Interview: Per Jarlemark on how to build a user-friendly intranet

Building an intranet that is both user-friendly and sustainable is a challenge for many organizations. Success requires careful preparation and a long-term strategy.

Intranet and document management expert Per Jarlemark shares his top tips for creating a flexible solution that not only makes it easy for employees to find the right information, but can also be adapted and developed over time.

Hi Per!

What are the keys to success when building an intranet in SharePoint?
To build a sustainable and effective intranet, careful planning is essential from the start. Once SharePoint is installed, it can be tempting to start using it straight away. Every time someone has said “We’ll set it up like this for now and fix it properly later”, it doesn’t work. SharePoint is such a huge platform that if you don’t know where you’re going with it in the future, you won’t get anywhere.

What might such planning look like?
It is about clearly defining what content should be on the intranet, how the information should be organized, and how the intranet should interact with other communication channels such as Microsoft Teams or Viva Engage. A well-structured plan will not only ensure that the intranet is user-friendly, but also that it can evolve and adapt to the changing needs of the organization.

How to ensure that the intranet remains sustainable and easy to maintain over time?
To create a long-term and sustainable structure of the intranet, it is important to think about how to keep information up-to-date and easily accessible. Metadata plays a key role in this. By tagging documents, news and pages appropriately, certain pieces of information on the intranet can be updated automatically without having to manually edit each individual page. This makes the system both dynamic and easy to maintain over time, helping to maintain a user-friendly experience even as content grows. Metadata can also make it easier for editors to keep pages up to date.

How should the intranet navigation be structured to be both effective and user-friendly?
The navigation of the intranet should be process or function based rather than organization based. This means that information is organized by workflows and functions rather than departments. This will make it easier for employees to find relevant information, even if it comes from different departments.

However, it can sometimes be important to maintain a certain departmental structure, as there may be specific information that is relevant only to a particular group or function in the organization. By including specific pages or sites only for specific departments/groups, you can help employees to quickly find the information that is directly related to their daily work, while still having access to information from other parts of the organization.

An effective solution could be to use a hybrid model where the main structure of the intranet is based on functions and processes, but where departments are available as links or subcategories. This allows both the need for an overview and department-specific information to be met, without creating unnecessary complexity.

How can you ensure that the correct version of a document is easy to find on the intranet?
A common problem is that documents are attached directly to pages or news items, making it difficult to find the latest version when older documents appear in search results. One solution is to use links to the correct documents preferably with search with the correct metadata tags to ensure that the information you link to is accurate and up to date over time.

How to create a long-term and flexible structure for the intranet?
To build a sustainable structure, one should avoid tying the intranet too much to specific organizational units. Flexibility allows the intranet to adapt to future needs. Regular updates and reviews of the structure are also important to keep the intranet relevant over time.