A digital workplace is not a new name for an intranet, nor is it a large technology programme that needs to run for a year before anyone sees a result. For a small or mid-sized organisation using Microsoft 365, it is the practical set of places, processes and information that helps people get work done without hunting, chasing or working around the systems they already pay for.
That definition matters because many organisations start in the wrong place. They commission a polished homepage while staff still cannot find the current policy, managers approve requests through email chains, and new starters spend their first week asking where everything lives. A better-looking SharePoint site can help, but only if it tackles the friction underneath.
Start with the work that is getting stuck
The useful question is not, “What should our digital workplace look like?” It is, “Where are people losing time every week?”
Usually, the answers are familiar. Documents sit across Teams, personal folders and old shared locations. A staff announcement is published but missed by the people who need it. An approval has no clear owner once it leaves someone’s inbox. Employees search for a colleague because nobody knows who owns a particular service or process. These are operational problems, not cosmetic ones.
A good digital workplace gives each type of work an obvious home. SharePoint may provide the central information layer, Teams may support day-to-day conversation, and Power Automate may handle repeatable hand-offs. The point is not to force every activity into one place. It is to make the route clear enough that people stop creating their own workarounds.
There is a trade-off here. Too much structure turns a useful platform into a maze of sites, folders and rules. Too little structure leaves people to decide where information belongs every time they create it. The right level is usually simpler than teams expect: clear ownership, a small number of well-understood locations, and sensible standards for documents that matter.
A useful intranet does more than publish news
Many underused intranets have the same problem: they were designed as a noticeboard. News has a place, especially for internal communications, but people return to an intranet when it helps them complete something.
That might mean finding the latest HR guidance, seeing who is in a team, locating a template, checking an organisational structure, recognising a colleague or reaching a frequently used service. These are everyday reasons to visit. When they are handled well, news and wider communications gain a more reliable audience because the intranet is already part of the working day.
The homepage should therefore earn its position. It needs a clear welcome, relevant communications and prominent routes to common tasks. It should reflect the organisation’s brand without becoming a design project that delays delivery. Microsoft 365 provides a strong base, but its standard components do not always cover the experiences teams expect, such as a clearer people directory, an engaging news display or a tailored view of calendar and email information.
This is where buying can be more sensible than building. A custom SharePoint web part for a familiar intranet feature can easily cost £8,000 or more once design, development, testing and support are included. A production-ready app may cost from £249 per year and be installed in minutes. That does not mean custom development is never justified. It is the right choice when a requirement is genuinely unique or central to how the organisation operates. For common intranet needs, paying repeatedly to recreate an established feature is rarely a good use of budget.
ThePoint’s SharePoint Experience Pack takes this approach: ready-to-deploy web parts that run natively in Microsoft 365, retain tenant branding and keep data within the tenant. The practical advantage is not just lower cost. It is visible progress in days rather than a long wait for a bespoke build.
Fix document findability before adding more content
When people say they cannot find documents, the immediate response is often to create more folders. That usually makes the problem worse.
Findability depends on decisions made before documents are uploaded: who owns the content, which version is authoritative, who may edit it, when it should be reviewed and how it should be labelled. If those decisions are absent, no navigation menu will compensate for them.
Start with the documents that cause the most disruption when they are missing or out of date. Policies, procedures, templates, client-facing materials and operational guidance are common candidates. Move them into managed SharePoint libraries with named owners and a clear purpose. Then remove or redirect old copies rather than allowing two competing sources to remain in circulation.
Search also deserves attention, but it should follow basic content discipline. Search results are only as useful as the titles, metadata, permissions and source locations behind them. A search improvement project that ignores those foundations can make a poor structure easier to browse, not easier to trust.
Treat approvals as a process, not an inbox habit
Approval delays are often blamed on busy managers. Sometimes that is fair. More often, the process itself gives no one a clear view of what is waiting, what information is required or what happens after approval.
A well-designed workflow should answer straightforward questions. What starts it? Who owns each stage? What evidence or documents are needed? What happens if someone is absent? Where can the requester see the current status? If those answers live only in the memory of experienced staff, the process is fragile.
Microsoft 365 can remove a great deal of this manual chasing through SharePoint lists, forms and Power Automate workflows. The aim is not to automate everything. A process that needs judgement, exception handling or a sensitive conversation should retain it. But routine requests, standard notifications and predictable hand-offs are often good candidates for improvement.
Begin with one process where delay has a visible cost. It could be a purchase request, document review, onboarding task or service request. Map the real process first, including the informal steps people take when the official route fails. Then simplify it before automation. Automating an unclear process simply makes confusion move faster.
Ownership is the part most projects miss
A digital workplace needs product ownership after launch. Not a committee that meets twice a year, but a named person or small group that can make decisions about content, navigation, permissions and priorities.
Without this, an intranet gradually becomes a museum of old pages. News stops being published, links break, department areas drift apart and staff lose confidence that what they find is current. The technical platform may be working perfectly while the experience deteriorates.
Ownership does not mean one person must write every page or solve every support request. It means there is a clear operating model. Department owners maintain their content. IT manages platform standards and security. Internal communications leads publishing and messaging. Senior sponsors resolve priorities when teams disagree. The exact split depends on the organisation, but ambiguity is expensive.
For organisations without in-house SharePoint capacity, ongoing senior support can be more useful than a one-off launch project. A monthly consultancy retainer creates space for small improvements, governance checks, user support and a planned pipeline of changes. That is often how the workplace continues to improve once the original project team has returned to its day job.
Measure adoption through behaviour, not page views
Page views can show whether people visited an intranet. They cannot prove that it made work easier.
Better measures connect to the original problem. Are fewer people asking where policies are stored? Has the time taken to complete a routine approval reduced? Are new starters finding essential information without repeated help? Is there one trusted source for the documents that matter? Are teams using the agreed process rather than email and spreadsheets?
Some of this can be measured through Microsoft 365 usage data. Some requires short conversations with users and service owners. Both are worthwhile. If a feature is rarely used, the answer may be better communication or training. It may also be that the feature solves a problem nobody really has. Removing it can be as valuable as improving it.
Build in stages, then keep improving
The most effective digital workplaces are rarely delivered as a single grand launch. Start with the places where confusion, delay or duplicated effort is highest. Give staff a useful home for information and common tasks. Improve one or two processes with clear owners. Learn from how people actually use the result.
This staged approach keeps spend proportionate and makes decisions easier. It also avoids the common mistake of treating a SharePoint intranet as finished once it has been published. The better test is simpler: each month, can people find what they need, complete routine work with fewer hand-offs and trust the information in front of them? If the answer is improving, the workplace is doing its job.