What is a SharePoint intranet, and does a small business need one?

A SharePoint intranet is simply a site holding the things everyone in the business needs: policies, forms, contact lists, induction material, and answers to whatever people keep asking. For a small business it is worth building if the same questions reach you every week, and it should take hours rather than months.

The word intranet carries baggage from an era of large corporate portals, which puts small businesses off something genuinely useful. Strip the term away and the question is practical: is there one place where a new starter can find the leave policy, the expense form, the emergency contacts and the induction checklist? In most small businesses the honest answer is that these live in someone's inbox, a folder nobody can find, and one person's memory.

What makes a small business intranet work is restraint. A handful of pages: a home page with the things people need weekly, a policies page, a forms page, and something for new starters. Every page with a named owner and a review date. That is it. The failure mode is enthusiasm, where forty pages get built in a burst of energy, nobody owns them, and eighteen months later the intranet is a monument to information that was true once.

Two practical touches make the difference between used and ignored. Pin it as a tab in Teams, because that is where people already are and a destination they must remember to visit is a destination they will not. And point every repeat question at it: when someone asks where the form is, send the link rather than the file. Do that for a month and the habit forms on its own. If you want a simple one built and structured so it stays current, call 1800 456 567.