Are you an internal communicator who owns and manages the intranet?  Are you looking to redesign your intranet but are not sure how Microsoft's Modern Communication sites fit into your project?  Attend this session to learn about what features Communication Sites provide and how you can leverage them.  This session will also be demo heavy to showcase key features that are available for 1st Release users in Office 365 tenants.

1. Introducing Communication Sites for Communicators
Attend this session to learn about what features Communication Sites provide and how you can
leverage them. This session will also be demo heavy to showcase key features that are available
for 1st Release users in Office 365 tenants.
Presented by Kanwal Khipple (@kkhipple)
SharePoint Fest Chicago
#spfestchi
December 5th 2018

2. INTRANET IN YOUR POCKET…
What if you could also enable better site experiences on mobile devices. What if you could
design for the user? Extending team or departmental reach.

3. GET LEADERSHIP ENGAGED
Enabling your champions and leaders to connect with employees.

4. SHARED STORIES
Building champions in an organization starts by encouraging and sharing failures

5. MORE NEWS FROM TEAMS…
It can’t just be regional, departmental and corporate news on your homepage anymore. You
need to think about how you will surface team and project news.
As team and departmental news increases
we want to ensure our digital hub is helping
by giving a broader view of that important
information. You should be integrating team
news on your homepage design ASAP.
In this example perhaps green team news.

6. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
What we are going to cover today

7. 100+ slides
50+ SharePoint Presentations @ Slideshare.Net/kkhipple
Intranets w/ Office 365 Whitepaper @ Office365Intranets.com
Message Me On LinkedIn or Email Kanwal@Khipple.com

8. SPEAKER | AUTHOR | SUPER GOOD LOOKING
KANWAL KHIPPLE, CEO
@kkhipple
bit.ly/linkedinkk
2014 2015

9. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
PRINCIPLES
What we are going to cover today

10. ARCHITECTURE
How your sites are organized changes going forward
DYK classic publishing still has a place
for your custom portals
DYK modern sites (communication,
teams) are really improving but
customization is limited
DYK flat hierarchy directly simplifies
and impacts governance (i.e. group or
not to group?

11. SITE STRUCTURE MODEL(S)
There are a number of ways to manage site hierarchy. Key is to ensure hierarchy enables
collaboration it should not restrict it.
SITE NAV
TOP NAV
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
HUB-AND-SPOKE
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
SITE
NAV
SITE NAV
SITE NAV
TOP NAV
SITE NAV
TOP NAV
HIERARCHICAL

12. GOVERNANCE
Ensuring you have a governance model in place to guide users what sites they should
create
Company
+
Hub Site
Team site Communication siteTeam site
Division
Team
ROOT SITE
- New tenant under 500 users, will
have Communication site as
default
- Existing tenants, Microsoft is
finalizing ways to switch your root
site to use Communication Site

13. COMMUNICATION SITES
Engaging with like-minded community members
CONCISE & CONSISTENT NAVIGATION
Is there specific content that should be
prioritized and accessible for everyone?
BRAND WITH PURPOSE
What color should we use to highlight key
content?
USER INTERFACE
Can we encourage others to contribute?

14. COMMUNICATION SITES
Inform and engage people across your organization. Create visually stunning and natively-
mobile pages to share vision, news, information and resources.
Region Brand Single Page

15. REGION SPECIFIC
Communicating out to your organization can be done beautifully and effectively with
Communication sites for each region

16. REGION SPECIFIC
Communicating out to your organization can be done beautifully and effectively with
Communication sites for each region

17. BRAND SPECIFIC
Communicating and reinforcing your brand in a highly visual way is the goal of this
communication site

18. BRAND SPECIFIC
Communicating and reinforcing your brand in a highly visual way is the goal of this
communication site

19. SINGLE PAGE
Create a focused training site on a single page that doesn't distract by leading users away with
off-page navigation.

20. SINGLE PAGE
Create a focused training site on a single page that doesn't distract by leading users away with
off-page navigation.

21. RESPONSIVE DESIGN…
Responsive design is a default requirement. Every Intranet should be responsive by design.
Microsoft is incorporating in all modern site designs and so should you.

