Key Takeaways
- SharePoint news often underperforms because updates aren’t targeted, prioritised or delivered where employees already work. Audience targeting, Viva Connections and better analytics can help internal comms teams make news more relevant and visible.
- When employees say they can’t find anything in SharePoint, the issue is usually information architecture, not search alone. Clear navigation, metadata and ownership make SharePoint easier to use.
- Modern SharePoint intranets don’t have to look generic. Site themes, brand centre, page templates and design accelerators can help comms teams create branded, engaging employee experiences without heavy custom development.
- SharePoint becomes a dumping ground when publishing isn’t supported by governance. Clear content ownership, review dates, naming standards and archive rules keep information accurate, trusted and easy to manage.
- A successful SharePoint intranet needs ongoing ownership after launch. Treating the intranet as a live communication channel, with regular measurement and continuous improvement, prevents it from becoming stale.
Top 5 Frustrations with SharePoint Intranets (And Why Most of Them Aren’t True Anymore)
For many internal communicators, SharePoint is the intranet platform they’ve inherited, not the one they would’ve chosen. It’s where company news, policies, leadership updates and employee resources are meant to come together. Yet comms teams often find themselves frustrated by the same things: news that doesn’t land, search that feels unreliable, pages that look uninspiring, permissions that seem confusing, and content that slowly turns into a dumping ground.
And we get it. Internal communicators often sit closest to the employee experience and are usually judged on whether information reaches people clearly, quickly and consistently. When an announcement is missed, a policy can’t be found, or a frontline colleague gives up before reaching the right page, comms often owns the fallout even when the root cause sits across content, governance, search and design.
But a lot of the strongest objections to SharePoint come from outdated experiences of the platform, or from intranets that were never designed in a way that supports modern employee communication. In most cases, SharePoint has grown up. The way organisations use it hasn’t always kept pace.
Here are five of the SharePoint intranet frustrations we hear the most, what’s usually causing each one, and why most of them are no longer reasons to dismiss SharePoint as an intranet platform.
Jump to:
- Top 5 SharePoint Intranet Frustrations: At a Glance
- 1. “We Publish News and Nobody Reads It”
- 2. “Nobody Can Find Anything”
- 3. “Everything Looks Like SharePoint”
- 4. “SharePoint Turns into a Dumping Ground”
- 5. “It Starts Well, Then Turns into a Graveyard”
- Is SharePoint a Good Intranet Platform for Internal Comms?
Top 5 SharePoint Intranet Frustrations: At a Glance
If SharePoint has left your comms team sceptical, start here.
| Frustration | What’s really going on | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| “We publish news and nobody reads it” | A reach and placement problem, not a content one | Audience targeting, and news delivered in Teams |
| “Nobody can find anything” | Search is reflecting a messy structure | Information architecture first, then metadata |
| “Everything looks like SharePoint” | The platform has moved on, but many intranet designs haven’t | Brand centre, site themes, page templates and design accelerators |
| “SharePoint turns into a dumping ground” | Publishing is too easy without clear rules for ownership, structure and review | Define ownership, review dates, publishing standards and archiving rules |
| “It turns into a graveyard” | No ongoing ownership, measurement or content rhythm after launch | Treat the intranet as a live channel, with regular measurement and improvement |
1. “We Publish News and Nobody Reads It”
What’s really going on
This is one of the most common reasons internal communicators lose confidence in SharePoint as an intranet. It feels like the platform is swallowing important updates, when the real issue is usually reach and relevance. Most news gets published to an intranet homepage, and then everyone waits for employees to make a deliberate visit.
They usually don’t.
They’re busy in Teams, Outlook, or on a phone between tasks, maybe killing time before their next meeting. In fact, the Swoop 2026 SharePoint Benchmarking report claims employees are spending just 0.9 minutes a day reading news.
Poor news engagement doesn’t automatically mean SharePoint is the villain. It’s often a combination of more content than ever, employees with less time than ever, and SharePoint not set up in a way that helps employees cut through the noise to find what matters to them.
Employees aren’t going to read every news story. But it should be easy for them to find the ones they care about.
SharePoint news can work, but it has to be relevant, well placed and supported by the channels employees already use.
What to do about it
- Use audience targeting, so a UK-only policy update doesn’t land in front of 2,000 people in APAC. Relevance is the biggest single driver of whether people come back.
- Push news into Teams with Viva Connections rather than hoping people visit the intranet. Meet people where they already are.
- Set up organisation news sites, so official announcements are badged as authoritative and given priority in feeds and search.
