What is a SharePoint intranet?
A SharePoint intranet is a company portal built from SharePoint sites: a home page with news, links and search, connected to the department and project sites behind it. SharePoint is the platform and the intranet is what you build on it, so SharePoint is not an intranet by itself, and an intranet does not have to be a single site. Microsoft states that with SharePoint "any user can create highly functional intranet pages quickly without the need for writing code or other difficult customizations."
This page covers the building blocks Microsoft provides, the steps to put an intranet together, what to put on the home page, the limits Microsoft recommends for a portal, what it costs, and how to keep the documents behind it from taking over your storage.
The building blocks of a SharePoint intranet
Microsoft's planning and home site guides list these components. Most intranets use the first four.
| Building block | What it does in an intranet |
|---|---|
| Communication site | Shares news, reports, statuses and other information to a broad audience through templates and web parts. Microsoft highly recommends a communication site with a site page as the home page for a portal |
| Home site | A communication site you set as the intranet landing page for your organization |
| Hub sites | Organize related sites and teams and centralize news, search and navigation. See SharePoint hub sites |
| SharePoint news | The News web part posts announcements, people news and status updates with graphics and rich formatting |
| Viva Engage | Connects people across projects, functions and departments |
| Stream | Delivers live and on-demand meetings, events and training |
| SharePoint app in Teams | Brings the home site into Microsoft Teams. It was called Viva Connections before |
Team sites have a different job. Microsoft designs them for collaboration, such as projects and interest groups, and recommends communication sites for portals. SharePoint vs OneDrive vs Teams compares where each one fits.
How to build a SharePoint intranet
Microsoft's planning guidance puts the thinking before the building. This is the order that works.
- Start from business priorities. Microsoft says the most successful intranets are focused on helping people get work done. Line the intranet up with the goals your organization already funds, and note that an intranet project is never done because priorities change.
- Know the audience. Write short personas for typical users such as a new starter, a knowledge worker, a field worker, a sales rep, a people manager and a content author. Microsoft's point is that site owners know what they want to publish, which is often not what users want to read.
- Decide governance early. Decide who can create sites, whether sites follow a common pattern, who is accountable for each site's content, how often content is reviewed, and whether content needs retention or sensitivity labels. Governance best practices for SharePoint Online covers the framework.
- Review what you have. List the existing sites, meet their owners and decide what moves. Microsoft notes it is not unusual to leave old content behind and write new content for the modern experience.
- Pick one pilot. Choose the initiative that solves a real problem, has many users, can be built in reasonable time and has a clear return. Microsoft suggests a prototype that takes a few days, a committed sponsor, enough up-to-date content and a specific audience.
- Create the communication site. How to create a SharePoint site has the steps. For a company home page, start from the Organization home template, described in SharePoint site templates.
- Build the home page with web parts, covered in the next section, and set up navigation. How to create and edit a SharePoint page has the editing steps.
- Connect the sites. Make the home site a hub or associate department sites with a hub so navigation, search and branding carry across.
- Set the home site (below).
- Launch in phases, then measure and maintain (below).
What goes on a SharePoint intranet home page
A SharePoint page is built from web parts. These are the ones intranet home pages are made of, with Microsoft's description of each.
| Web part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Hero | Highlights up to five items with images, text and links |
| News | Creates posts such as announcements and status updates |
| Events | Lists upcoming events, optionally with a map and meeting details |
| Quick links | Pins items for easy access |
| Highlighted content | Dynamically surfaces content by type, filter or search string |
| Document library | Shows a library where users can open or edit files |
| People | Displays selected people and their profiles |
| Organization chart | Shows an org chart centered on a chosen person |
| Conversations | Lets users read and join Viva Engage threads on the page |
| Site activity | Lists recent site activity, such as uploads and new lists |
| Microsoft Forms | Creates surveys, quizzes and polls and shows the responses |
To add one, open the page, select Edit, open the toolbox on the right and select See all web parts, then click the web part or drag it onto the page. A circled plus sign also appears just above or below an existing web part when you point at it.
Microsoft's examples of what to feature are news, events, resources and personalized content. Audience targeting lets you prioritize specific content for specific groups in navigation links, news and some web parts. Microsoft's SharePoint Look Book shows designs you can start from, and the site templates for it are in SharePoint site templates.
