15 Intranet Best Practices

Get proven strategies and practical tips from 700+ customer implementations to shape a strategy for a successful employee intranet in 2025.

In this guide you will learn about proven practices to enhance your intranet platform, including:

✔ Improve employee communication with personalized start pages, location news, and department hubs, and more.

✔ Streamline content creation with editorial planning and AI-powered publishing tools.

✔ Support collaboration with integrated project spaces, document workflows, and search.

✔ Drive engagement through onboarding journeys, learning tools, and recognition features. ✔ Connect people and processes using process models, navigation, and automation.

✔ Deliver a consistent and user-friendly intranet experience across every device.

Each best practice includes real-world Omnia examples and practical guidance for delivering results across key intranet feature areas such as: 

Image 1: Design a start page using targeting, subscriptions, user behavior, and AI-powered solutions to optimize the experience for every user.

Image 2: Use multiple navigation types to improve findability and apply design guidelines for a consistent user experience.

Image 3: Create a task-oriented intranet that supports daily workflows, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

Built for Intranet Teams, Digital Workplace Leaders, and Comms Pros, this guide is ideal for:

✔ Intranet Managers and Owners.

✔ Internal Communication Teams.

✔ Digital Workplace Leads.

✔ HR, IT, and Knowledge Management Professionals.

✔ Anyone planning a new company intranet project or improving an existing platform.

1. What are intranet best practices and how do they matter for us?

Intranet best practices are proven strategies for designing and managing an effective employee intranet. They help organizations improve communication, support collaboration, and ensure the platform delivers real value to employees and the business. The best practices in this guide will provide inspiration and ideas on how to design a better intranet solution.

2. Who can use this intranet best practices guide?

This guide is ideal for intranet managers, internal communications teams, digital workplace leads, and IT professionals. It’s especially useful for organizations using Microsoft 365 that want to improve intranet adoption, usability, and impact. The Guide can also be used as solution examples in intranet design workshops.

3. Can these intranet best practices be applied to in Microsoft 365 environments?

Yes. The best practices in this guide are specifically designed for intranets built on Microsoft 365—including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva. Each section includes examples of how Omnia supports these scenarios in real-world solutions. Omnia is the perfect platform for enterprise-grade intranets for organizations using Microsoft 365, and all examples in the guide are based on this platform.

4. How can the intranet best practices improve employee communication and engagement?

Best practices for topics as personalized start pages, targeted news, recognition tools, and feedback features make the intranet more relevant and inclusive—connecting people across roles, teams, and locations. The best practices in the guide cover several examples that can help achieve these benefits.

5. Does the Intranet Best Practices Guide cover how to improve intranet usability and adoption?

Improving usability starts with features like intuitive navigation, smart search, and mobile accessibility - all topics covered in the guide. Adoption improves when the intranet supports daily work with tools, content, and integrations tailored to employee needs, which also is covered in the document. You will also find links to related content to be able to learn more.

6. Is this guide more useful for organizations planning a new intranet launch, than for organizations redesigning a present intranet?

Whether you’re planning your first company intranet or upgrading an existing solution, this guide offers practical intranet design tips and real-world feature examples to help you build a successful intranet strategy from day one. If you are redesigning a solution, there might be technical or solution-specific obstacles to implementing all best practices. Still, we expect the scenarios covered to be highly useful in those situations as well.