- Boost the two or three posts a month that genuinely matter, and leave the rest alone. Boosting everything is the same as boosting nothing.
- Look at your analytics before you publish the next thing. Unique readers, dwell time and drop-off points will tell you whether the message landed, not just whether it was posted.
Bonus tip: If you want to deliver a truly personalised news experience in SharePoint, Beacon News lets employees subscribe to the topics and sites they care about, while internal comms keeps central control over priority updates and key announcements.
Real Example: Bauer Media Group’s myNews
We’ve seen this work in practice with Bauer Media Group’s myNews project, which uses SharePoint and Microsoft 365 to make internal news more personal, relevant and useful across a large global organisation. The project has been shortlisted for a 2026 IoIC Award, showing that SharePoint news can be much more than a passive homepage feed.
A brief example of Bauer Media’s intranet, showcasing what a truly personalised SharePoint experience looks like.
2. “Nobody Can Find Anything”
What’s really going on
Search often takes the blame here, but it’s rarely the whole problem. In our discovery work, search consistently shows up as one of the most-used intranet tasks, and one of the biggest sources of frustration. That tells us employees are relying on search because they can’t easily navigate to what they need.
That doesn’t mean search doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But search should be a safety net, not the primary way people get around the intranet. If employees have to search for every policy, form, tool, department page or process update, the navigation probably isn’t working hard enough.
A good SharePoint intranet should make common tasks and high-value content easy to reach through simple, intuitive navigation. Search then supports the experience by helping people find something specific, not by carrying the weight of the whole intranet.
What to do about it
| Symptom | Usual cause | Practical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Employees search for everything, even common tasks | Navigation is built around departments, not employee needs | Design navigation around tasks, journeys and everyday language |
| Search results feel noisy or unreliable | Content is duplicated, outdated or poorly labelled | Clean up duplicate content, agree a source of truth and use clear page titles |
| People can’t find key policies, forms or tools | Important content is buried too deep or spread across too many sites | Create clear landing pages for high-use content and make them visible from the main navigation |
| Different teams organise information in different ways | No shared rules for content structure, ownership or naming | Introduce simple governance for page ownership, naming, metadata and review days |
You don’t have to choose between “fix search” or “fix navigation”. You need both. Navigation should make the most common journeys feel obvious: finding a policy, accessing a form, checking a process, understanding a benefit, reaching a department page, or catching up on important news. Employees shouldn’t need to think like the organisation chart to find what they need.
Search then becomes the second route in: useful when someone knows exactly what they’re looking for, remembers a keyword, or needs something more specific. But if search is the only reliable way around the intranet, it’s a sign that the structure underneath needs attention.
For internal communicators, this is where SharePoint can be unfairly blamed. The platform can support good navigation, strong search, metadata, hubs and audience-specific experiences. But it still needs someone to make deliberate decisions about structure, language and ownership.
Real Example: How University of Leeds Solved Findability
At the University of Leeds, just 24% of employees said they could quickly find the information they needed. After we helped redesign navigation and search as part of their new intranet, that increased by 74%. It’s a good reminder that findability isn’t solved by search alone. When navigation is clearer and search is better supported by structure, ownership and content quality, employees have a much easier route to the information they need.
3. “Everything Looks Like SharePoint”
What’s really going on
This one had real substance a decade ago. Branding meant custom master pages, a developer on speed dial, and a build that broke every time Microsoft shipped an update. Plenty of people got burnt, decided SharePoint couldn’t look good, and never went back for another look.
Modern SharePoint is a different conversation. Site themes, headers, section backgrounds, flexible layouts and the SharePoint brand centre give comms and brand teams much more control over fonts, logos, colours and page templates, without relying on custom code for every visual decision.
What to do about it
- Build reusable, branded page templates so content owners can produce on-brand pages without needing design help every time.
- Keep fonts, logos and colours in the brand centre, so consistency becomes the default rather than a policing exercise.
- Design for mobile first if a chunk of your workforce is frontline. Native web parts are responsive; heavily customised builds often aren’t.
- Resist the urge to rebuild SharePoint into something it isn’t. Every custom component is something you’ll be retesting with every update for years.
- Sub-brands aren’t a problem either. In our project with Gulf Oil, we made sure their coffee brand, Reviva, has its own templates and identity inside the same intranet while staying visually in harmony with everything around it. Distinct, but still clearly part of the same house.
