Thanks to advanced communication and collaboration tools available in today’s digital workplace, people can now work anywhere they choose.

There is always communication between teams, but physical proximity is no longer necessary for them to function well.

Remote Employment is the Work of the Future

Even though it’s unlikely that brick-and-mortar workplaces will go away anytime soon, the rise of the telecommuting workforce is undeniable. Currently, 38% of American workers do some or all of their jobs from part. That number is only expected to grow as communication and collaboration technologies work to advance at a rapid time. Workers in remote locations may include: 

• Employees, either full-time or part-time, who perform periodic work away from the office 
• Workers that are entirely remote from their workplace environment, whether full-time or part-time 
• Freelancers, consultants, and contractors that work independently, either whole or part-time  

There are several reasons why companies that don’t offer flexible work choices struggle to compete. When companies aren’t limited by geography, they have more freedom to find and hire the greatest people. Companies are learning the hard way that giving workers more control over their schedules and working conditions results in happier, more productive workers, which positively affects the bottom line. 

There has been rapid development in the digital workplace, with sophisticated tools for communication and collaboration empowering employees to work in whichever manner and location they see fit. While it is still essential for teams to work together, physically being in the same place is no longer necessary, given the prevalence of constant connectivity.

Despite its many advantages, the remote workforce is still in its infancy, and many companies have yet to figure out how to maximize its potential for productivity and employee engagement. Collaboration software and practices that put teams in the same position to be productive and company-centric, whether at the office, at home in pajamas, or halfway around the world, are essential to the success of a remote workforce. 

This is where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint is one of the most successful enterprise-level collaboration platforms in the world. Over the past two decades, Microsoft saw SharePoint grow to over 100 million users around the world. 

Microsoft 365  SharePoint Intranet  has the tools your employees need to boost your productivity. Below we share how to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 license when you use a SharePoint-based intranet to improve productivity and communication among your remote team. 

7 Reasons why SharePoint Intranet is for Your Remote Teams

1. Clear Communication- Share news instantly and stay informed

Your corporate intranet can become a virtual hub where your team meets to communicate effectively. 

SharePoint has the features and flexibility to customize the platform to mold this to your business needs. You can choose among various plug-in and play add-ins, workflows, and other widgets for your corporate intranet page. These tools can help your remote teams instantly search, store, or secure key company data. The portal helps companies disseminate information across your organization. This helps you organize information, people, and projects. 

You can also use SharePoint Add-ins like the Employee Directory as a central directory for your organization. People can easily search for employees’ information and share their contact details, skill sets, and current project lists. You can embed the add-in on your corporate intranet to connect your staff. 

Other add-ins like News Ticker and RSS Viewer share the latest news and snippets related to your company or industry. This helps your remote teams stay informed about changes in your organization.

2. A Great Collaboration Tool

It is vital to ensure Your remote team works together as a group collaborating on projects. SharePoint helps collaborators change documents simultaneously without delay. Co-authoring is a great way to get real-time feedback on your work and ideas. 

Also, SharePoint lists serve as project management tools to help remote teams collaborate more effectively. Remote team members can review the list of outstanding tasks, check deadlines, and dependencies, and communicate accordingly with concerned team members. 

Furthermore, we developed advanced collaboration add-ins like the SharePoint Knowledge Management add-in. It is a digital repository that stores your key company information. You can use the Knowledge Management add-in to share:

• Policies and procedures
•  FAQs
• Best practices
• Document templates
• Project requirement data, etc. 

Finally, employees can ask questions in real-time. Employees who are authorized to answer get email notifications about a new question on the platform.  

Depending on the privacy of the question, the answer can be privately emailed as well as publicly published if you wish. This add-in can also be easily embedded on your corporate intranet as a widget. 

3. Central document repository

SharePoint is awesome when it comes to storing crucial documents. They have an advanced search feature to ensure users can find the data they uploaded.

With SharePoint, you can share documents and files with your remote team at any given time from wherever you are on any device you choose to use.

