1. Practical guide to build Modern Intranet sites with SharePoint Communication Sites
Asish Padhy

2. About me SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Solutions Consultant
at Kloud Solutions
12 years of experience working on SharePoint and MS Technologies
I am a Consultant, Architect, Project Lead
and always a Developer.
Microsoft Certified Professional in SharePoint

3. Agenda Introduction Communication Sites Mapping the old structure
Configure Communication sites as Intranet
Demo
Challenges
Extensibility Options
Final thoughts

4. Intranet build cycle Scope for MVP Design a layout (UX)
Review with Stakeholders
Feasibility with Technical team
Identify limitations
Prepare for upcoming changes
Implement with minimal support strategy
Present it to business stakeholders and get regular feedback
Scope
Design
Review
Implement
Adopt

5. Benefits of Communication sites
Easy Content Management
Site Pages grouped based on content groups
Role based pages (coming ..)
Target based on Business functions
Types of Site Pages – Promoted state (0 = Site Page, 1 = Article Page, 2 = News Page)
Easy Targeting of Content
Site Pages with Highlighted web parts with metadata
Announcements and Updates
Create and Promote News
Configurable News web parts
Content Aggregation, Global Navigation to all sites
Could be promoted to Hub sites
Forms
Embed Microsoft Forms and PowerApps Forms onto the page
Content Approval
Promote site pages to news
Start custom approval on pages (upcoming ..)

6. Communication Sites - Inclusions
Full width layout
Top Navigation
Site Pages
Responsive design
Site Themes
New Web parts
Ease to create Site Pages and News (that fit on your phone)
Interactive Components
Pre-built templates – Topic, Showcase and blank
Pre-built page templates

7. Communication sites - Limitations
No Master page
No Publishing Feature
No Page Layouts
No Office 365 Groups features
No OneNote Notebook
No Left hand navigation
No Custom Scripting

8. Configuration options
Branding
Use SharePoint themes for customizing look and feel
Create custom themes using the Theme generator
Web parts
Use Hero web part and high resolution images to tell a story
Use Highlighted content to target and group content based on user roles
Use various layout options on the page to arrange components
Use News web part for showcasing news from selective SharePoint sites
Use Events calendar to show upcoming events
Use Yammer for sharing and communicating user voices
Use Site Activity to show the latest working content
… and many more

9. Configuration options (cont’d…)
Pages
Add custom metadata as per business groups and activities
Use News posting for sharing latest content
Navigation
Configure navigation
Limitation : Navigation element can’t be blank, even for headers
Page templates (customization)
Could be done via programmatic approach
Use of OfficeDevPnP library for modern page operations
Add Page and Sections
Add web parts
Configure properties

10. Demo

11. Mapping Old structure to New
New Structure
Comments
Publishing Pages
Site Pages
Site Pages have responsive design and full width layout
Page Layouts
Sections
Sections could be easily configured for each page
Site Hierarchical Navigation
Hub Sites
Hub sites also allow you to aggregate News, Search and Themes
Content Publishing
Promoted State*
Promoted state and Content Approval for managing content status
Master Pages
Site Designs and Site Scripts
Site Designs provide a combination of Themes, Provisioning template and SPFx components
Web Parts and Hosted Apps
SPFx web parts
SPFx are client side driven components

12. Extensibility options
Challenges
Approach
Top Banner or Footer customizations
Application customizers
Custom business requirements
SPFx web parts
Custom Layouts and sections*
SharePoint Online CSOM
Content Approval and Lifecycle*
Flow with Azure Functions
Page Metadata Management*
SPFx extension with Azure Functions
Custom forms
PowerApps and SPFx web parts

13. Latest Updates (SharePoint Conf NA 2018)
Audience Targeting – link
Page Metadata update and Page details on page – link
Custom approval flow on site pages - link
New List Creation options – create from existing, from excel and new templates – link
Copy and paste data directly from excel - link
Change type of column on the list view directly – link
Edit in place in List - link
Assign a task to Planner directly from a List item – link
Row Conditional Formatting - link
Analyse Image information and get recommendations from Azure Cognitive services - link
New Search results with filtering experience - link
PowerBI integration with List views and analysis information for List items – link - link
Sentiment analysis via Flow on List items - link
Search transcript for videos in Microsoft Stream – link
New Web Parts – Weather web part, Map View web part
and many more ..

14. Final Thoughts Winners :
Great fit for business teams moving to Office 365
Latest releases and updates
Seamless integration with other Office 365 suite services such as PowerBI, PowerApps and Flow
Best Mobility experience
Things to keep in mind :
Targeting release
Target release for everyone – more frequent changes, beta releases
Target release for specific users – beta release only affect specific users, power users
Standard release – GA available features
Changes might break functionality. Keep users regularly informed

15. Questions