Intranet Development Services

What a modern intranet does

A modern intranet is the front door to working at your company. Employees use it to read news, find policies and documents, look up colleagues, submit requests, access the tools they need and complete onboarding. When it works, it saves time every day and helps a dispersed workforce feel connected.

Many intranets fail because they become dumping grounds for outdated documents with poor search. Successful ones are designed around employee tasks, owned by content editors in each department and integrated with the systems people already use.

Problems we solve

• Employees cannot find current policies or forms
• Important announcements lost in email
• New starters asking the same questions repeatedly
• Frontline staff without a company email have no access to information
• An old intranet nobody updates or trusts

What’s included

Platform options

We recommend a platform based on your existing tools, content governance and the experience you want for employees, including those without desktop computers.

Designing for adoption

• Interview employees across roles to find their top tasks
• Organise content by task, not by department structure
• Give each department an owner responsible for keeping content current
• Mobile access for frontline and field staff
• Measure search queries and page usage to improve continuously

Information architecture for intranets

Intranets usually fail because people cannot find things, not because features are missing. Organising content around tasks rather than the org chart makes a big difference:

• Start with top tasks — survey staff to find the 10–20 things they most often need (book leave, find a policy, submit expenses, find a colleague).
• Use plain labels — “Pay and benefits” beats “Total Rewards”; test labels with card sorting.
• Keep navigation shallow — two or three levels, with search covering the rest.
• Assign owners — every page has a named owner and review date, so outdated content is flagged automatically.
• Personalise lightly — show news and links by location or department without hiding shared resources.

Launch and ongoing governance

1. Content audit

   Inventory existing content, then keep, rewrite or delete. Most organisations can retire a large share of old pages.

2. Pilot group

   Launch to a representative group first to test search, navigation and publishing workflows.

3. Champions network

   Train a content champion in each department to publish and maintain their area.

4. Launch and measure

   Track searches with no results, most-visited pages and feedback to guide improvements.

5. Quarterly reviews

   Review stale content, analytics and requests, and plan the next improvements.

An intranet is a product, not a one-off project. A small ongoing budget for content and improvements keeps it trusted and used.

Integrating the tools people already use

An intranet earns daily visits when it becomes the front door to work, not another place to check. Useful integrations include single sign-on so staff never log in twice; a people directory synced from HR or Entra ID; links and widgets for leave, expenses and IT requests; embedded Teams or Slack channels for discussion; and search that covers documents in SharePoint, Google Drive or your document management system. Mobile access matters for frontline staff who do not sit at desks, and is often the deciding factor in adoption.

SharePoint, an intranet product or custom?

The right choice depends less on features than on where your people already work and which licences they hold. We recommend after a short discovery, and we are comfortable advising you to stay on SharePoint when it fits.

A typical intranet project

1. Discovery2–3 weeks

   Interviews and surveys across departments and locations, analytics from the current intranet and a content audit.

2. Information architecture1–2 weeks

   Navigation organised by tasks people perform, tested with card sorting and tree testing.

3. Design and prototype2–3 weeks

   Home page, news, people directory and department templates validated with real employees.

4. Build and migrate4–10 weeks

   Templates, integrations, permissions and migration of the content worth keeping.

5. Pilot and launch2–4 weeks

   A pilot group, editor training, launch communications and feedback channels.

Timelines are typical for a mid-sized organisation; multi-language, multi-country intranets take longer.

Content migration: keep, rewrite or retire

Old intranets accumulate thousands of pages nobody reads. Migrating everything carries the clutter into the new platform and undermines search. We classify content with owners before moving anything:

• Keep — accurate, used pages moved as they are, with an owner and review date
• Rewrite — important topics with outdated or confusing pages, rewritten into the new templates
• Archive — records that must be retained but not surfaced in navigation
• Retire — duplicates, expired news and pages with no owner

Every page that survives gets a named owner and a review date, so the new intranet does not decay the same way the old one did.

Measuring intranet success

• Share of employees active weekly, broken down by location and role
• Search success: searches followed by a click rather than a refined search or exit
• Fewer repeat questions to HR, IT and facilities help desks
• Pages past their review date — a leading indicator of decay
• Feedback from a short pulse survey a few months after launch

Related: enterprise integration, document management and UX design.

Permissions and governance roles

A healthy intranet has clear roles rather than one overloaded administrator. We set these up before launch so publishing stays fast and content stays trustworthy:

• Owners — accountable for a department or site and its review dates
• Editors — create and update pages within their area using approved templates
• Communications team — curates company-wide news and the home page
• Platform administrator — manages permissions, integrations and updates

Audience targeting then shows each person the news and links relevant to their location, department or role, without creating separate sites for every group.

Governance is reviewed a few months after launch, once real usage shows which sites thrive and which need support or consolidation.

Related services

Intranets often include workflow automation and connect through enterprise integration. An AI assistant can be added with RAG.

This page is part of Enterprise Application Development Services — see the full overview for related services, approach and pricing.