At a basic level, intranets based on SharePoint are just like every other intranet. The same questions of design, structure, management and governance arise, regardless of the technology used to publish the site.

As discussed in the earlier article Promoting the intranet as a service, the intranet should be considered a service, underpinned by a technology product.

SharePoint does, however, introduce some new questions into the intranet planning process. The greatest strength of SharePoint is its breadth of functionality, from content publishing and collaboration, to CRM and application development.

It is this wide range of capabilities that can be so daunting for many teams. Without a clear plan, the results can become a little bit of everything, but no one clear and compelling success.

This article outlines a best-practice methodology for planning SharePoint-based intranet projects. Drawing on the Intranet Roadmap™, it provides a step-by-step approach that every team can take.

The result is confidence from the outset that the project will deliver clear benefits, and an approach that brings together business needs and technology considerations.

Intranet projects on SharePoint need a clear direction

Challenges and opportunities

Intranet projects are not easy at the best of times. Often replacing sprawling legacy sites, they have to meet the needs of a diverse audience with a limited budget and constrained resources.

SharePoint intranets are just like any other technology platform in this respect. Independent of the underlying product, the new intranet needs to be usable for staff, valuable for the business, and easy for the intranet team to maintain.

SharePoint does introduce, however, some particular issues of its own, both positive and negative.

[April article, read the full article]

The content owners may have many questions: Where does our content go in the new structure? What content do we actually have? Should we delete some of it? Will time be allowed for content quality and improvement work? Will there be a freeze period when we won’t be able to work on the current intranet?

Whether one is implementing a new system or moving from one system to another, content migration is always an important aspect. Each situation is unique and so each migration scenario will have its own roadmap. However, there are some common factors that are present in each migration and can determine how long will the migration last. I’m listing down a few. If you think there are other factors as well, please feel free to comment.

How do you even get started in your planning for a large Web Site migration? Of course, you want to have strong Web Strategy, Web Governance, and Web Team in place. Probably another useful step is to just get a feel for the overall scope of a migration, before diving into any particular details (or just starting without planning). Perhaps this one page checklist will help your planning by providing some ideas of the scope of migration planning.

I’d like to talk for a moment about what I call the Content Migration Fantasy. In this fantasy, an experienced team lead by a tough-yet-wise project manager ports legacy content to a new system. This being a fantasy, the work is done quickly and efficiently, due, in no small part, to a brilliantly executed content inventory and information architecture. In this fantasy, not only do the items that should be moved end up in the right place, but the items that shouldn’t be moved stay right where they are.

(This was also covered in the article Content migration: options and strategies a little while ago.)

How is Joe going to solve this problem? Here is the traditional web management solution. Joe decides he needs a new jug. Joe gets a team together to decide what sort of jug is needed. They specify a really cool, all-dancing, all-singing, high-tech portal jug and they go out and spend a lot of money on it.

You’ve spent months researching and redesigning your intranet or website. The wireframes and the sitemaps have done their job in communicating the benefits of the new design to the stakeholders and you’ve got good feedback from the users. The new templates are done up and the CMS is getting tuned. It’s time to think about those 2000 or so pages of content that need to go into the new website. Yes, this is the content migration phase that’s been getting a lot of attention lately.