A runaway intranet that’s spiralled into a tangled web of unmanaged sites is a tale as old as time. Intranet sprawl is a real challenge faced by many internal comms and technical teams. But it doesn’t have to be this way – there are lots of easy ways to get a better handle on the governance of your intranet. And we’re here to show you how.
Every person who has ever been responsible for the management and upkeep of an intranet is likely to have first-hand experience of intranet sprawl, which happens when your SharePoint spirals out of control due to a lack of effective governance.
An unprotected site structure that’s had hundreds of new sites and pages added by different people across the business is often populated with unmanaged and outdated content. This uncontrolled approach to intranet management will put you on a one-way street to poor site usage, low engagement, and a platform that’s certainly not viewed as a reliable source of information.Â
The antidote to intranet sprawl is effective site governance.
Which, in our opinion, gets an unfair bad rap. Intranet governance does not have to be boring. When done right, it makes your life easier and saves some serious platform-induced headaches as your intranet continues to grow. It will increase engagement and interaction with the channel, ultimately improving the efficacy of internal communication across your organisation.
And while the broader topic of ‘governance’ touches every part of an organisation, this blog post focuses specifically on the ways you can use governance best practices to keep your intranet under control and tame the SharePoint sprawl.
How ‘intranet sprawl’ happens
Let’s start with the basics. What actually is ‘intranet sprawl’, and how does it happen?
The term ‘intranet sprawl’ describes what happens when a SharePoint site grows in an unmanaged or uncontrolled way, resulting in a tangled web of sites with no clear owners, outdated content and disastrous search functionality.
It can happen both intentionally and unintentionally. At the start of every organisation’s Microsoft 365 journey, all employees have the ability to set up a new site, team or group. It quickly becomes common practice for people to set up a new channel in Teams for every new project, ‘working group’ or campaign team. But they often don’t realise that a new SharePoint site is automatically created every time a new team or shared channel is set up in Teams. So, before you know it, you can be facing hundreds of inactive sites that are wreaking havoc with your intranet.
Despite that, nobody wants a stagnant intranet that sees minimal employee interaction and remains completely untouched. It’s definitely a positive thing when we see intranets beginning to grow organically due to different teams and departments taking ownership of their sites and adding local content. However, platform interaction and proactive site usage without clear intranet governance or content guidelines is another cause of uncontrolled intranet sprawl.
It’s like a game of football without any rules, structure, or even a referee – guaranteed to descend into chaos.
And that’s not what you want for your intranet.
So it’s important to find the right balance between encouraging that all-so-important engagement right across M365, and having an intentional site structure with content that remains up-to-date and relevant. Which is where intranet governance comes into play.
What is intranet governance?
Intranet governance is the process of managing site content and structure to ensure that the platform can fulfil its potential.
In simple terms, it refers to the guard rails you put in place that proactively protect your intranet from the dreaded sprawl, and mitigate platform risks.
It might include things like processes, structures, policies and guidelines. You need to think about things like who should be able to create and manage new sites, how content duplication will be avoided, and who can edit, delete or add content. Because, as we’ve already established, you will run into problems if there’s no overarching plan for your intranet’s site structure or the content that’s added to it.
In an ideal world, site governance would be front-of-mind when you begin planning your intranet migration so that you can design a clear hierarchy of hubs, sites and pages that feels logical for employees and is scalable to allow for future platform growth. But, regardless of where you are on your SharePoint journey, there’s no better time than the present to introduce a solid approach to intranet governance.
Let’s get to work.
4 ways to make intranet governance easy
As we mentioned at the start of this blog post, intranet governance gets a bit of a bad rap as being a bit…dull. But it doesn’t have to be. And it certainly doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing either.
We’ve set out four effective ways to help you to get a handle on SharePoint intranet governance, and do your bit to prevent content chaos across your organisation’s wider suite of M365 applications.
1. Set clear ground rules
The most important thing to do is to set clear ‘rules’ for your intranet. It can be helpful to articulate these ground rules in both ‘formal’ ways like policies and procedures, and ‘informal’ ways like intranet guidelines and supporting materials.
