of a three column layout, is that right?
Jarbas Horst [00:10:23]:
Yes, that's correct.
David Bowman [00:10:24]:
And you have some, you know, you've got some variation there. Right. You can have one wide column, one narrow column, one narrow column, one wide column, one wide column or three columns. But you are working within a sort of fixed layout of each page. And that's now changing because there's a new layout type.
Jarbas Horst [00:10:40]:
Yeah. So that layout type is called like flexible layout. It's a section that you can add like to a page as you can like do with the other columns, sections that you mentioned. And that gives you up to 12 columns that you can now use, but they are flexible. So you know, you can take your web path, you can resize it so that it can fit kind of different areas of this section.
David Bowman [00:11:02]:
There's a snappable grid that you can drag the web parts onto the kind of line them up manually. You've got quite a lot of control over how the page looks.
Jarbas Horst [00:11:11]:
You can overlap web parts, you can create kind of different look and feels. Now like with this option, it's really flexible. So if you have a bit of a sense for design, I think you can really go quite wild in terms of content you can create or like how you can present your content, which.
David Bowman [00:11:27]:
Is great for people that are good at doing layout pages.
Jarbas Horst [00:11:29]:
Yeah, it's not me just to mention that, but like, you know this, the challenge I think is again, like, you know, you have all of this flexibility and you need to make sure again that you are creating something that aligns with the concept, the overall concept. That's the only thing that you keep in mind when you are giving people like these options that they are following kind of the overall corporate branding.
David Bowman [00:11:51]:
Yeah. Because there isn't at the moment, there isn't any way of fixing how much flexibility people can have. User A and user B, as long as they have some level of edit permissions, have full control over what they want that page to look like.
Jarbas Horst [00:12:07]:
It's a good point as far as I am aware of. Think about the design Idea. So there is no option to turn it off that's per page. Right. So it's a functionality that it's available at page level. So there is also like no governance at a central level that would allow you like to turn that off for all pages, not even like for a page level. So in that case, I think you need the adoption aspect to tell people how they can use that feature, how to use that. I think that would be important.
David Bowman [00:12:36]:
Yeah. So if you're the owner of a SharePoint intranet and you've got a team of content creators in your organization that have the ability to be able to edit and create and modify pages in your intranet, they're probably going to need some guidance and some training on whether they should be using these flexible layouts and if they are using them, to what level should they be using these flexible layouts. So that, you know, at the moment that's a kind of training manual, human to human support thing. There isn't really any functionality in SharePoint that's going to do that for you.
Jarbas Horst [00:13:09]:
Yes, that's a good point. And well then let's kind of continue like this. The journey of new features that have been recently added, a new one, and it's a big one, is the ability to create pages using SharePoint. So as you know, right. So so far, when you go like to that new dropdown on a, on a site, you can choose like from a news post a page. And now like there are also like many other options there. And now there's a new option that's called kind of Create with Copilot. Create a page with Copilot or Copilot Page.
David Bowman [00:13:40]:
Just so we're clear, I think we forgot to mention this. We're talking about flexible layouts. Flexible layouts is something that is available for everyone on all SharePoint licenses. And this thing that we're now Talking about, the SharePoint Copilot page creation requires you to have a Copilot license, right?
Jarbas Horst [00:13:55]:
That's good. That's a good point. Yeah. Well, with that requirement in mind, so if you have the license, then you can use Copilot to create a page when you click that button. So an interface opens and then that allows you like to create a page using a Copilot enabled template, or you can create the page based on the prompt. So you can choose one of that option. Let's say you go with a Copilot enabled template. You choose your template, you get some text that allows you to provide some instructions for how that page can be Created, you can provide the reference document, which might be an existing maybe like the transcript of your town hall event.
Jarbas Horst [00:14:33]:
So maybe you want to create a page about that to promote kind of the town hall session. And you can also provide basic things like the content length and the tone of voice. So you do that, you hit the kind of the create button and then copilot will literally open the page creation experience and will start adding content in that page. So that happens live, basically, which, you know, is quite exciting. I think now at this point it's a bit limited what you can do with copilot in terms of content creation. Right. It will be very focused on text. So now that doesn't mean that this is.
Jarbas Horst [00:15:09]:
That Copilot will kind of create the entire page content and you publish that straight away. So actually when Copilot is done, you are still kind of in control of that creation experience. So you can still go there further, edit the content using rewrite with Copilot. So that's an option that's available with the text web part. Or you can of course, just create the page the way you want, add additional content, add additional web parts. Because Copilot will not be adding things like a quick links web part or basic things like that also are not support at this point. But definitely something we should be on the lookout for because definitely I believe that this will improve over time.