22. FITS ALL SIZES AND DEVICES
Ensure your sites work seamlessly on any page layout, screen size and to work great on
mobile phones.
Responsive experiences
seamlessly scale across
devices to better
display your content on
a range of different
screen sizes
http://bit.ly/docspresponsivedesign

23. NEW DESIGNS & TEMPLATES…
The ability to add custom themes, set a default site design, add additional site designs,
scope site designs to users, and more!

24. APP LAUNCHER/QUICK ACCESS…
While many Intranets build out quick access or app launchers this is in O365 already.
Whatever we build should compliment this and not look to replace it.
Out Of The Box
●

25. NAVIGATION
Needs to be user centric and help users complete their day to day work
Typically we see this because
navigation is not user-centric. Users
generally start by finding where they
need to go through the navigation
75% of the time.
When people get stuck navigating
they resort to using site search.
SEARCH SUCKS

26. INTRANET NAVIGATION
The four (4) key elements to consider when planning your navigation.
1 2 3
HEADER GLOBAL NAVIGATION QUICK LINKS FOOTER
• App Launcher
• Office 365 taskbar
• ‘Home’ button
• Global search
• World Clocks
• Office sites
• Sections mega-menu
• Departments mega-menu
• Tools
• Hub-site navigation
• Top Links
• My saved links
• Favorites
• External websites
• Social media
• Getting Started
• Corporate Community sites
4

27. NAVIGATION INVESTMENTS…
The hub navigation is still relatively simple and many organizations still invest in developing or
purchasing a custom global navigation to use across their sites.
Requires Minor Customization
◑

28. NAVIGATION OPTIONS
Choose your navigation wisely
• Site navigation:
• Team site = left nav
• Comm site = top nav
• Hub navigation:
• Connects associated sites
Styling options for both:
Cascading
COMING SOON:
option to change
orientation of the
navigation from the
site default.

29. CHANGE THE LOOK OF SHAREPOINT
You can quickly and easily customize the look of your SharePoint site to reflect your professional
style and brand.

30. CHANGE THE LOOK OF SHAREPOINT
You can quickly and easily customize the look of your SharePoint site to reflect your professional
style and brand.

31. BRANDING OPTIONS
How you customize determines your team’s
Levelofeffort
Flexibility
Office 365 Theming
Site Designs
Master Pages
JavaScript embed
Intranet in a Box

32. CUSTOMIZATION OR CONFIGURATION?
Be aware of the limitations to what you can customize and what you can configure
CONFIGURE
CONFIGURE / CUSTOMIZE
CONFIGURE
CONFIGURE / CUSTOMIZE
CONFIGURE / CUSTOMIZE CONFIGURE

33. SHAREPOINT MODERNIZATION SCANNER
Using this scanner you can prepare your classic sites for modernization

34. SHAREPOINT MODERNIZATION SCANNER
Using this scanner you can prepare your classic sites for modernization
Transform classic
pages to modern
client-side pages
http://bit.ly/githubspmodernizationtool

35. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
What we are going to cover today
BUILDING COMMUNITIES

36. Empower employees to be productive and engage
with their peers through an integrated employee digital
experience
OUR VISION

37. PAIN POINTS
• Adoption
• Too many tools - Not sure what to use when
• No formal training/support (only peer-to-peer support)
• Lack of governance
• Self-Serve – Communication & Collaboration
• Self-management of workspaces is not available
• Client/Project Knowledge not shared across regions/teams
• Lack of collaboration between teams
• Lack of best practices for documents management
• Technology Enablement
• Technology Infrastructure is slow and combersome
• Permissions hard to implement to comply with MSA agreements
• Need direction to migrate documents to SharePoint Online
• Automate Collaboration
• Repetitive tasks are not easy to perform due to large number of applications
• Intelligent Search
• Difficult to find information within the company
• No central place to search for employees
• Employee information and status not up to date
• Digital Hub
• Fractured Corporate Communication (each business line has separate communication)
• Lack of Single Sign-on (10-15 applications to log in every day)
Frequency of the various pain points we’ve heard. Dominated by Culture, Adoption & Training
frustrations, followed by Workplace Communication & Collaboration.
Automate
Collaboration Digital Hub
Intelligent Search
Adoption
Self-Serve
(Communication &
Collaboration)
Technology
Enablement

38. OUR USERS, OUR EXPERIENCE
Understanding needs from our users perspective guides our priorities
Theodore,
Connector
Kyle,
Collaborator
Judy,
Consumer
Eva,
Contributor
John,
Communicator