You have a good jumping-off point if your organisation already has content governance best practices in place for things such as folder structures, file naming conventions, etc. If not, this is a great opportunity to introduce a consistent approach in alignment with your new intranet ground rules.
One of the most impactful things you can do to reduce intranet sprawl is to define the people who will have permission to add sites or upload content. We see lots of organisations battling a complex and sprawling intranet due to employees right across the business continually creating new sites that are often unneeded and unused.
Introducing clarity around which employee groups or individuals have the permissions to create new sites and add various pieces of content is a game-changer.
It’s also important to introduce an accompanying process that enables employees who do not have creation permissions to submit a request, whether it be for a new site, page, post, etc. We recently custom-built a ‘provisioning tool’ for one of our clients. It enables employees to fill out a self-service form, and then automatically offers guidance and highlights any pre-existing sites or teams with a similar name. If the request meets the approval criteria, the tool will then automatically create the new site, page or resource. Any requests that don’t meet the criteria are escalated for manual review and approval before being fulfilled.
A tool like this automates as much as possible to reduce the burden on IC and technical teams, while still adhering to the ground rules that will help avoid sprawl and ensure security.
2. Assemble an intranet governance committee
An intranet ‘governance committee’ should include key stakeholders from core departments including IT and Internal Comms, but also Site and Content Owners from right across the business. They will be responsible for reviewing SharePoint requests logged by employees, setting user permissions, managing access and checking for unused sites and updating outdated content.
Adding a clearly identifiable ‘Content Owner’ on every page within your SharePoint intranet will pay great dividends. It makes it significantly easier for employees to get in touch with the relevant person, for content to be kept up-to-date, and for sites not to end up lost and abandoned.
We helped one of our clients to do this by adding a mandatory ‘Content Owner’ field into their custom page template, ensuring total visibility of who owns what content.
3. Stay on top of content
Staying on top of your site’s content is vital if you want to maintain top-notch intranet governance.
It’s a practice that not only prevents the site from becoming a total mess in a few years, but also makes it much more ‘searchable’ and AI-friendly. Because if you’re not already using Copilot, you likely will be soon. So we’re big fans of anything that helps to future-proof an intranet by improving the quality of its eventual AI output.
There are two main things to think about here – retention and naming conventions.
So far we’ve focussed on the ground rules, roles and responsibilities surrounding intranet governance. But defining a bullet-proof site and document retention policy is just as critical for avoiding sprawl and ensuring your intranet doesn’t become full of outdated content. Microsoft Purview is an intuitive application that makes things much easier when it comes to the appropriate retention of content on your intranet. It provides a centralised platform from which you can manage all data and content across your M365 tools. In practical terms, this means you can create retention policies that automatically apply to certain types of content on your intranet, like sites, documents or news posts.
As we discussed earlier in this blog post, it’s best practice to have standardised naming conventions for both files and folders when it comes to content governance. A lack of consistency inevitably leads to the unnecessary creation of new documents as employees end up duplicating content when they can’t find it.
4. Automate for success
Using automation to your advantage is a key part of effective intranet management, and one of the most important things you can do to make governance easy.
We’ve already touched on things like automating the ‘new site’ approval process and using Microsoft Purview to help with content retention policies. With the right tools in your back pocket, all of the steps we’ve discussed in this blog post become much more efficient and effective.
Microsoft Power Automate is another versatile tool that can support intranet governance by ensuring the site is managed in line with your policies, automating tasks, and providing valuable insights. It can be configured to trigger content reviews, delete or archive content that hasn’t been viewed or edited in a specific time frame, and ensure new sites are only created based on predefined templates.
While certain manual interventions are always going to be needed, it makes sense to save time and energy by automating as much as you can surrounding the governance of your intranet.
We told you intranet governance doesn’t have to be boring!
Get in touch with our friendly team if you’d like any support with any of the applications, features or automations that we explored in this blog post. Â
