Microsoft made some pretty big announcements at the Ignite conference I spoke at last week, which I think may change how intranets will be built in Office 365 (and maybe on-premises SharePoint too in the future?). I don’t normally try to be a “news blogger”, but for things that have a big impact on me/my team I like to make the occasional exception. Microsoft’s moves on “NextGen portals” and in particular the new Knowledge Management portal (codename “Infopedia”) are definitely in that category – there are several new CMS-like concepts here for Office 365/SharePoint. Some new “ready-to-go portals” will be made available to Office 365 users, and these come with a philosophy of “use more, build less”. As well as the KM portal, we can expect to see some kind of blogging capability soon, which may or may not be known as “stories”. These tools should work well for organizations who aren’t strongly tied to their own (often carefully-crafted!) list of requirements. If you’re already wondering about what happens when this isn’t the case, Microsoft *are* thinking about the customization strategy for NextGen portals. In the future it sounds like it will be possible to use various bits of what I’ll describe here as building blocks for custom portals – but that’s further down the line, and the “ready-to-go” offerings are likely to be around for a while first.
The impact
Immediately, a couple of things jump out at me:
- If using the new portals, organizations will need to decide where they fit in the user experience with any existing intranet sites (just as they already do with Delve, Yammer and so on)
- Notably, the NextGen portals come with their own look and feel. It’s not yet clear whether some level of branding can be inherited – but in the end, you’re kinda getting something for free here, so.. 🙂
- The Knowledge Management portal could be seen as an “intranet-in-a-box”. There’s been a certain trend towards 3rd party SharePoint products of this type in recent years, but thinking as a client/user, I’m not sure why now you just wouldn’t use Microsoft’s. After all:
- It’s free (i.e. part of your existing Office 365 licensing)
- It’s got the development muscle of Microsoft behind it
- It will be enhanced continually
- It will be 100% supported by Microsoft
- Whilst it might not match the precise functionality of a particular example product, you can probably get close enough to what you were trying to achieve. And it’s free 😉
Understanding how Boards, Microsites and portals relate to each other
The Knowledge Management portal is an example of a “ready-to-go” portal – just like Delve and the existing Office 365 video portal. You can immediately start creating sites and pages, but you won’t have much control over the functionality or look and feel. You get what you’re given, and if it works, great. If it doesn’t, well you don’t have to use it – ultimately it’s just another tool in the toolbox. I see it almost as a cross between a team site and a publishing site. Before we go into detail on different aspects, to help you frame things here’s what a page looks like:
The image shown above is an article page. As you’d expect, other page types exist such as a landing/front page – but implementers do not create custom page templates or page layouts.
Jim Ehrenberg (SharePoint Pros, Inc.) 