39. It would be great to find content easily over the Intranet
using search and be able to access work related
documents and materials while I am out of the office
GOALS
Create work related documents
efficiently with reference to existing
documents and templates.
EXPECTATIONS
Consolidate personalized
mechanism to find relevant
content. Personalized
communication/notifications.
FRUSTRATIONS
Difficult to sift through search
results / documents to find the
relevant documents, and lack of
communication relevance to his
work.
“
KEY CHARACTERISTICS
Age
Occupation
Education
Family
Location
41
Field Employee
Bachelor’s Degree
Married
Canada
FUTURE STATE
OUTLOOK
SHAREPOINT
ONEDRIVE
TEAMS
YAMMER
CURRENT STATE
OUTLOOK
SHAREPOINT
ONEDRIVE
TEAMS
YAMMER
Judy
Consumer Persona
Straight Focused independent
ATTRIBUTES
TECHNICAL PROWESS
TECH. AVOIDANCE
ONLINE EXPERIENCE
SOCIAL
DRIVE
TOUCH POINT CHANNELS
Phone Website
Speech Chat
Mobile App
Goal Oriented

40. DESIGN WITH YOUR USERS
Encourage users to create sites and play with the editing experience

41. PRODUCT ROADMAP
As we unearth requests, we will align them based on priority and business value
CORE
COMPONENTS
CONTENTS
2018 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
R1 R2
OFFICE 365
BETA PILOT
TOP NAVIGATION
SOLUTION FRAMEWORK
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
OOTB BRANDING RESPONSIVE DESIGN
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
PAGE LAYOUTSHOME PAGE
TOP NAVIGATION
FOOTER
HERO SLIDER
EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT
STAFF DIRECTORY
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
SPOTLIGHT PAGES
SITE DESIGNS HUB SITES PAGE TEMPLATES? ???

42. YAMMER INTEGRATION ON PAGES
This kind of usage of Yammer is especially helpful on content like news where
comments and social interaction can create more opportunities for engagement.
Major Customization Required
◔

43. BETTER YAMMER EXPERIENCES…
Continued innovation provides more styles and ways to integrate existing social tools like
Yammer into your Intranet.

44. GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES
• Easy to create a communication site
• Site news automatically appear on SharePoint Home
• Presentation takes center stage
Where you run into challenges when leveraging communication sites

45. GAPS TODAY
• Multilingual support
• Global Navigation is non-existent
• Information architecture is limited
• Extending branding is limited
Where you run into challenges when leveraging communication sites

46. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
What we are going to cover today
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS

47. COMMUNICATION SITES
Inform and engage people across your organization. Create visually stunning and natively-
mobile pages to share vision, news, information and resources.
Showcase Topic Blank

48. ADD A PAGE
When you create a communication site, you can add pages using built-in templates to help
you get started. Choose from a blank page, a multi-column page, or a single-column page.

49. SECTIONS
You can add columns to sections within SharePoint pages. To show content side-by-side, you can add up to
three columns to each section. Vertically, you can have multiple sections with varying numbers of columns

50. HERO
Bring focus and visual interest to your page with the Hero web part.
TOPIC SHOWCASE

51. HERO CONFIGURATION
Bring focus and visual interest to your page with the Hero web part.

52. NEWS
You can keep everyone in the loop and engage your audience with important or interesting stories by using the News web part on
your page or site. You can quickly create eye-catching posts like announcements, people news, status updates, and more that can
include graphics and rich formatting.

53. NEWS CONFIGURATION
You can keep everyone in the loop and engage your audience with important or interesting stories by using the News web part on
your page or site. You can quickly create eye-catching posts like announcements, people news, status updates, and more that can
include graphics and rich formatting.
Choose which sites to show Change the layout Add News Post/Link

54. EVENTS
You can keep everyone in the loop and engage your audience with important or interesting events
by using the Events web part on your page or site.

55. TWITTER
With the Twitter web part, you can show tweets that are relevant to you or your audience right
on your page.

56. YAMMER
If your organization has an active Yammer network (for example: www.yammer.com/contoso.com), you can
enhance collaboration by adding Yammer conversations or a Yammer feed right on your page.

57. EMBED
You can display content on your SharePoint page from sites that allow embedding (like YouTube or Bing maps, for example). For many
sites, you can either use the site's web address for the content or embed code that the site provides. See exceptions at the bottom of
this article.

