Decide who it is for and what they need
On site, the intranet competes with a messaging group and the noticeboard in the cabin. It wins only if it is quicker for the things people actually need.
- List the five or six tasks site staff need most, such as reporting a near miss, finding the site induction, checking the next toolbox talk and seeing who the site manager is.
- Ask site managers and operatives directly, on site, rather than relying on head office assumptions.
- Separate what office staff need from what site staff need, and design the phone view for site staff first.
- Identify which tasks already live in another system, and plan to link to or surface them rather than rebuild them.
- Name a business owner for the intranet, usually in communications or operations, alongside an owner in IT.
Get identity and access ready
Most intranet launches that stall on site do so at sign-in, not at content.
- Confirm every site worker who should use the intranet has an Entra ID account and a licence that includes Teams and SharePoint, and check frontline licence entitlements against current Microsoft documentation.
- Populate attributes such as department, job title, office location and project, so you can build groups for audience targeting.
- Create dynamic groups for audiences such as site-based staff, office staff, and each region or major project.
- Decide how operatives sign in on phones: personal devices with Intune app protection policies, company phones, or shared devices on site.
- Test password reset and MFA registration with a real site worker on a real phone before launch.
Set up the SharePoint foundations
Viva Connections sits on top of SharePoint, so the structure underneath needs to be in order first.
- Create a communication site to act as the intranet home and set it as your home site, checking current guidance because Microsoft has changed how home sites and Viva Connections are configured.
- Configure global navigation from the home site so the main links appear across SharePoint.
- Create hub sites for divisions or regions and associate project and department sites to them.
- Create every new project site from the same template, so site teams find the induction, permits and contacts in the same place on every job.
- Create page templates for site news so teams post updates in a consistent format.
- Turn on multilingual pages if part of your workforce reads more comfortably in another language, and assign translators.
- Review sharing and permissions so sites holding commercial or tender information are not open to everyone.
Configure Viva Connections in Teams
For most site staff, the Viva Connections app in Teams on their phone is the intranet. Its dashboard is what they see first.
- Set up Viva Connections from your home site, and confirm the current setup steps in Microsoft documentation, as the Viva Connections experience and its naming have changed.
- Build the dashboard first, and keep it short enough to read on a phone without scrolling far.
- Configure the feed to draw news from the sites that matter, then check what a site-based user actually sees.
- Add resource links for office staff, who will use the desktop view more.
- Use a Teams app setup policy to pin the Viva Connections app for everyone, positioned so it is visible on mobile.
- Use your organisation's own name and icon for the app where your tenant settings allow, so people recognise it.
- Check the dashboard on both iOS and Android, signed in as a site user rather than an administrator.
Build cards for the frontline with SPFx
The built-in dashboard cards cover links, Teams apps, news and tasks. Custom Adaptive Card Extensions built with the SharePoint Framework are worth the effort when site staff need live information without opening another app.
- Start with built-in cards, and build a custom one only for a task that clearly needs it.
- Consider custom cards for today's permit status, the next toolbox talk, the nearest first aider, snagging items assigned to me, or a quick near-miss report.
- Keep the card view to one glanceable fact and one action, and put the detail in the quick view.
- Design for weak signal: keep payloads small, show a clear message when data cannot load, and avoid large images.
- Call Microsoft Graph or your own Entra-secured APIs, request only the permissions each card needs, and have an administrator approve them on the API access page in the SharePoint admin centre.
- Deploy packages through the tenant app catalogue, and keep SPFx code under the same source control and release process as your other code.
- Test every card on the phones site staff actually carry, not only in a desktop browser.
Content, news and audiences
The intranet stays useful only if the right people see the right content, and someone keeps it current.
- Train a small group of news authors, with at least one per region or major project.
- Use audience targeting on news, navigation and dashboard cards so site teams see their own project rather than everyone's.
- Set a rhythm: safety and project updates weekly, company news as it happens, and a quarterly review to archive stale pages.
- Write for a phone: a short headline, one image, and the key fact in the first sentence.
- Make safety-critical information reachable in two taps from the dashboard, and do not rely on news posts to carry it.
- Keep documents in SharePoint libraries with clear owners, and link to them rather than uploading copies to pages.
- Agree how urgent safety alerts reach site phones, such as a boosted news post or a Teams announcement, and test how quickly one arrives.
Make it accessible on site
Site conditions are a harsher test of accessibility than an office desk. Bright light, cold hands, noise and a mix of first languages all affect whether people can use what you build.
- Check pages and cards at large text sizes and with a screen reader on a phone.
- Write in plain English with short sentences, and explain any internal acronyms the first time they appear.
- Add alt text to images, and never put key information only in an image of text.
- Offer translated versions of safety-critical pages through multilingual pages, reviewed by a fluent speaker.
- Check colour contrast on cards and banners, including outdoors in bright light.
- Make buttons and links large enough to tap with gloves on or with cold hands.
Pilot on one site, then roll out
We usually pilot with one project site and one office team, because problems on site rarely show up in a head office demo.
- Run the pilot for a few weeks with one project site and one office team before wider launch.
- Brief the site manager first, and ask them to use the intranet at the morning briefing.
- Put a QR code on the site noticeboard and in the welfare cabin that opens the intranet in Teams.
- Collect feedback in person on site visits, and ask what people looked for and could not find.
- Fix the main issues before rollout, then roll out region by region rather than all at once.
- Add intranet sign-in to the site induction so new starters are covered from day one.
Keep it alive after launch
An intranet launched and left alone goes stale within a few months, and site staff are quick to stop opening it.
- Review Viva Connections and SharePoint usage analytics monthly with the business owner.
- Retire cards and links that nobody uses.
- Update audiences when projects start and finish, so completed projects drop off the dashboard.
- Keep SPFx packages on supported framework versions and retest them after significant Microsoft changes.
- Run a short annual review with site staff on what they need now.