Hi Louise, 

using Teams as an intranet without further thought is likely to be a recipe for disaster. 

There are many starting points for the development of a good intranet, but starting with Teams is not one of them. Not to say it doesn't have its uses, but after a few weeks of people being amazed at the ability to share animated gifs, what next?

Some more effective starting points would be:


1. Requirements - what are the requirements? News? Communications? a shared corporate calendar? how to guides? search function? Do you want a blog function? A wiki type function? Space for social stuff? 

2. Information audit - what information does the business currently have and where is it and how is it used? How does it fit together (or not).

3. Knowledge audit - what knowledge does the business currently have and how can that be captured and made available on an intranet?

3. Content plan - what content is needed? Content should have clearly defined content owners. Who is going to look after the content? How is currency, accuracy and relevancy determined? What should the content include? Staff directory? Contracts library? List of suppliers? How to guides? Minutes of board meetings? Templates for reports, presentations, briefings? Press releases? 

4. Information architecture. Initial and high level information architecture can be created through workshops, spreadsheets, post-it notes, questionnaires, surveys, information audits. Studying users behaviours in online environments - this is actually good fun - give people scenarios with existing systems in your organisation and ask them to show you how they look for things. 

What language does the business use? What categories do they use? How can these categories be mapped and can synonyms be built into the search function?

What sort of search function will it have (after all writing in search boxes is what a lot of people are used to) ? And - what control does your business have over how that search function can be configured? What about metadata? Is it needed, is it relevant, can it be autogenerated, can the user tag their content? Does the search engine actually search the metadata?

Information architecture and content should be tested with users in an iterative way. Three - five users can be enough. Have a look at 'Don't Make Me Think' by Steve Krug which explains how to do this. Test the prototype with users through scenarios - 'how would you find the latest minutes of the board meeting?' 'how would you find the staff code of conduct'? 'where would you find the expenses claim form?'. Think about natural language because that is how your users think, not in the strange language of Microsoft developers. 


5. Then it might be time to evaluate technologies based on the content, requirements and information architecture. 

Unfortunately anyone in a Microsoft environment has Sharepoint and Teams imposed upon them. But depending on the size of your organisation, the amount of content and the requirements, you might be able to build a more effective intranet using basic html or something like Wordpress or a web development programme. It's ages since I've used them but you basically buy software which you can use to build an intranet - they are not particularly technical, you don't need programming skills -  but there is a need to understand information architecture. I  used something called Dreamweaver to build intranets in the past - it was great but I am sure there are other things which have developed since then. 


There are other things you can do and hopefully people will chip in with other ideas. But try to shift the thinking away from starting with the technology and to the starting point of what is it the business wants the intranet to do for them? It's about people, not technologies.

Good luck! 

Danny

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