An intranet your employees actually use — designed around how they find information, integrated into Microsoft Teams via Viva Connections, optimised for Microsoft Search, and built from the ground up as the knowledge layer your Microsoft Copilot strategy depends on.
Living Intranet Programme
The two ways intranets fail and why both are avoidable
Most corporate intranets fail for one of two reasons. The first is the intranet nobody uses. It was built by IT, technically correctly, and then handed over to a business that was never consulted on what employees actually need. Navigation reflects the organisation chart. Content was written for compliance rather than communication. Search returns noise. Adoption never gets above thirty percent and the project is quietly declared complete while employees keep finding information through email, instant messages, and asking colleagues.
The second is the intranet that goes stale. It launched well — senior leader endorsement, a communications campaign, strong early adoption. Then reality arrived. Content owners were assigned at launch but never told what to do or how often to do it. The IT team does not have capacity to manage content — that is not their job. The Internal Comms team has a full communications programme to run alongside the intranet. Twelve months after launch the news section has not been updated since February, the CEO message on the homepage is from a strategy session that concluded eight months ago, and employees who check once and find outdated information stop checking.
Both failures happen because the intranet was treated as a project. A project has a launch date. A living intranet has a launch date — and then it continues. That distinction is what we design around from the very first conversation.
The intranet is no longer just a communications channel. It is the knowledge layer that determines the quality of every answer Microsoft Copilot gives your organisation.
What we build and how we build it
- Employee discovery research before any design decisions — Structured interviews and surveys with employees across functions and levels before a single SharePoint page is designed. Navigation, content hierarchy, homepage structure, and search configuration are all built around the actual mental models of the people who will use it — not around assumptions about what they should want.
- Content ownership framework designed before the build — Every content area assigned a named owner with defined responsibilities and update frequencies before build begins. This is the governance foundation that prevents the stale intranet — it is structural, not aspirational, and it is established before launch, not scrambled for afterward.
- Viva Connections — the intranet inside Teams — Your intranet surfaced directly inside Microsoft Teams so employees encounter it without leaving their working environment. For organisations where Teams is the primary collaboration tool, this converts the intranet from a destination employees have to remember to visit into a communication layer they access every day.
- Microsoft Search configuration — Your intranet content findable through the search experience employees already use across Microsoft 365 — in Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and the browser. Bookmarks, acronym definitions, and answer configurations for the most common organisational queries so search becomes a primary channel through which the intranet delivers value.
- Copilot knowledge layer design — Content structured, owned, and governed from the outset to serve as a reliable source for Copilot retrieval. Current content, consistent metadata, clear ownership, and a governance model that keeps all three maintained over time. What Copilot gives back is only as good as what you put in.
Project or programme: your choice
We design, build, and launch the intranet as a complete engagement. After launch, you choose your path. You can take full ownership with the governance framework, content ownership model, design system, and training we provide. Or you can continue with our Living Programme — a monthly retainer that includes analytics review and insight reporting, content governance check-ins, iterative design improvements, an annual intranet health review, and strategic advisory access as your communications needs evolve. Most organisations that launch with us choose to continue with it, because the Living Programme is what makes the intranet earn its name.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
We launched an intranet two years ago and nobody uses it. Can this be fixed or do we need to start again?
In most cases it can be fixed — and the first question we ask is whether to rebuild or to evolve the existing environment. An intranet that nobody uses was almost certainly designed around the organisation rather than its employees. The fix is employee research, information architecture redesign based on how people actually navigate information, and a content governance model that makes the right content findable and keeps it current. Whether that requires a rebuild or an evolution depends on the extent of the structural problems — we assess this honestly at the discovery session.
How do we make sure the content stays current after launch?
The content governance model is designed in Phase 1, before a single page is built, because the architecture of the intranet depends on it. Every content area has a named owner before launch. Every owner understands their responsibilities, their update frequency, and the editorial support available to them. The monthly analytics report in the Living Programme flags content approaching staleness before it becomes a problem. The quarterly governance review maintains the ownership framework as the organisation changes. This is not aspirational governance — it is structural, documented, and enforced through the programme.
How much does this add to our IT team's workload?
Significantly less than most IT Directors expect. The Living Intranet is designed to be maintained primarily by Internal Comms and content owners, not by IT. The design system allows content owners to create and update pages to a consistent standard without IT involvement. SharePoint site provisioning is governed through templates and workflows that require minimal IT oversight for day-to-day operations. IT’s primary ongoing responsibility is the SharePoint platform itself — licensing, security, and platform governance — which is already their remit.
We are planning to deploy Microsoft Copilot in the next twelve months. Should we do the intranet first?
Yes, and the reason is direct. Copilot draws from your SharePoint content. An intranet built with Copilot in mind — with a content ownership model, metadata framework, and governance structure that keeps content current and well-organised — becomes Copilot’s most reliable knowledge source from day one of AI deployment. Building or rebuilding the intranet after Copilot deployment means the AI goes live drawing from whatever your current SharePoint content looks like — which for most organisations means stale content, inconsistent structure, and no ownership model to ensure it improves.
What does the intranet look like on mobile and for frontline workers?
Fully responsive on mobile browsers, and Viva Connections in the Teams mobile app provides a native mobile experience. For organisations with a significant proportion of frontline or field employees who primarily access company information on mobile, we design the mobile experience as a primary use case from the outset — including the Viva Connections dashboard layout for smaller screens, the navigation patterns that work best on touch interfaces, and the content prioritisation that reflects what frontline workers need most urgently.
How do we measure whether the intranet is working?
We establish a measurement framework during Phase 1 and implement it as part of the build, so baseline data is available from launch day. The framework covers unique visitors and return visit rates, page-level engagement, search query analysis — what people are looking for and whether they are finding it — Viva Connections usage in Teams, content currency rates, and employee satisfaction with information accessibility through periodic pulse surveys. The monthly analytics report in the Living Programme turns these metrics into a narrative of what is working, what needs attention, and what should change in the following month.
