A design-and-build engagement that turns SharePoint Online into your company intranet: stakeholder discovery, information architecture, a branded home site and hub structure built with out-of-box web parts, a news channel and dashboard your people actually open, and the whole experience surfaced inside Microsoft Teams through Viva Connections. We finish with editor training and a one-page governance model so the intranet stays alive after launch. From $9,500 per project, typically 6 weeks — the final fixed quote is confirmed in writing after discovery, before build begins.
Most organizations between 50 and 1,000 seats already pay for everything a modern intranet needs — they just have not built it. Company news goes out as email blasts nobody can find a week later, policies live in a file share with a folder tree only its creator understands, and the 'intranet', if one exists, is a legacy product nobody has updated since the person who owned it left. Meanwhile SharePoint Online sits in the same tenant with communication sites, hub navigation, audience targeting, a news engine, and a Teams-embedded employee experience — included in the licensing you already own. Viva Connections is Microsoft's default path for this, and it is the one we build on: it takes your SharePoint home site — news, dashboard cards, navigation, resources — and puts it inside Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile, where your people already spend their day. One Viva Connections experience is included with Microsoft 365 plans that include SharePoint Online, so for the core intranet there is no additional product to buy. One thing to know going in: Microsoft is rolling out a rename of Viva Connections to simply 'the SharePoint app' in Teams (announced for mid-2026), with existing configurations continuing to work — we design against Microsoft's current guidance at project time so the rename is a label change for you, not a rebuild. The engagement runs from stakeholder discovery through launch: we map how your organization actually communicates, design the information architecture and hub structure around it, build the branded home site and section pages with out-of-box web parts, stand up the news and dashboard experience, surface it in Teams, and then train your editors and leave a governance one-pager that says who owns what. Two honest boundaries. First, we build with what modern SharePoint provides out of the box — custom web parts and SPFx development are a separate engagement, our SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Apps Customization service. Second, this is a design-and-build project, not a bulk content move: migrating years of legacy documents is quoted separately as Company Document Migration to SharePoint Online or Teams. And if what you actually need is SharePoint Online stood up correctly for a small team — not an intranet designed — our smaller SharePoint Online planning and setup service is the honest entry point.
Stakeholder interviews with communications, HR, IT, and the departments in scope; inventory of today's channels and content sources; audience mapping. Output: the discovery summary and the confirmed fixed quote.
Hub and site topology, navigation model, page types, and the branding approach — reviewed with your stakeholders and signed off before anything is built.
Home site and hub structure, theming and branding, news configuration with audience targeting, section and department pages from templates, and the dashboard cards in scope.
Viva Connections set up and pinned per your Teams admin policy, dashboard and resources verified on desktop and mobile, against Microsoft's current guidance at project time.
Hands-on sessions where your editors build and publish real pages; the governance one-pager agreed with the intranet owner.
Go-live checklist executed, launch announcement out, retirement path for the old channel stated, and a post-launch check-in two weeks after launch.
The floor covers the full engagement at base scope: discovery, information architecture, a branded home site and hub navigation, news and dashboard configuration, Viva Connections in Teams, a small set of section pages built from templates, editor training, and the governance one-pager. The price moves with department page count, number of hubs, multilingual needs, complex audience targeting, and dashboard card scope. After discovery you receive one fixed quote in writing — that number is the number, and you pay after you approve delivery.
For the core intranet, no. One Viva Connections experience — home site, dashboard, resources, the Teams and mobile app — is included with Microsoft 365 plans that include SharePoint Online. Microsoft Viva licensing only enters the picture if you need multiple distinct experiences (say, separate intranets for separate subsidiaries) or premium Viva modules. We verify your licensing position during discovery and tell you before design if your requirements would cross into paid territory.
Renamed, not retired. Microsoft has announced that Viva Connections becomes 'the SharePoint app' in Teams, rolling out from mid-2026, and has stated that existing configurations — including customized app names and logos — continue to work. The underlying architecture is the same: your SharePoint home site surfaced in Teams. We build against Microsoft's current guidance at project time, so the rename reaches you as a label change, not a rebuild.
That service stands up SharePoint Online correctly for a small organization — tenant settings, basic site structure, and user guidance. It does not design an intranet. This engagement is the full design-and-build: stakeholder discovery, information architecture, branding, news, the Teams experience, editor training, and governance. If you are under about 50 seats and mainly need SharePoint working properly, start with the smaller service — it is the honest recommendation, and you can grow into this one later.
Structured migration is deliberately outside this project, because bulk content moves are their own discipline with their own scope drivers. During build we load the template pages and a small set of launch content with your team. Moving years of legacy documents or an old intranet's page estate is quoted separately as our Company Document Migration to SharePoint Online or Teams service — and running the two projects together is common and coordinated.
Your team — and we are upfront about that boundary. We deliver the structure, page templates, a working news channel, and hands-on training where your editors publish real pages, so nobody is left staring at a blank canvas. But policy pages, department content, and news items are your organization's voice. Where content production is a genuine blocker, we can scope authoring support separately — it is just not silently inside the fixed price.
Yes — that is the point of building on Viva Connections. Your home site, news feed, dashboard, and resources appear inside Teams on desktop and in the Teams mobile app, so frontline and desk workers get the same experience without opening a browser. Whether the app is pinned for everyone is a Teams admin policy decision we configure with you during the Teams-experience milestone.
SharePoint's modern theming, logos, layouts, and — where your tenant supports it — the SharePoint brand center get you a genuinely branded experience: your colors, your typography direction, your imagery. What we will not do is fight the platform with custom code to chase pixel-perfect mockups; that path creates maintenance debt every Microsoft update cycle. If your design requirements truly exceed out-of-box theming, we will tell you plainly and scope it as custom development instead.
Yes. Audience targeting scopes news, navigation links, and dashboard cards to Microsoft 365 groups — so the Denver office sees Denver news and executives see the board update without either group wading through the other's content. We configure the audiences as part of the news architecture and verify targeting works before launch, because a mistargeted intranet quietly trains people to ignore it.
Three things are built into the engagement precisely because of that history: editors are trained on real content, not demos; the governance one-pager names who owns news, pages, and review cadence — agreed with your intranet owner, not left implicit; and we hold a post-launch check-in two weeks in to catch what is drifting. If you want ongoing help beyond that, our SharePoint Engineer as a Service covers it — but the design goal is an intranet your team can run without us.
Sometimes, yes — and we will tell you during discovery if you are in that situation. The intranet project creates a clean, governed set of new sites, so it does not require your whole estate to be healthy first. But if broad oversharing or years of sprawl are the deeper problem — especially if Copilot is on your roadmap — our SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Review is the right first move, and its findings feed this project's design directly.
The typical engagement is 6 weeks: discovery and IA design in the first two, build in the middle two, Teams experience, training, and launch in the final two. The critical dependency is your people: stakeholder interviews in week one, design sign-off in week two, and editors present for training. Where sign-offs slip, the launch moves week-for-week — we say that at kickoff so the plan is honest.