How to Build an Intelligent Workplace with SharePoint in 2026

Strip the marketing away and an intelligent workplace is five things working together:

1. A home site and a small set of hub sites that carry news, navigation and the official versions of policies and forms.
2. The same intranet inside Teams through Viva Connections, with a dashboard of cards for the tasks people do weekly.
3. Microsoft Lists and Power Automate approvals replacing the forms that still travel by email.
4. Search that returns the right page first, through bookmarks, acronyms and clean permissions.
5. Governance that keeps the site count, sharing and ownership under control, so that Microsoft 365 Copilot and SharePoint agents answer from the right content.

What it is not: a redesign of every team site, a custom-coded portal, or a Viva Suite purchase. Decide at the start which departments' content is in scope for the first release; three to five is right for a company of 50 to 500 people.

Information architecture is the decision you cannot easily undo. Make it on paper first.

Decision rules: a page that more than one department reads lives on a communication site, not in a team; a document that is "the official version" lives in one library with a label, never attached to an email; navigation follows what people do (request time off, find a form, book a room), not the org chart. Write the owner's name next to every site before it exists.

Most of the build is covered by the plan you already pay for. The exceptions are specific.

• SharePoint, OneDrive, Lists, Power Automate standard connectors, Viva Connections (one experience), and Viva Engage communities are included with Microsoft 365 Business Basic ($7.00), Business Standard ($14.00), Business Premium ($22.00) and E3 ($39.00). Creating a Viva Connections experience needs an Enterprise, Frontline or Academic license type; the base license allows one experience per tenant.
• More than one Viva Connections experience, Viva Amplify campaigns and premium Viva Engage features need Microsoft Viva Suite ($12.00 per user per month) or Viva Employee Communications and Communities ($2.00 per user per month) for every user, on an annual commitment (Microsoft list price, October 2026 price list).
• Premium Power Automate connectors (SQL, Dataverse, HTTP, most third-party systems) need Power Automate Premium at $15.00 per user per month.
• SharePoint Advanced Management Plan 1 at $3.00 per user per month adds site lifecycle and access governance; if at least one user holds a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, SharePoint admins get the Copilot-supporting subset (site ownership and inactive-site policies, data access governance reports, block download policy, change history) without buying it, while restricted site creation still needs the add-on.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30.00 per user per month unlocks Copilot Search and SharePoint agents for the holder; agents are also usable by unlicensed users through pay-as-you-go billing set up as an Azure resource.

All prices are per user per month on an annual commitment, Microsoft list price, October 2026 price list. Storage is pooled: 1 TB per tenant plus 10 GB per licensed user for Business and Enterprise plans, a maximum of 25 TB per site (a site that reaches it becomes read-only until items are deleted), and up to 2 million sites per organization. Our SharePoint storage guide covers what to do when the pool runs low.

1. Create the home site as a communication site, apply the organization theme and logo, and set the global navigation: six to eight first-level links, each one a task or an audience, never a department name alone.
2. Register the hub sites and associate the department communication sites to them; associated sites inherit the hub navigation and theme and appear in hub-scoped search.
3. Configure news: a news web part on the home site that aggregates from the hubs, audience targeting so that a warehouse notice does not reach the sales team, and a page template per news type so editors fill in fields rather than design pages.
4. Create the policy and forms libraries with a document set or a content type that carries owner, review date and label columns; put a "current version" view on the page so nobody downloads a stale copy.
5. Use the SharePoint look book templates as a starting layout, then remove every web part that no one will maintain. An empty "Events" web part is worse than none.
6. Set page approval on the home site and hubs with the built-in Power Automate approval flow so a second person sees a page before it is published.

Set the home site in the Viva Connections admin center (the setting has moved there from the SharePoint admin center), pin the Viva Connections app in Teams through an app setup policy, and build the dashboard. The dashboard is where adoption happens: cards for "request time off", "submit an expense", "IT help", "my pay slips", "book a desk", targeted by audience so that a frontline worker sees shift cards and an office worker sees meeting-room cards. Check it on a phone before launch; Viva Connections on mobile is the first intranet many frontline staff have used.

Pick the three requests that still arrive by email with an attachment. Typical candidates: new-hire onboarding, purchase requests, policy acknowledgements, equipment requests, visitor registration. For each one:

1. Create a Microsoft List with the fields the approver needs and nothing else; keep lists under the 5,000-item list view threshold by using indexed columns and views, or archive annually.
2. Add a form view for submitters and a dashboard view for the owner.
3. Build the approval in Power Automate with the standard Approvals connector, posting the decision back to the list and notifying the submitter in Teams.
4. Put the form on a Viva Connections card.

