While SharePoint's basic functionalities already satisfy the collaboration and communication requirements of most organizations, it's always best to put a personal touch to your intranet. This 2020, make sure to include SharePoint customization to your list of New Year's resolutions.
SharePoint Best Practices 2020
Customizing SharePoint certainly comes with plenty of benefits. For one, customization allows you to create a more seamless user experience (UX) and an intuitive user interface (UI) to improve employee performance and business efficiency.
Additionally, if you want to migrate your data from another intranet provider, you can customize your SharePoint sites to mirror your previous systems to help your employees easily adjust to your new content environment. These SharePoint tips, tricks, and best practices will help you achieve these and more:
Create a Home Site
The home site feature was initially introduced at the SharePoint Conference 2019 in May last year. Its dedicated home button allows one-touch access to your home site in the mobile app. The function allows brands to personalize their main landing pages to feature relevant content that can be targeted to employees.
On their blog, Microsoft described home sites as landing sites that "bring together news, events, content, conversations, and video to deliver an engaging experience." With that in mind, they made sure that the feature allows users to balance and curate organization
Create a Swipe File for Organization Logos, Images, and Documents
Your SharePoint Swipe File will serve as a single space where all your employees can add and access brand-approved files. They are useful for when an employee wants to add images or other media in a post. This also helps your organization improve brand consistency.
To create one, register a document library via PowerShell so your files can be accessed across all files within your intranet. SharePoint allows users to create up to 30 libraries in a single organization.
SEE ALSO: Microsoft Brings SharePoint To Your iPhone And iPad
Use Headings to Break Down Long Pages
It's no secret that due to humans' naturally short attention span, we are suckers for long-form content or pages. Basically, the rule of the thumb is to avoid creating long pages in your SharePoint site. If it can't be avoided, make sure to break down your content using headings.
While you can simply opt to use bold text to separate your content, there's a good reason why you must use the built-in headings style: SharePoint automatically adds anchor links to headings of up to three levels.
Use SharePoint's Audience Targeting Feature
One of the best SharePoint practices you can implement for your organization is to utilize the Audience targeting function for pages, web parts, and navigation. In essence, the Audience function allows brands to create personalized content to be seen by a specific group of people.
This practice helps your employees get rid of the white noise and see only news, updates, and announcements that are relevant to them. Audience targeting for SharePoint pages and news are being rolled out now, while the targeting for navigation is coming soon.
Wrap Up
This 2020, SharePoint is cooking up a number of new capabilities that will make internal communication and collaboration within organizations more seamless and convenient. Make sure to implement these SharePoint customization tips as you kick off the year.