SharePoint intranet examples
Microsoft's planning guide gives four examples of intranet initiatives, each with the content to build and how to judge it. They are a better starting point than a gallery of home pages because each one has an owner and a result.
| Initiative | Key content | Business measure |
|---|---|---|
| Benefits site for employees (HR) | Announcements and training videos | Help requests fall by a set percentage |
| Weekly news post by a senior leader (Engineering) | Streaming events and formal training | Share of staff who complete the training |
| Executive leadership community on Viva Engage (HR) | News posts, streaming events and Viva Engage conversations | Positive sentiment, comments answered within 24 hours and higher satisfaction with executive communications |
| Marketing site for proposals | Company business value slides and proposal templates | Time to create a proposal falls by a set percentage |
For the look of a finished home page, Microsoft's Look Book lists templates such as Organization home, Department, Human resources, Leadership connection, Learning central and New employee onboarding. SharePoint site templates describes each one.
Set the home site
A home site is a communication site that becomes the top landing page for your intranet. Microsoft lists three things it adds:
- Intranet-wide search. Search on a home site covers the whole intranet instead of just the site.
- Official organizational news. A home site is the organization news source by default, so news posted from it takes priority on the SharePoint start page.
- Global navigation in the SharePoint app bar. It shows intranet links wherever users are in SharePoint, and it can only be customized from the home site's home page.
A SharePoint Administrator sets the home site with PowerShell:
Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/homesite"
Microsoft also states that from July 2026 the SharePoint admin center is used to set a home site for the SharePoint app in Teams experience.
Do the root site first. Microsoft's guidance is to swap your communication site in as the root site (the site at contoso.sharepoint.com) before setting it as the home site, because if you set the home site first and swap afterward, you might lose the home site settings and need to reapply them. The rules for replacing the root site:
- The new root site must be a communication site, or a modern team site that is not connected to a Microsoft 365 group, and the publishing feature must never have been activated on it.
- Neither the current root site nor the new one can be a hub site or associated with a hub during the swap. Unregister or disassociate first and reconnect afterward.
- The swap replaces the whole site collection, and any subsites on the current root site are archived.
- The new site must be in the same domain, and the admin doing it must be a member of the site being replaced.
- In the SharePoint admin center, go to Active sites, select the root site, select Replace site, enter the URL of the new site and save. The root URL can return a 404 for a few minutes, and search needs time to recrawl.
A home site is not the same as the SharePoint start page. The start page is personalized to each person's recent activity and followed sites. The home site is one landing experience for the whole organization.
Organization news
Mark a site as an organization news site and its posts get special visual treatment and appear on the SharePoint start page. Administrators can specify up to 100 organization news sites, and a communication site set as the home site is configured as one automatically. The command:
Set-SPOOrgNewsSite -OrgNewsSiteUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Marketing
Get-SPOOrgNewsSite lists them and Remove-SPOOrgNewsSite takes one off the list.
SharePoint app in Teams
The SharePoint app in Teams, formerly Viva Connections, puts the home site where people already work. Microsoft's requirements: you need an Enterprise (E), Frontline (F) or Academic (A) license to create the experience, and users on those licenses are limited to creating and using one experience. Up to 50 experiences need a Microsoft Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license for every user. Home site owners control it from the home site: select the Settings cog, then Manage home site, then SharePoint app for Teams. On desktop, the landing experience can be the home site itself. On mobile, the custom layout offers the Home, Dashboard and News tabs in any order.
Limits for a healthy intranet
Portals serve many readers and few editors, so Microsoft publishes recommended maximums for modern portal sites. Staying inside them keeps pages fast.
| Item | Recommended maximum |
|---|---|
| Pages and news items | Fewer than 5,000 per site |
| Web parts on a page | 20, including custom ones |
| Dynamic web parts on a page (such as News) | 4 |
| Items in site navigation | Fewer than 100 per site |
| Image size | 300 KB per image |
| Users with edit rights | 200 per site |
| Security groups | 20 per site |
| Third-party iFrames | 2 per page |
Edit permissions are the one people forget. Edit permissions download additional controls, so people with edit rights get slower pages and too many of them affects the overall experience. Give the many readers view access and keep the group that edits small. SharePoint permission levels explains Read, Edit and the rest.
Microsoft's other advice for the launch:
- Run Page diagnostics for SharePoint on the home page before you share it.
- Use the Portal launch scheduler to release the site to batches of users in phases.
- Make it discoverable with a custom tile in the Microsoft 365 app launcher and a featured link on the SharePoint start page.
- Add a page approval flow so only reviewed content is published on the home site.
- Keep the logo small. Microsoft recommends logo files of 64 by 64 pixels for the home site.
- Don't run a live event from the portal. Microsoft recommends Teams live events or Viva Engage for town halls, and linking to the stream.
