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15 Intranet Best Practices for Modern Intranet Design
Want to improve your intranet and get more value from Microsoft 365? This free guide shares 15 practical intranet best practices—covering key features and functions like navigation, search, onboarding, project collaboration, and internal communication. Whether you're launching a new intranet or evolving an existing platform, you'll find hands-on advice, design guidelines, and examples to help you create a more effective and engaging digital workplace.
By Omnia Coach
Anders Fagerlund
Gothenburg, Sweden
CONTENT IN THIS ARTICLE
Success Factors
Intranet
Communication
Download Your Free Intranet Best Practices Guide
Get proven strategies and intranet design best practices based on 700+ customer implementations to shape a successful intranet strategy for 2025.
What You'll Learn in the Intranet Best Practices Guide
In this guide you will learn about proven intranet best practices to enhance your platform, including:
✔ Improve employee communication with personalized start pages, location news, and department hubs, and more.
✔ Streamline content creation with editorial planning and AI-powered publishing tools.
✔ Support collaboration with integrated project spaces, document workflows, and search.
✔ Drive engagement through onboarding journeys, learning tools, and recognition features. ✔ Connect people and processes using process models, navigation, and automation.
✔ Deliver a consistent and user-friendly intranet experience across every device.
Each intranet best practice includes real-world Omnia examples and practical guidance for delivering results across key intranet feature areas, examples including:
Intranet Design Best Practice 1: Design a start page using targeting, subscriptions, user behavior, and AI-powered solutions to optimize the experience for every user.
Intranet Design Best Practice 2: Use multiple navigation types to improve findability and apply design guidelines for a consistent user experience.
Intranet Design Best Practice 3: Create a task-oriented intranet that supports daily workflows, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
Who Should Read This Intranet Best Practices Guide?
Built for Intranet Teams, Digital Workplace Leaders, and Comms Pros, this guide on intranet best practices is ideal for:
✔ Intranet Managers and Owners.
✔ Internal Communication Teams.
✔ Digital Workplace Leads.
✔ HR, IT, and Knowledge Management Professionals.
✔ Anyone planning a new company intranet project or improving an existing platform.
Frequently Asked Questions About Intranet Best Practices
1. What are intranet best practices and why do they matter to us?
Intranet best practices are proven strategies for designing and managing an effective employee intranet. They help organizations improve communication, support collaboration, and ensure the platform delivers value to employees and the business. The best practices in this guide also provide inspiration and ideas on how to apply intranet design best practices to create a better digital workplace.
2. Who can use this intranet best practices guide?
This guide is ideal for intranet managers, internal communications teams, digital workplace leads, and IT professionals. It’s especially useful for organizations using Microsoft 365 that want to improve intranet adoption, usability, and impact. The guide can also be used as solution examples in intranet design workshops.
3. Can these intranet best practices be applied to in Microsoft 365 environments?
Yes. The intranet best practices in this guide are specifically designed for intranets built on Microsoft 365—including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva. Each section includes examples of how Omnia supports these scenarios in real-world solutions. Omnia is the perfect platform for enterprise-grade intranets for organizations using Microsoft 365, and all examples in the guide are based on this platform.
4. How can the intranet best practices improve employee communication and engagement?
Intranet design best practices such as personalized start pages, targeted news, recognition tools, and feedback features make the intranet more relevant and inclusive—connecting people across roles, teams, and locations. The best practices in the guide include several real-world examples that help achieve these benefits.
5. Does the Intranet Best Practices Guide cover how to improve intranet usability and adoption?
Improving usability starts with features like intuitive navigation, smart search, and mobile accessibility - all topics covered in the guide. Adoption improves when the intranet supports daily work with tools, content, and integrations tailored to employee needs, which also is covered in the document. You will also find links to related content to be able to learn more.
6. Is this guide more useful for organizations planning a new intranet launch, than for organizations redesigning a present intranet?
Whether you’re planning your first company intranet or upgrading an existing solution, this guide offers practical intranet design best practices and real-world examples to help you build a successful intranet strategy from day one. If you are redesigning, some technical or solution-specific limitations may apply—but the best practices are highly relevant and useful in both cases.