These documents can be in formats like Word, Excel, PDF, image, or videos. You can also set user permissions for accessing, downloading, or editing these documents thus also setting up a secured system for storage of the crucial company files.

4. Encourage ideas

Your remote team members may not be close physically,  but it is important to never underestimate their ability to work together when it comes to innovative ideas.

Your intranet is a central platform where team members can post their innovative ideas, chats, pictures and more. By sharing this information, they can build their relationship, and improve employee engagement.

5. Intranet in your pocket

As companies adopt a mobile work environment it’s increasingly important for employees to have access to business content, anywhere they work, no matter the time of day or device.

With SharePoint Mobile and SharePoint Online, you can use your device to access company data from anywhere in the world. This means you can open, review, and edit documents with colleagues even when you’re not in the office. Note: To keep this digital environment secure, it is only accessible with a specific login URL and the right credentials.

Conclusion

Remote working has become the new normal for many organizations. Because it is still new for many companies, they are learning how to master this new organizational setup.

A robust and intuitive SharePoint intranet can help your team ease into this type of work scenario. Let’s start building a connected workplace for our remote teams and boost their productivity and collaboration with the best-in-class Intranet. Check out our SharePoint Intranet Examples here or contact us today. We are here to answer any questions you have on how to set up your intranet.

Intranets are making great strides with their new modern communication sites and are likely to continue. Most organizations use intranets to share a quick fact or an update, or maybe a landing page about a department or working group. For medium- and small-scale organizations this may suffice, however, the larger enterprises need something robust and scalable. 

 The Need for Modern Experience 

Technology has stepped forward swiftly in the last decade as we have moved towards digitization, cloud transformation, robotics, and analytics. Market developments and competition have altered commercial enterprise goals dramatically as their legacy systems are getting a face-lift, they are moving from servers to clouds, a static web-page to a responsive layout and beyond.  

Talking about the legacy corporate intranets, they lack front-end experience and diverse content editor roles. Microsoft realized the need for a modern SharePoint framework and decided to put an end to any updates to the old installations. This leaves many organizations with Intranets having very basic templates that are very nondescript and still doesn’t support accessibility by default. They introduced Modern SharePoint which is a development framework which emphasizes user experience, collaboration and efficiency, and most importantly, isn’t developer-intensive. The fundamental changes are mostly done on the client’s front instead of the server and don’t require manpower and investment for the CSS, JavaScript, and web parts. 

 Capabilities of Modern SharePoint  

-Attractive, brand-specific designs that come with hub-wide navigation with increased search capabilities across all departments. 

-On-site customization within an existing hub become possible along with the easy installation of web parts with conditional formatting.  

-Automate repetitive tasks, assign site design permissions and make sure whatever is done to the intranet stands approved. 

-Turnkey solutions with noteworthy cost savings for democratized intranets that no longer require developer intensive tasks. 

-Smooth migration of complex sites that host monolithic designs and complex navigation.  

Purpose of a Modern SharePoint Intranet  

Modern SharePoint empowers you to do so much beyond simply communicating general procedures using a portal that serves are a repository for documents; it gives you the ability to design functional sites, pages, and web parts. With modernization comes innovation, collaboration and efficiencies that support activities within a working environment.  

Webinar on Modern SharePoint 

Beyond Intranet is hosting its first webinar on Building Smart Intranet using Modern SharePoint. This will be a 30- minute free session which will expose the limitations of legacy Intranets and take a deeper dive into the features of Modern SharePoint. The webinar will be a live session followed by a short QnA session.  

 Audience 

While this session is directed toward anyone wanting to learn Modern SharePoint features, all are encouraged to attend.  

TOPIC: Building Smart Intranet…. Simplified With Modern SharePoint  

WHEN: August 21st, 2019 @ 1 pm EDT 

WHO: Dave Brown, Bhupendra Singh, and Vijay Mangtani  

WHAT: Tips and feature demonstrations of Modern SharePoint  

 Find speaker details and other information here: 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

The success of non-profit organization depends on donations or funds from different external sources and its resources. If the fund is mismanaged or not used properly, it may result in loss of clients, trust, and status. Therefore, it’s crucial for non-profits to use effective yet affordable tools to handle the entire process.