58. FILES
Use the File viewer web part to insert a file on your page. File types you can insert include Excel,
Word, PowerPoint, Visio, PDFs, 3D models, and more.

59. DOCUMENT
When you use the document library web part, you can choose to show a specific view of the
library or even a folder within the library.

60. PLANNER
With the Planner web part, you can show board or charts and work with your plan right on
your SharePoint page.

61. WEATHER
Use the weather web part which allows you to show the current weather on your page.

62. BING MAPS
Use the Bing maps web part to add a map to your page. Simply enter an address or a well
known name and your map will appear

63. IMAGE
use the Image web part. Use it to insert an image on the page, either from your site, your
computer, or from the web

64. TEXT
Use the Text web part to add paragraphs to your page. Formatting options like styles, bullets,
indentations, highlighting, and links are available.

65. SITES
The Sites web part allows you to automatically show sites associated with a hub site or a current
user's recent sites

66. SITE ACTIVITY
This web part automatically shows recent activity on your site, such as files uploaded, edits made, lists and
libraries created, and so on. Just add the web part, and the latest activity is pulled in automatically.

67. SITES CONFIGURATION
The Sites web part allows you to automatically show sites associated with a hub site or a current
user's recent sites
Choose which sites to show Change the layout Reorder sites

68. COMMENTS
Each news article and page can have its own set of comments.

69. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
What we are going to cover today
UPCOMING FEATURES

70. ACCENT COLORS
More use of accent color for more visual energy
New theme
color application via
background
colors provide visual
interest and organization
Out-of-the-box themes
provide 120 theme color
combination options
Shy header creates more
room for content
consumption

71. PAGE DESIGNS
Provides for saving a page within the same site so others can repeat the content structure

72. CENTRAL ASSET LIBRARY
provide easy access to your organization’s approved images that can be leveraged by
everyone.
When a person needs an approved
image, or one that was purchased for
licensed use throughout the intranet.
Click on “Your organization” and
navigate files and folders of assets that
are centrally managed for use in title
regions and the Image webpart.

73. PUBLISHING LITE
Use modern pages/news whenever possible. It is richer with sharing, personalization,
integration and more.

74. INSIGHTFUL NEWS
Some controls like the hero spotlight or the ability to pin documents to the top of a library
can be great ways to spotlight key content and are quite intuitive.

75. CONTENT PUBLISHING
Fast and improved news/page authoring builds on what is already available. Microsoft
provides many new client side web parts.
WYSIWYG authoring
Multi-column sections
Drag/ drop editing
RTE & Paste support
OOB web parts
Page Templates

76. HEADER
Continued updates are coming to customize header sizes
Minimal Header
Compact Header
Strongly branded

77. FOOTER
Continued updates are coming for managing links in the footer
Extended
Simple
Stacked
SPFx solution using PnP
footer extended
(personal links)

78. MEGA MENU
enable you to better organize and showcase the related content and sites associated under
that hub site.
COMING SOON
Limited to site collection
TOP OF MIND
Global mega

79. SECTION BACKGROUND
ability to change the background color

80. UNIVERSAL SEARCH
Search will be removed from the site header to the Office 365 Suite bar
Current suite header
Coming soon suite header with universal search

81. FLUENT USER EXPERIENCE
A preview of Fluent design language

82. PRINCIPLES
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
MOST POPULAR COMPONENTS
UPCOMING FEATURES
What we are going to cover today

83. It goes into much greater depth and can be found at
Office365Intranets.com
DOWNLOAD OUR 100+ PAGE
WHITEPAPER ON INTRANETS
WITH OFFICE 365

84. INTRANET STRATEGY…
As an organization you need to ensure that you build a great foundation and focus on the
right areas
EMPLOYEE
ENGAGEMENT
GOVERNANCE`

85. My twitter handle is @kkhipple and I work at
Thank You!
Organizers, Sponsors and You for making this possible.
50+ SharePoint Presentations @ Slideshare.Net/kkhipple
When to Use What Whitepaper @ WhentoUseWhat.com
Intranets w/ Office 365 Whitepaper @ Office365Intranets.com
External Sharing w/ Office 365 Whitepaper @ Office365Extranets.com
and more!
Message Me On LinkedIn or Email Kanwal@Khipple.com
SPEAKER | AUTHOR | SUPER GOOD LOOKING