How to integrate an intranet with Microsoft Teams 

If your organization uses Teams as your central messaging hub, you are far from alone: it is used by over 300 million people in 1M+ organizations globally, every day. 

For any intranet project leader that has struggled to get employees to adopt and engage with intranet, it’s little wonder why they might be tempted to explore Teams as an environment to deploy their company intranet. 

Teams can be the front-door to your intranet, but it won’t provide a complete replacement to SharePoint Intranet. That’s why we will explain why and how you can provide a corporate intranet experience within Teams that’s fit for the largest, most complex global organizations. 

Can Microsoft Teams replace SharePoint intranet?  

As you will know, Microsoft Teams has far more capabilities than being a simple messaging app.  

With access to thousands of app integrations, including Viva Connections functions and many third-party apps, businesses can and do use Teams as their single hub for communication and collaboration. 

It is a seamless front door to access applications and information businesses might need, and its interaction with SharePoint (among other applications) reduces a significant amount of friction created by using multiple tools. 

However, as a complete replacement to a SharePoint Intranet, it has limitations – especially in organizations that are larger and more complex where a key issue arises: storing information and making it easy to find. 

The search problem 

In simple terms, your SharePoint Intranet will host many key resources: policy pages, employees, business applications and data, mainly.  

All of it needs to be organized logically, easy to find in a context logical to the employee’s role and region, and it often needs to stand scrutiny at an audit, as well. 

This becomes more difficult as you introduce more complexity in the business, such as different business units, international teams and even remote/frontline workforces. 

Whilst SharePoint can form the basis of that logical structure, there are far more effective, user-friendly options than Teams and SharePoint to make resources quick and easy to find. 

Fundamentally, even if Teams, SharePoint and Viva Connections can help you create a pleasing ‘digital employee experience’ with a news feed, an L&D hub and a recognition application, it will cause far more problems if those core issues isn’t answered for. 

So, whilst Teams shouldn’t be a replacement to a SharePoint Intranet in a large organisation, it is an excellent companion to a more robust ‘in-a-box’ intranet solution. Let’s explore why. 

Why is Teams the perfect companion for your intranet?  

For internal communications units, Microsoft Teams has a lot of positives as a ‘digital front door’ to your intranet. These are: 

1. It is a familiar, highly-used ecosystem, making it easy for companies to adopt at scale. 

2. The UX is simple to understand, allowing for a low learning curve and easy navigation. 

3. Mobile access to intranet via Teams is highly sought after for agile companies with high remote and frontline employee bases. 

4. It is integrated with the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem, making access to applications like SharePoint, Office (and 3^rd-party productivity tools) simple. 

5. Integrated with SharePoint Intranet, it helps organizations reduce the complexity of managing a custom intranet solution. 

Building an Intranet with SharePoint and delivering it through Teams is a smart way for organizations to make their Microsoft investment stretch further. However, there’s one final issue to address – how an in-a-box SharePoint intranet solution like LiveTiles can deliver the most complete intranet experience that can be accessed effortlessly in Microsoft Teams. 

How does LiveTiles use Viva Connections for a seamless intranet experience  

As LiveTiles Intranet is based on SharePoint, it provides the best of both worlds.  

LiveTiles natively allow you to deploy Viva Connections cards (with useful functionalities such as world clocks, weather apps and events pages) via a simple drag-and-drop interface. However, it does so while empowering administrators to provide these features on a secure, scalable foundation needed by large, global organizations. 

For IT administrators, three important features to ensure growth doesn’t create confusion include: 

• Approval workflows for adding intranet functionality 

• Auto-archiving of unused teams and functions 

• Fixed templates for new page creation to ensure a high degree of consistency as your intranet grows. 

In effect, it’s far preferable to lay the foundations for a corporate intranet with LiveTiles and add Viva Connections features, than to be months or years into deployment via SharePoint and Teams, and realise that your intranet will create barriers as you try to scale. 

So, what’s the next step? 

Making your Microsoft investment go further 

Fully integrated into Microsoft Teams, LiveTiles is designed to be the frictionless internal communications tool that large organizations need. 

It’s seamless hub for employee comms that pulls together every employee, application, document and update into a single, easy-to-retrieve place. 

With robust content creation, targeting and reporting features, it allows internal communications teams a single hub to deliver, monitor and tweak communications strategy, all accessible in the places your employees already work: SharePoint, Teams, on desktop and on mobile. 

If you want to see if it it’s right for your organization, the next best step is to book a demo to see why over 1000+ large, global companies trust LiveTiles to knit the fabric of their organizations.