The answer to this problem lies in one technology and that is Microsoft SharePoint, a web-based collaborative platform.

How can SharePoint benefit non-profits?

A SharePoint Version that is Affordable and Effective

Gone are the days when SharePoint was considered the technology of only the big and profitable companies. With the release of Office 365 and SharePoint Online, non-profits can now find a SharePoint version that is affordable and effective. Microsoft offers Office 365 and SharePoint either totally free or at a significant discount to non-profits (depending on the plan). This is a no-brainer considering all the features and benefits that are provided.

Central Location for All Your Important Documents

Most non-profits email accounts are scattered all over Yahoo, Gmail, or any other mail provider. Important documents are also stored all over the place (i.e. Dropbox or personal drives). Utilizing SharePoint brings all these important aspects of your non-profit under one roof. With SharePoint there is a cohesiveness that streamlines processes. When an employee leaves, the important documents are all saved under one common location, so there is no loss of data or difficulty finding the right information at any time.

Shallow Pockets for IT Budgets

SharePoint is a cloud-based system that allows you to work 100% online. Since your files are in the cloud, Microsoft controls the security aspect and spends millions of dollars on that effort, so you don’t ever have to worry about your data being breached. Non-profits don’t need to worry any more on server hosting, software licensing, or separate IT support. This all comes as a bundled package under services provided by Microsoft. If you need to scale up or make the tools more effective as per your use case, the platform is highly flexible for customizations. And that’s where Beyond Intranet

Sharing Internal Documents with External Partners

Non-profits work mostly with external partners. SharePoint is a well-known platform for document management and seamless collaboration. You can easily set up a document library where all the important documents related to vendors, donators, or stakeholders can be placed, and you can also manage user permission levels to access the documents. Apart from document management, you can also set up group calendars to track projects, tasks, meetings and events, or create custom workflows that simplify your specific processes. We have a complete SharePoint team of experts who can demonstrate how to set up these processes in SharePoint easily.

But when we say document management, we don’t mean DROPBOX! SharePoint isn’t just drop box.

Knowledge Management and Collaboration

SharePoint is excellent when it comes to knowledge management and collaboration. We know that organizations, including non-profits, can suffer when there is miscommunication or no communication at all. It is important to bridge this gap and SharePoint Knowledge Management tools have taken the charge to determine how they can help you reinvent the way you work!

Users can search, share, add, or access important company information whenever and wherever they want within high security levels.

Value of Your Own Non-Profit Intranet

Just like with SharePoint, having an intranet of your own was also at one time thought to be just for larger companies! Small organizations avoided giving even a thought to their OWN COMPANY INTRANET. Surprisingly, though, experts state that non-profits are among the companies that can benefit the most from having their own intranet. Resources are required to collaborate and work from anywhere, anytime. It is necessary that everyone continuously shares the latest docs and info at one common location, ensuring easy access at all times.  Only SharePoint can make this happen.

A well-thought-out intranet can be the nexus where staff can easily find relevant documents, organizational charts, employee directories, employee benefits, forms, general directions for operating as a member of your nonprofit, and more. SharePoint Online makes setting up and modifying your intranet super easy. All you need to do is plan up your Intranet carefully.

Scalability and Customization

SharePoint is a highly customizable application, one that is designed to accommodate your changing needs. You can not only create custom workflows of any of your business processes within this, but you can also set up document libraries to allow for easy document sharing, setting up group calendars to track projects, tasks, meetings and events, and more.

Microsoft also takes good care of keeping SharePoint Online updated with new features on a regular basis, making the platform up-to-date as well as highly scalable.

We’re Here to Help!

Hey, non-profits! You continuously serve your communities, so give Beyond Intranet the chance to serve you!

Beyond Intranet, (a subsidiary company of Beyond Key) is a SharePoint custom development expert for the last 12 years and can help you in any aspect of SharePoint customization, ready-to-use SharePoint add-ins, integration capability, and intranets for nonprofits. We have built an enviable reputation as an expert in SharePoint based consulting, Custom Application Development, Intranet Design and Development, Branding, and  SharePoint Migration.