David Bowman [00:15:46]:
So this is kind of a way of making creating SharePoint pages, particularly when using existing content. You mentioned the kind of script from the town hall or a new product briefing, something like that of being able to create quickly create SharePoint pages using that existing content.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:01]:
Yeah, it's a quick way. Right. So we're using generative AI to help you craft the message on your page. And in the future it might be doing more than just adding kind of the text there, there.
David Bowman [00:16:11]:
So I guess kind of on that theme of governance, we've got some new superpowers for UI design of individual pages. We've got the ability to create more content pages. Automating the creation of pages using copilot.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:26]:
Those are kind of tangible options, depending of course, on the license you have. So then you can also make use of that or not. It's still like on this aspect of licensing or things that require license. Let's say there are agents now.
David Bowman [00:16:39]:
Yep.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:39]:
So we talked about that also, like previously, agents are now part of SharePoint as well. So that means that maybe. Let's start with the use case. Right. So in SharePoint, we have a lot of knowledge there that we have been collecting over time. We have been SharePoint is known like for being the place for storing documents and different type of files. So you have all of that information now and now you can add an agent so you can extract information from that knowledge. You can now create the same way as you can create documents.
Jarbas Horst [00:17:10]:
You can create now agents. Now that will be then looking across a set of predefined files to extract information from it.
David Bowman [00:17:18]:
So my understanding of this is that this is allowing you to create a new file type in SharePoint which is the definition of an agent. And an agent can be something like a document or a series of documents or a library or some content that lives in a SharePoint site. And there is a definition, the agent defines those content items in SharePoint. You can publish the agent in a SharePoint site so that when a user visits your SharePoint site, they can then have a conversation with the content that you've predefined. So example that we were talking about in your intranet, you've got a kind of new product site that lives in your intranet. You're going to create an agent that wraps up some information about your new product, a briefing schema, specification files, some pricing, a bunch of content and information that's going to allow users, visitors to this new product site to ask some questions about the new product rather than opening the specification, digging through a large document, looking at files. I guess in the responses that this agent is producing, it's probably, you know, adding the citations to the documents, whether answers are coming from. But this is, you know, a really nice way of being able to help people have a Q and A with the content.
David Bowman [00:18:30]:
The agents can be added into a teams conversation.
Jarbas Horst [00:18:33]:
The ability for sharing, I think Microsoft is working on that right now so that you're going to be able to share kind of this expert because now it has the knowledge of all of those documents across the different places and teams is one of them. It's valuable, right? Very useful.
David Bowman [00:18:48]:
So you know the kind of extension of that scenario that you've got a product and sales chat that's happening in teams of being able to add, you know, as you say, the subject matter expert agent that understands the content into that conversation as well, that you're able to, as the sales and the product teams are having a dialogue, are able to ask this agent some questions in that conversation. And that's something that's being created in the SharePoint site.
Jarbas Horst [00:19:13]:
Yes. So by default, just to mention that Also any, each SharePoint site will have a default agent that is already kind of scoped to the content of that site and then as a user you can create additional agents. I think the challenge here is that like any user can then create an agent as they can create files, presumably.
David Bowman [00:19:32]:
If you're a content creator. So you've got permissions to be able to upload, update, add documents, modify content pages. You also have permissions to be able to create agents in those sites, right?
Jarbas Horst [00:19:43]:
Yes. Well, again, thinking of the licensing aspect, the Copilot license there is also like this pay as you go option. We don't need to get into detail but like a license, the next license to be able to create agents. So with that in mind, then you can exactly so create those agents. That means like any user with the license and the permissions will be able to create an agent, which might mean that over time we might end up with a lot of agents across your SharePoint across like in this site, maybe just focusing on that.
David Bowman [00:20:14]:
In the same way that you may end up in some SharePoint sites with duplicate files, content policies. There is also now the potential to have these kind of overlapping or duplicate agents that if different people have created them, they may have been created with a slightly different set of content in.
Jarbas Horst [00:20:31]:
It could be the same like different agents looking into the same library, but maybe one is covering one document more. Just like you know, if you're focusing like being very specific with the content that an agent can support. So we have talked like so much, not like us, but like there has been so many discussion around governance and sprawl of content, looking at teams and SharePoint sites, making sure that don't have documents with the same names, preventing, trying to like, you know, there are solutions focused on trying to prevent that from happening. And now we have kind of the same scenario, a new scenario now with agents. So that's the thing that might increase over time that might make SharePoint be like more mass if we think of that.
