A modern intranet with SharePoint and Viva Connections

The corporate intranet has moved out of the "forgotten bulletin board" role and back into strategy. With SharePoint Online as the content engine and Viva Connections as the front door inside Teams, you can deliver an internal-communications experience people actually use — because it lives where they already work.

The problem with old intranets

Most legacy intranets fail for three reasons:

1. Nobody visits because it means opening yet another system with yet another login.
2. Content rots because there is no owner and no update process.
3. Search does not work, so people go back to asking over email.

The modern approach attacks all three. The intranet becomes embedded in Teams, content is distributed across area owners, and search leverages the unified Microsoft 365 index.

The architecture: hub sites and communication sites

Modern SharePoint drops the rigid subsite hierarchy. In its place, it uses a flat, connected structure:

• Communication sites for editorial content: news, policies, HR pages, campaigns.
• Team sites for group collaboration, usually tied to a Teams team.
• Hub sites that connect related sites, applying shared navigation and branding while rolling up news and search.

A typical design has a corporate hub at the center with departmental hubs (HR, IT, Sales) associated to it. That way, news published on the HR site can appear automatically on the corporate home without duplication.

Viva Connections: the intranet inside Teams

Viva Connections turns that intranet into an app inside Teams, with three components:

• Feed — aggregates news, posts and content relevant to each person.
• Dashboard — actionable cards: clock in, open a ticket, view a payslip, approve an expense.
• Resources — the intranet's global navigation, always one click away.

The gain is behavioral: people do not need to "go to the intranet." The intranet comes to them, in the same place where they already message and meet. This tends to lift engagement significantly compared to standalone portals.

Governance: what separates success from chaos

An ungoverned intranet becomes a graveyard of sites. Define from the start:

Using site templates and page templates ensures visual consistency without needing designers in every department. And retention policies keep obsolete documents from polluting search.

Rollout roadmap

1. Discovery — map audiences, content and area owners.
2. Information architecture — define hubs, sites and navigation.
3. Design and branding — apply the visual identity and templates.
4. Content migration — bring what still has value, discard the rest.
5. Viva Connections — publish the dashboard and feed in Teams.
6. Adoption — train content authors and communicate the launch.

The most common mistake is skipping step 1 and starting to build pages. Without understanding the audience and who maintains what, the intranet is born an orphan.

Measuring results

Use SharePoint page analytics and usage reports to track visits, reading time and most-accessed content. That data guides where to invest and what to retire — the intranet becomes a living product, not a project that ends at go-live.

Key takeaways

• Old intranets fail from low access, stale content and poor search.
• Modern SharePoint uses connected communication sites, team sites and hub sites.
• Viva Connections brings the intranet into Teams, lifting engagement.
• Governance (names, owners, lifecycle, branding) is what prevents chaos.
• Start with information architecture, not with pages.

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, RHC designs and deploys SharePoint Online intranets with Viva Connections, uniting information architecture, governance and adoption in a single flow.