Reach out to us at contact@beyondintranet.com and connect with our SharePoint experts to get a free consultation today!

Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? If you also want to give a personalized touch to your SharePoint site, then you have landed at the right place.  

What Are SharePoint Themes? 

SharePoint themes are collections of various design elements. These elements include color palettes, font styles, and site layout designs. These customized SharePoint themes offer a lightweight branding experience to the SharePoint site. 

A site owner can curate these themes. This customization is optional as they are available in drag-and-drop options. It will instantly change the look and feel of your SharePoint site. 

Are you ready to give a custom look to your SharePoint site? Let’s get started. 

This attractive SharePoint Site theming option allows user to apply custom or default themes to all modern sites (communication or team sites) to deliver new engaging and familiar looks.

The process is extremely simple. In this article below, we are sharing the step by step process of using the theme generator using PowerShell.

1. Go to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric

2. Then go to Components>>Customizations>>Colors

(https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/customizations/colors)

3. As we proceed further to create our custom theme, we can choose from various color options available under:

a) Primary color theme

b) Body text color

c) Body background color

4. From the color palette choose a specific shade for each one of them; these colors will determine what your custom theme will look like.

5. Copy the PowerShell generated in the Output.

6. Now open PowerShell and connect to your SharePoint Tenant. To Open PowerShell, go to your Windows menu and search for “Windows PowerShell ISE”– Run as administrator.

7. To run the PowerShell cmdlets for theme management, you must do the following:

Download and install the SharePoint Online Management Shell. If you already have a previous version of the shell installed, uninstall it first and then install the latest version.

8. To connect PowerShell with your SharePoint online tenant-

Run “Connect-SPOService” command in your PowerShell.

9. Next, It will ask for SharePoint tenant URl where you want to add the custom color theme.

10. Enter your Microsoft account credentials if prompted.

11. Write “$themecontoso = “ and paste copied PowerShell script

12. Now again write “$themecontoso” at the end of the script and press enter and you will find that the values are assigned to variables.

13. To add this theme, write the below command, and assign a proper name to your theme so it is easily identified.

a) For Light colored theme the command will be: Add-SPOTheme –Name “Theme Name” –Palette $themecontoso –IsInverted $false

b) And for Dark colored theme the command will be : Add-SPOTheme –Name “Theme Name” –Palette $themecontoso –IsInverted $fTrue

14. To Apply the theme:

a) Open your modern site and click on the cog icon

b) Click on “Change the Look”

c) Select your custom theme and click Apply

15. Your custom theme will start appearing on the right side panel.

SharePoint site theming: PowerShell cmdlets

The following cmdlets are available for managing site themes from PowerShell:

a) Add-SPOTheme – Creates a new custom theme, or overwrites an existing theme to modify its settings.

b) Get-SPOTheme – Retrieves settings for an existing theme.

c) Remove-SPOTheme – Removes a theme from the theme gallery.

d) Set-SPOHideDefaultThemes – Specifies whether the default themes should be available.

e) Get-SPOHideDefaultThemes – Queries the current SPOHideDefaultThemes setting.

How We Can Help You In Customizing Your SharePoint Themes

Beyond Intranet is a Microsoft Gold Partner Company. With over 18 years of experience in the domain we successfully served more than 500 clients across the globe. We boast a team of more than 300 brilliant individuals, a significant number of whom hold certifications from Microsoft. We are experts in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises. We help enterprises to steer through their SharePoint journey.  

In case you find it difficult to customize your SharePoint themes feel free to consult us today. Our Customized SharePoint Themes services can offer you the following benefits: 

• Strategic SharePoint Alignment:  

Our SharePoint customization solutions align the SharePoint site with your existing organizational strategy. It provides a unified digital ecosystem. 

• Upgraded User Experience:  

A well-designed and implemented SharePoint theme enhances user satisfaction and productivity by 2x. It will result in increased user engagement. 