David Bowman [00:21:14]:
And again, I think the kind of common theme across these three items that we've been talking about is kind of introducing some new responsibilities for governance, for planning. It's probably worth saying that it would be very easy, I think, to overplay the concerns on governance here. Right. Because people aren't, not all people, all people aren't naturally curious about this stuff. Right? You don't have 100% of your organization that have got access to SharePoint are going to suddenly start using the flexible layouts and the brand center to create these. In some cases amazing, in some cases less amazing pages in SharePoint not everybody is going to be creating content with SharePoint Copilot and not everybody is going to be inclined to be creating agents, but it is having some. For the moment it is kind of manual rules or definition on how many should be created, in what circumstances, having some levels of approval over who is setting standards with flexible layouts, with agents. How much content should we now be creating using Copilot?
Jarbas Horst [00:22:11]:
There are basic functionalities in place in SharePoint that already help you achieve that. First of all, like working with page templates, so providing already kind of a definition of what good looks like and then making sure that if you want to create a new post, this is what you should be using, adding an approval process in place, you can enable that for your pages. So making sure that before something gets published there is someone who is approving, making sure that that content is aligned with your strategy.
David Bowman [00:22:41]:
And those approvals may be kind of temporary. Right. It doesn't. As flexible layouts are new in the tenant, it may be introducing some approvals to see how it goes. Right. And then retreat from those later. So it's easy to make it sound like we're saying that these three things are introducing some new problems to take care of. Actually these are three extremely powerful new features that are being added inside of SharePoint and they're good reasons for people to be using SharePoint.
David Bowman [00:23:06]:
What we're really saying is spending more time thinking about how they will be utilized to provide solutions to end user problems.
Jarbas Horst [00:23:15]:
Yeah, well, definitely. Well, I think my summary on this part is like, especially when I talk about the pages, keep in mind like the page template approval, maybe an editorial calendar also to give you an overview of that content if we, you know, move on and look. So, you know, we have talked about things of bearing in mind when creating our content or like some new options in SharePoint, but there are also like aspects in SharePoint that are very important and crucial to keep in mind.
David Bowman [00:23:44]:
This is kind of underpinning the reasons that it's worth putting the investment into SharePoint and putting the time and energy into kind of structuring what's going on in SharePoint into these workloads. Right. Data security, the breadth of functionality that's available. You know, we were talking About Viva, Engage, SharePoint. These are highly available services that are included in licenses that most people have already got. Right. There's a huge amount of power at people's fingertips inside Microsoft 365 already.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:10]:
Yeah, well, I think also keeping in mind that your organization might have done investment in SharePoint or in Microsoft 365 so you have SharePoint and you can use that. People say like it's for free, so you know your organization is paying for that license already. So maybe instead of thinking I'm not going to use SharePoint at all because I don't see benefits and I should like go with a third part solution, say like to thinking of the workload of an Intranet so I can solve that specific problem. Look at SharePoint like there are all of those aspects that you mentioned here, especially like the investment that your IT department has put into making this like a secure place.
David Bowman [00:24:46]:
And a badly managed third party solution can still look like a dog's dinner at the end of the day. It doesn't mean that you automatically get some neat and tidy solution without any additional effort being put in.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:55]:
Well, we talked about Viva Engage, which kind of is a point solution, right? So that without governance and that you know, the same can also apply with third party solution as well. And also like one thing to keep in mind with third party solution, when you are buying it, they're usually not just giving you like the solution saying look, go there and start with it. Usually those suppliers will also give you like training and will work with you like an information architecture. There is also a project that goes there to make sure that that solution will be successful. So keep that in mind. Also for SharePoint, we've talked a lot.
David Bowman [00:25:27]:
About problems today and highlighting some new things to be aware of that are going to be appearing in SharePoint and your intranet. If you're using SharePoint for your intranet. We've mentioned the G Word governance a few times. In my experience, governance, if you've never had any experience with it before, feels like this big complicated thing that you've got to spend loads and loads of time creating these great big documents that go in the drawer and gather dust and no one looks at. Again, if this is a new concept for people today, where should they start?
Jarbas Horst [00:25:53]:
Here I think just don't rush into starting a new workload or adding some new random thing without thinking about the impact it will have. It's easier if you have basics written down like what are your workloads? Where do they begin and end? What kinds of content belong in each workload? Some guidance on if you need a new workload, where is it going? Who owns it? How might it expand? How will it affect the other workloads? If we're thinking of the Intranet as a workload, so how will that interplay with, let's say your social enterprise network? I don't think it should be controversial to say that investment is required, expertise is needed upfront. So before you start your project already at that planning phase, but also continuously. Right. So you need to keep maintaining it over time as well. So if you don't have the knowledge in house, I think it's also legend to say that, you know, go look for it outside the organization. And, you know, I think that good outcomes aren't easy, and the sooner that people understand and support that, the better.
David Bowman [00:27:00]:
Great advice, and let's conclude the episode on that note. Jarbas, good to see you, buddy.
Jarbas Horst [00:27:06]:
Likewise. Cheers.