Dear reader,
Most SharePoint intranets start well. There's a proper launch, staff get shown around, someone spends real effort getting the structure right. Then, gradually, it becomes the place nobody quite remembers to check, and email or a shared drive quietly takes back over.
Why the launch excitement doesn't last
An intranet isn't a one-time build, it's an ongoing structure that needs to keep matching how the organisation actually works. Staff change, and permissions don't always get updated to match. Content ages, and nobody's specifically responsible for archiving what's gone stale. The site structure that made sense at launch slowly drifts from how the team actually operates two years later. None of this happens because anyone did anything wrong. It happens because nobody was ever assigned to keep it current after the people who built it moved on to the next thing.
What actually keeps an intranet alive
It doesn't take much, but it does need to actually happen, on a schedule, not "whenever someone notices." A few things worth checking regularly:
Every quarter:
- Review who has access. Remove anyone who's left, and check group memberships still match current teams, not last year's.
- Flag or archive anything that hasn't been touched in a long time. Stale content sitting alongside current content quietly makes the whole site feel unreliable, even the parts that are fine.
- Check the navigation still matches how the organisation is actually structured today, not how it was structured at launch.
- Pick three things a new starter would genuinely need to find, and actually search for them. If they don't surface easily, that's worth fixing before someone else hits the same wall.
Every month:
- Confirm the homepage and any announcements area are current. A stale homepage is often the first thing that makes people stop trusting the whole site.
- Click through for broken links on the pages people actually use.
Once a year:
- A proper governance review, is the record of who owns which area of the site still accurate, or has that quietly gone out of date too?
Why this fits a fractional arrangement well
This is close to the actual job I held as IT Manager at a peak body, not just building the intranet, but being responsible for it staying genuinely useful afterwards. A fractional arrangement brings that same ongoing responsibility to an association without requiring a full-time hire, someone actually working through checks like the ones above on a schedule, rather than hoping they happen.
Who this is for
Some associations already have an IT Manager, and this sits alongside them, extra capacity specifically for the intranet rather than one more thing added to an already full plate. Others have nobody technical at all, and this becomes the person actually responsible for it, rather than the site slowly becoming everyone's problem and nobody's job at once.
Want a more thorough version of this, one you can actually work through with whoever manages your intranet? The SharePoint Health Check covers the same ground in more depth, work through all six areas properly and come away with a prioritised list of what to fix first.
Until next week,
Brock