Bonus tip: SharePoint design has come a long way, but for some brands, the standard experience still won’t tick every box. That’s where Beacon, our SharePoint design accelerator, helps internal comms teams go further. It gives you additional page layouts, more visual options for branding, including gradients and richer design treatments, and intuitive tools that make it easier for comms teams to create polished, on-brand pages without needing design or development support every time.
. SharePoint doesn’t have to look like SharePoint. An example of what a branded SharePoint intranet can look like with a bit of creativity
4. “SharePoint Turns into a Dumping Ground”
What’s really going on
This is one of the biggest frustrations for internal communicators. SharePoint often starts with the right intention: give teams somewhere to publish useful information, manage documents and keep content close to the people who own it. But without clear governance, it can quickly spread in every direction.
New sites get created. Old pages stay live. Documents are copied into multiple places. Department areas grow in different ways. Before long, employees are faced with several versions of the same answer, and comms teams are left trying to work out which page is current, who owns it, and whether anyone is keeping it up to date.
SharePoint makes it easy for teams to publish and manage content, which is one of its strengths. Sprawl starts when that ease isn’t matched by clear rules around ownership, structure and review.
What to do about it
| Frustration | What’s usually causing it | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| The intranet feels cluttered and hard to manage | Too many pages, sites and libraries have been created without a clear structure | Define what belongs on the intranet, what belongs in Teams, and what should be archived |
| Employees find multiple versions of the same information | Content has been copied rather than linked to a single source of truth | Create clear ownership for high-value content and link back to authoritative pages |
| Pages stay live long after they’re useful | No review process or named content owner | Add review dates, page owners and a simple content lifecycle |
| Different teams publish in different ways | There are no shared standards for page layout, naming or content quality | Give publishers templates, guidance and light-touch governance |
For internal communicators, sprawl is frustrating because it damages trust. Employees don’t always see the difference between a page that’s out of date, a page that’s poorly labelled, and a page they should never have found in the first place. They just experience a messy intranet.
Once people stop trusting the intranet, they stop using it as the first place to go. They ask colleagues, message teams directly, or rely on old documents saved elsewhere. Comms then has to work harder to cut through, even when the right information does exist.
SharePoint stays useful when publishing is guided by enough structure to keep content clear, current and trusted. That means clear site architecture, named content owners, agreed publishing standards, regular content reviews and a plan for archiving what no longer needs to be there.
5. “It Starts Well, Then Turns into a Graveyard”
What’s really going on
Launch day is usually the easy part for a comms team. The campaign lands, leaders promote the new intranet, and people know where to go. Six months later, the news feed has gone quiet, pages have no named owner, and an old policy is still sitting near the top of search.
Enthusiasm can carry a launch, but it won’t keep an intranet useful over time.
That takes ongoing ownership, regular attention and a clear view of the intranet as a live communication channel, not a finished project.
Trust erodes over time. A page looks old, a link throws an access error, the same document turns up three times, and employees stop coming back. By the time that shows up in engagement feedback, behavioural habits have already changed.
What to do about it
- Give every site and key page a named owner. Not a team, a person. (Tip: Build a space to name content owners into your page templates, so ownership is visible and employees know who to contact when a page needs refreshing.)
- Put review dates on content and make expiry the default, so stale pages are flagged before they start causing problems.
- Make archiving part of the publishing process. When content is no longer useful, move it out of the way so employees aren’t left sorting through old pages in search results.
- Get comms and IT in the same room on a regular basis. Most intranet decay happens in the gap between the two.
- Measure something, and act on it. Even a monthly look at top pages, dead pages, and search terms that return nothing gives you practical prompts for continuous improvement.
And perhaps our favourite tip: have fun with it! A good intranet doesn’t have to be a noticeboard. Campaigns, homepage takeovers, seasonal content, scavenger hunts and interactive moments can give employees a reason to come back, explore and engage. It keeps the intranet visible and front of mind, instead of turning it into a place people only visit when they need to check the news.
So, is SharePoint a Good Intranet Platform for Internal Comms?
Yes, as long as nobody expects the licence alone to solve the communication challenge. SharePoint will always give you a capable blank canvas rather than a finished employee experience, which is why no two organisations end up with the same intranet. That flexibility is one of its biggest strengths, but it takes creativity, employee insight and SharePoint know-how to turn it into something people actually want to use.
When internal communicators say SharePoint is a poor intranet, they usually haven’t seen SharePoint done well. Not just switched on, or lightly branded, but properly shaped around employees and how they work.
That’s exactly why we run Art of the Possible sessions: to show comms teams what SharePoint can look like with a bit of wow factor, a smooth employee experience, and the creativity to make people stop and say, “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that.”