• Brand Consistency:  

  We help you to customize SharePoint themes to ensure that your SharePoint site reflects your brand’s identity. It will strengthen brand consistency. 

• Optimized Performance:  

  Beyond Intranet’s expertise ensures that the customized theme does not compromise performance. It will maintain optimal speed and responsiveness. 

• Future-Ready Solutions:  

  We ensure that your SharePoint customized theme is scalable. We ensure it should be adaptable to future SharePoint updates and expansions. 

 Still have any queries write us at: contact@beyondintranet.com 

Try on your own or ask for help!

So, isn’t it simple to create your own branded SharePoint  themes which can be easily applied all over your Modern SharePoint tenant? Just try the simple steps and let us know how it went.

Even if you face any challenges, the Beyond Intranet SharePoint Consulting team of expert developers is always there to help. Connect with us at contact@beyondintranet.com and we will respond to you as soon as we can.

If you are looking for a comprehensive Microsoft SharePoint Intranet for your company, it needs to fulfill some basic requirements. It should be able to keep employees engaged and informed, support daily initiatives, reflect company values and ultimately help people get work done effectively and efficiently. We, at Beyond Intranet, recommend that as the company SharePoint Intranet administrator you should review the following 7 add-ins which can be used to quickly setup a really effective and comprehensive intranet for your company.

Before installation of add-ins, sign up with your Office 365 account with a Microsoft SharePoint subscription plan. Now start adding ‘Beyond Intranet’ apps by finding them on the Microsoft AppSource store and subscribing to them one by one.

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01. Slider

Images have a remarkable capacity of communicating more in less time. Our Slider add-in can be impressively used to make a rotating banner of your SharePoint Intranet home page. Either showcase your company’s new launches, events pictures or anything else, a dynamic slider will ensure that it creates an attractive landing page of your Intranet.

02. Knowledge management

Beyond Intranet’s Knowledge Management add-in acts as a central repository for loads of information which can be used by any employee having access to it at any point of time. Employees keep on constantly adding new information in the form of comments, discussions, blogs, documents on the SharePoint Intranet. If they do so with Knowledge management software, the information gets saved as a hub of information which can be used anytime, anywhere with designated people.

03. Employee Directory

True saying. Employees are the key asset for any organization. Beyond Intranet’s Employee Directory add-in is an absolute must to have for large organizations or office with remote staff. SharePoint Employee Directory Software allows employees to recognize who’s who as well as it brings easy engagement of the staff. This add-in is built to be fully responsive for any android or iOS phone as well so enjoy connecting to employees whenever and wherever you are.

04. Task Manager

Deadlines keep the momentum of work moving in positive direction. They force you to organize your tasks in order of priority. Task Management software helps your employees by prioritizing the work and marking its schedule on Task Manager. Automated email alerts are sent as soon as new task is created or deadline is missed. Task Manager becomes extremely important component of your company’s intranet page to help employees’ catchup with the growing pace of work.

05. Birthday Reminder

Birthday Reminder is another attractive add-in which has all rights to grab a small place on your company’s intranet. The add-in picks up birth date of the employees from the SharePoint / Office 365 database and displays it in a beautiful template with employee profile picture on his / her special day. Even the other office colleagues can send quick links with birthday greetings to the employee having his / her special day without investing lot of time.

06. Search Analytics

What if there are thousands of documents lying on the combined space of your intranet and employee wants to get the relevant document from this pool of information. Search Analytics add-in has a capability to search loads of documents, people, sites and other content from your loaded SharePoint Intranet to find the relevant information for you. Just install this add-in and don’t forget to give it a top space on the page to be easily located by your employees.

07. Chat Board

Discuss, chat, spread ideas and innovate and express yourself inside your SharePoint Intranet through an extremely simple application of Chat Board. Information radiators help your employees to communicate easily.

Ask for help!

Just try the simple add-ins on your Enterprise Intranet and let us know how it went.

Even if you face any challenges, the Beyond Intranet SharePoint team of expert developers is always there to help. Connect with us at contact@beyondintranet.com and we will respond to you as soon as we can.