The intelligent intranet is the heart of the digital workspace, providing connections to people and content across teams and channels. Further, we know that tapping into collective knowledge and collaboration boosts engagement and facilitates communications, which is why we’re so excited about the Microsoft Teams Home Site App.  

Sophisticated intranet deployments have, in the past, been expensive and time-consuming to architect and build, either via custom development or, for the more budget-conscious, through canned portal offerings.  

Well, Merry Christmas M365 & Teams Fans: Microsoft will soon be including an easily provisioned intranet solution to your Teams site. 

Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020, the M365 Teams Home Site app delivers the ability to pin a company-branded entry point to an intranet landing portal as a top-level, personal app in Teams. The app provides quick access to company resources, news, and important internal and external sites. Home pages (or any other SharePoint pages) pinned as tabs in channels provide ways to bring content directly into Teams collaboration scenarios. Best of all, the Teams Home Site App wraps this functionality in a comprehensive intranet experience, complete with navigation, mega-menus, and support for tenant-wide search. 

Key points: 

• Company branded entry-point in Teams 
• Immersive site experience, complete with navigation and mega-menus 
• Discover and engage with intranet content while staying within Teams 
• Quick access to company-curated resources, essential sites, and news that can be audience targeted 
• Support for tenant wide customizable SharePoint intranet search 
• Contextual actions to support collaboration and immersive consumption of intranet content in Teams chat and channels
   

When’s it coming?  

• March 2021 is the scheduled rollout for the Home Site app for Teams. For more information, review the Microsoft 365 roadmap.  

To get started with the Home Site app, we suggest checking out the video, Living in Teams? Now, so does your intranet! by @Tejas Mehta and @Prateek Dudeja.  

  

Start planning now… 

At PixelMill, we emphasize the importance of business analysis (BA) in delivering quality work to our clients. Successfully deploying the Teams Home Site app, while relatively easy, still requires some advanced planning. Set yourself and your team up for success by taking the time to do some BA before you deploy the Home Site app. User adoption of any intranet requires building a solution that meets the unique needs of your end-user. To ensure you build an solution that your team wants to use, you must begin by listening to them and uncovering their specific needs.   

Once you have defined the functional and business requirements of your Teams intranet, you need to craft the architecture you will be using, and this video from Melissa Bathman of Microsoft is a great place to start.

No matter where you are on your intranet/Teams journey, PixelMill is here to help! Are you excited to take advantage of the new Teams Home Site app, but need a little assistance? One of our Microsoft 365 experts would love to chat with you today!