A new-employee onboarding flow with approvals and notifications is a fixed-price build for us at $900 per project; larger automations are scoped as business process automation at $1,500 per project.

Sprawl starts on launch day. Set these before you invite users:

• Who can create sites and teams. Restrict Microsoft 365 group creation to a security group of trained owners, with a request form on the dashboard for everyone else.
• Two owners per site, enforced by a site ownership policy (SharePoint Advanced Management, or the Copilot-licensed subset), and an inactive-site policy that emails owners of dormant sites.
• Sharing defaults. Tenant default "new and existing guests", anonymous links off or expiring, and a block-download policy on the HR and finance sites.
• Sensitivity labels on sites and teams: Public, Internal, Confidential, with Confidential blocking external sharing and unmanaged-device access.
• Retention: a retention label on the policy library (keep seven years from the review date) and a deletion policy on team sites inactive for two years, after owner attestation.
• A review calendar: quarterly ownerless-site and external-sharing reports, annual navigation and page audit.

If the tenant already has years of sprawl, a read-only SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Review at $2,450 per project quantifies the oversharing and produces the target architecture and backlog before the build.

Search is the difference between an intranet and a file dump. Give the intranet owner the Search editor role, publish about 30 bookmarks from the help-desk question list, add the internal acronyms, and add a vertical only where a filter earns it; the full setup is in our Microsoft Search guide. Microsoft Search in Bing was retired on 31 March 2025, so train people on the search box in SharePoint, the Microsoft 365 app and Teams.

For Copilot, the preparation is the governance above: Copilot and SharePoint agents answer from whatever a user can open, so an overshared HR library becomes an answer. Run the oversharing checks in our Copilot oversharing guide before licensing. Then create one SharePoint agent per hub, grounded in that hub's policy and procedure libraries, for the questions the dashboard cards do not cover; licensed users use it immediately, and unlicensed users can use it once pay-as-you-go billing is set up.

A first release for three to five departments is a six-week project: one week of stakeholder interviews and audience mapping, one week of topology and navigation design signed off on paper, two weeks of build (home site, hubs, news, templates, dashboard), one week of Viva Connections, editor training and governance settings, and a week of pilot and fixes. The Microsoft licenses are the ones above, billed to you at list price. Our SharePoint Online Intranet Design and Deployment service starts from $9,500 per project with the final fixed quote confirmed in writing after discovery; a smaller initial planning and setup engagement is $875, and ongoing editor support and content care is a managed care plan at $750 per month.

Do I need Viva Suite to build an intranet in Teams?

No. One Viva Connections experience, the dashboard and Viva Engage communities are included with Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Frontline and Business plans that include Teams. Viva Suite or Viva Employee Communications and Communities is needed for more than one Connections experience, Viva Amplify campaigns and premium Engage features.

How many hub sites should a 100-person company have?

Three to five, matching the business areas that publish content: for example People, Operations, Sales and IT, with the home site above them. A hub per department of four people is sprawl with extra navigation.

Is SharePoint Advanced Management required?

Not required, but its site ownership, inactive-site and data access governance features are what keep a tenant tidy. It is $3.00 per user per month (Microsoft list price, October 2026 price list), and a tenant with at least one Microsoft 365 Copilot license gets the Copilot-supporting subset without buying it.

Where do videos go?

In SharePoint and OneDrive libraries, which is where Stream stores them now; they inherit the site's permissions, labels and retention, and a video page on a communication site is the town-hall archive.

Can we use SharePoint agents without buying Copilot for everyone?

Yes. Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license use agents directly; for everyone else, an admin sets up pay-as-you-go billing as an Azure resource, and usage by unlicensed users is metered to it.

What is the first thing to fix in an existing intranet?

Ownership and sharing: find the ownerless sites and the Everyone-except-external-users links, then fix navigation. A beautiful home site over overshared libraries is a Copilot incident waiting to happen.

• Plan, build, and launch a SharePoint home site for your organization — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Set up Viva Connections in the Microsoft 365 admin center — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Set up Viva Engage — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Microsoft Viva plans and pricing — Microsoft, checked 2026-10-11
• SharePoint limits — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Microsoft SharePoint Advanced Management overview — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• SharePoint Advanced Management features included with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Get started with SharePoint agents — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• Guidance for retiring Microsoft Search in Bing for your organization — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11
• License requirements and pricing for Microsoft Graph connectors — Microsoft Learn, checked 2026-10-11