As we have already mentioned, SharePoint has been on the market for almost 20 years. Obviously, during this time, the application has changed substantially. Logically, a SharePoint intranet created in 2019 would have huge functional advantages over a portal from the early 2000s. At the same time, considering the platform’s evolution, multiple releases of new SharePoint versions, and the arrival of the Microsoft collaboration suite, defining a SharePoint-based intranet is ridden with confusion.
A SharePoint intranet can have at least four different incarnations.
1. A SharePoint intranet as an on-premises solution is a corporate portal built on top of any version of SharePoint Server (2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, or 2019). Organizations deploy it using their own infrastructure and take full responsibility for their intranet customization, management, and support.
To implement a SharePoint intranet, companies have to purchases SharePoint Server licenses. Taking into consideration the hardware costs coupled with licenses and tuning spend, on-premises intranets aren’t cheap. This is the reason why SharePoint intranets have been the privilege of large enterprises for over a decade. Fortunately, things have changed with the arrival of the Microsoft cloud collaboration suite that made the following scenarios possible.
2. A stand-alone SharePoint Online (SPO) intranet is a portal based on the SharePoint cloud version. Microsoft owns the platform, which determines the scope of customizations that subscribers can apply to their intranets. Microsoft is also responsible for the solution’s performance, updates, and overall security.
3. A SharePoint Online intranet as part of Office 365 (O365) is often named an Office 365 intranet. In this case, SharePoint Online would still serve as the intranet core. At the same time, if an enterprise gets an Office 365 subscription, they get a chance to build a wider collaboration ecosystem where a SharePoint-based intranet is coupled with other tools such as Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Planner, Outlook Online, Sway, Stream, etc.
4. A SharePoint Online intranet as part of Microsoft 365 (M365) is also a SharePoint intranet. It comes as a default application in both Business and Enterprise plans, which offer a full pack of Office 365 capabilities, Windows 10 licenses, as well as security and device management tools. All in all, Microsoft 365 finally opened the SharePoint intranet capabilities to all businesses, including small ones.