Launch, measure and maintain
Microsoft's advice for adoption is to use a top-down and a bottom-up approach: executive sponsors who secure funding and message the importance, and champions across the organization who promote the site locally. Add launch events, formal training and regular office hours.
Measure more than page views. Microsoft's example pairs a system metric such as news post views with a business metric such as a fall in help requests. After launch, establish an intranet review team that checks navigation and content, and read site analytics to see what is used. Microsoft's navigation guidance asks owners to review links so that all of them are active, relevant and up to date.
How much does a SharePoint intranet cost?
The Microsoft cost of a SharePoint intranet is the Microsoft 365 licenses that include SharePoint, plus storage once you outgrow the allocation. Building the sites needs no code, so the other cost is the time of the people who plan, build and run it.
- Licenses. SharePoint is bought inside Microsoft 365 suites, from Business Basic at $7.00 per user per month paid yearly. The standalone SharePoint Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 are retiring and closed to new customers. SharePoint pricing has the plans and dates.
- Storage. The tenant gets 1 TB plus 10 GB for each licensed user, shared across every site, and extra storage is $0.20 per GB per month. For example, 250 users on Business Basic is $1,750 a month, or $21,000 a year, for the suite, and the tenant allocation is 1 TB plus 2.5 TB, which is 3.5 TB.
- SharePoint app in Teams. It has its own license conditions, listed in the section above.
- Templates. Two of the built-in site templates, Accounts Payable and Contracts Management, are powered by Microsoft Syntex and need a licensed Syntex user.
- Third-party intranet products and agencies are priced by their vendors.
Keep the documents behind the intranet lean
An intranet is pages and news on top, and document libraries underneath: policies, HR forms, training decks, event files and department folders. Microsoft recommends keeping a portal under 5,000 pages and news items, so retire old news posts; how to create and edit a SharePoint page covers unpublishing and deleting pages.
The documents are the part that grows. Every library draws on the same tenant storage pool, which is why the storage allocation matters to an intranet that has run for years. The free SharePoint Storage Explorer shows the consumption by site, library and file type, so you can see which departments hold the most. Squirrel then archives the inactive files from those libraries into Azure Blob Storage in your own subscription and leaves a stub in the library, and a click on the stub brings the file back in seconds.
Frequently asked questions
What is a SharePoint intranet?
A company portal built from SharePoint sites: a home page with news, links and search, connected to department and project sites. Microsoft recommends a communication site as the portal's home page.
Is SharePoint an intranet?
SharePoint is the platform and an intranet is what you build with it. Microsoft says SharePoint provides a wide variety of options and tools to create intranet sites for your organization.
Can SharePoint be used as an intranet?
Yes. Create a communication site, build the home page with web parts such as Hero, News, Events and Quick links, connect your sites with a hub and set the site as the home site.
What is the difference between SharePoint and an intranet?
SharePoint is the Microsoft product for sites, pages, lists and document libraries. An intranet is an internal portal for employees, and a SharePoint intranet is one built from SharePoint sites.
How do I create a SharePoint intranet?
Plan the audience and governance, pick one pilot scenario, create a communication site, build the home page with web parts, connect related sites with a hub, set it as the home site and launch in phases.
Is a SharePoint intranet free?
SharePoint is included in the Microsoft 365 suites that contain it, so you pay for those licenses, not for the intranet separately. See SharePoint pricing for the plans.
Do I need a home site?
Microsoft describes a home site as an add-on to your intranet design. It adds intranet-wide search, official organization news and global navigation, which a normal communication site does not have.
How many pages can a SharePoint intranet have?
Microsoft recommends fewer than 5,000 pages and news items per modern portal site, 20 web parts per page and fewer than 100 items in site navigation.
What is the best site type for an intranet home page?
A communication site with a site page as the home page, which is the default configuration when you create a communication site.
Related reading
- SharePoint site templates - the built-in templates, including Organization home.
- SharePoint hub sites - connect related sites with shared navigation and search.
- How to create a SharePoint site - team site or communication site.
- How to create and edit a SharePoint page - publish, promote and unpublish.
- SharePoint permission levels - Full Control to View Only.
- SharePoint Online governance - who creates, owns and reviews sites.
- SharePoint pricing - plans, storage and extra storage cost.
- SharePoint Online limits - the numbers that apply to sites, libraries and files.
Mark Smith co-founded SmiKar Software in 2015 and has spent the past decade helping organisations solve Microsoft 365 data management challenges. He works with the SmiKar team to build solutions for SharePoint archiving, storage optimisation, governance and compliance, supporting customers from growing businesses through to Fortune 500 enterprises.
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