In short
An intranet is an organisation’s private network and website, closed to outsiders, where employees read news, find what they need and get things done. In Microsoft 365 it is no longer one website but a set of connected surfaces: SharePoint sites, the SharePoint app in Teams, search and the newsletter that links back. An intranet only works if employees find and read what matters, so define it in a way you can measure.
Key takeaways
- The CNSSI 4009-2022 glossary defines an intranet as a network an organisation uses for its own internal, usually private, purposes and that is closed to outsiders; an extranet carries traffic between the organisation and its business partners.
- Nielsen Norman Group lists seven elements successful intranets share, from corporate and leadership communications to credible, dated content with named owners.
- The ten 2023 Intranet Design Annual winners, from AbbVie and Infosys to MetLife and ServiceNow, took between 6 and 45 months to create their intranets, 25 months on average.
- In Tryane’s Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026, SharePoint scored 68/100 overall and 45% on Analytics, the lowest scores among the 12 intranet platforms assessed.
- SharePoint site usage reports show unique viewers and visits for 7, 30 and 90 days per site, but no split by department or country.
What is an intranet?
An intranet is a private network that an organisation uses for its own internal purposes. The US Committee on National Security Systems glossary (CNSSI 4009-2022), quoting the internet security glossary RFC 4949, defines it as “a computer network, especially one based on Internet technology, that an organization uses for its own internal (and usually private) purposes and that is closed to outsiders.”[1]
In everyday use, people mean the website that sits on that network: the company’s internal portal, authenticated against your own directory and scoped to your employees. For an internal communication team, the useful definition is functional. An intranet exists to do three jobs:
- Publish: news, leadership messages, campaign pages and the editorial calendar.
- Find: policies, procedures, forms, the employee directory and the document estate.
- Transact: the things employees come to do rather than read, such as booking leave, requesting equipment or completing mandatory training.
Only the first job belongs fully to internal communication; the second is shared with HR, legal and IT, and the third belongs to whoever owns each process. That split matters when you report on the intranet, because a payroll portal generating thousands of sessions in January tells you people were paid, not that anyone read the CEO update.
What is intranet vs internet?
The difference is who can get in. The internet is public; an intranet is closed to outsiders; an extranet sits in between. The same glossary defines an extranet as “a computer network that an organization uses for application data traffic between the organization and its business partners.”[2]
| Intranet | Extranet | Internet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can get in | Employees, authenticated against your directory | Selected partners, suppliers or customers, usually through guest access or a separate portal | Anyone |
| Typical content | Company news, policies, HR and IT resources, tools, directory | Shared projects, orders, partner documentation | Public website, marketing, recruitment |
| Who owns the message | Internal communication, HR, IT | The business unit that manages the partnership | Marketing and corporate communication |
| What reach means | Share of your workforce that read it | Share of invited partners who used it | Visitors and conversions |
Two more terms are often confused with it. A digital workplace is the broader environment: the intranet plus collaboration, meetings, email and business applications. The intranet is a component of the digital workplace, not a synonym for it. And an internal communication app, such as a mobile employee app, is a way of delivering intranet content, not a separate category of information. If you report intranet and extranet usage together, your reach percentages lose meaning; our note on intranet and extranet measurement explains why.
What is an intranet used for? Examples from award winners
The best public examples come from Nielsen Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual, which has published case studies of award-winning intranets since 2001. The ten 2023 winners were AbbVie, a biopharmaceutical company; CDPQ, a Canadian investment group; Humana and Lifespan Health System in healthcare; Infosys, an Indian digital services firm; iRobot, a consumer-robotics company; MetLife, an insurer; OCBC Bank in Singapore; ServiceNow, a software company; and Żabka Polska, a convenience-store chain. They came from five countries and six industries, and their teams took between 6 and 45 months to create the winning designs, 25 months on average.[3] An intranet is not tied to one kind of organisation, and a good one is rarely built quickly.
Across organisations like these, intranets typically carry:
- company announcements, leadership messages and industry news;
- information about the organisation’s goals and progress, and tools for the teams that deliver them;
- trusted HR and IT information, forms and policies;
- a single, searchable place for digital tools and applications;
- an employee directory and content that helps people get to know each other;
- onboarding, learning and community spaces.
The everyday reality is more scattered than a homepage suggests. A production supervisor may go a full quarter without opening a SharePoint page in a browser. She reads the safety brief in the SharePoint app on a shared tablet, gets the restructuring note forwarded by her manager and sees the CEO video on a screen in the canteen. Each of those is the intranet doing its job, and none of them shows up as a page view on the site your team owns.
What do successful intranets have in common?
Nielsen Norman Group, drawing on hundreds of intranets reviewed over more than two decades, names seven elements that successful intranets share.[4] Use them as a quick self-check of your own intranet:
| Element | Check your intranet |
|---|---|
| Corporate and leadership communications | Can employees find company announcements and leadership messages in one click from the homepage? |
| Information about and support of core functions | Does it explain the organisation’s main work, goals and progress, not only HR content? |
| Repository of necessary resources | Are HR and IT information, forms and policies trusted and current? |
| Tools and applications in a central place | Is there one clearly labelled, searchable place for digital tools? |
| Connecting teams and individuals | Is there a directory and information about teams that helps people find each other? |
| Consistent design | Do logo, navigation, fonts and search placement stay the same on every page? |
| Credible content | Does each page show an owner and a last-updated date, with outdated content archived or removed? |
The last element is the one most intranets fail on. Content without a named owner and a date erodes trust quietly: once employees find two contradicting versions of a policy, they stop relying on search and start asking colleagues instead.
What does a modern intranet look like in Microsoft 365?
In a Microsoft 365 organisation, the intranet is a set of connected surfaces rather than one destination. Microsoft’s own planning guidance builds it from communication sites, a home site set as the intranet landing page, hub sites that organise related sites and centralise news, and SharePoint news, with Viva Engage to connect people across functions and departments.[5] Sites you mark as organisation news sites, up to 100 of them, publish “official” news that gets special visual treatment and appears on the SharePoint start page; a home site is automatically one.[6]
On top of that sits the SharePoint app in Teams, formerly Viva Connections. Built on the home site, it brings news, a dashboard, resources and announcements into Microsoft Teams on desktop, tablet and mobile, and content can be targeted to specific audiences.[7] Add enterprise search, which is how many employees actually reach intranet content, and the internal newsletter, which for some populations is the only surface they ever see. If you build on SharePoint, our guide to what SharePoint means for internal communication explains the pieces.
How are intranet platforms compared today?
Most organisations either build on SharePoint or buy a dedicated intranet platform, often one that runs on top of SharePoint. For Tryane’s Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026, we graded 12 platforms on 17 criteria in five categories that matter to communicators: UI/UX, Publishing, Targeting, Administration and Analytics. The scores are our assessment, based on demonstrations, expert interviews and public data.
Unily received the highest overall Tryane Score (92/100) and SharePoint the lowest (68/100). SharePoint’s profile is split: 88% on Administration, but 65% on UI/UX and 45% on Analytics, the lowest score any platform received in any category. In practice that means SharePoint is easy to govern and connects to everything in Microsoft 365, but it needs design work to feel like a communication channel and tells you little about who reads what. Download the full Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026 to compare all 12 platforms category by category, or read our comparison of intranet software in 2026.
How can you tell if employees read your intranet?
Start with what SharePoint gives you for free. Site usage reports show unique viewers and site visits for the last 7, 30 and 90 days, average time spent per user, popular pages and news posts for the last 7 days, and traffic by device and by time of day; site owners can export 90 days of data.[8] For a single site owner asking whether their pages are read, that is enough.
The limits are structural. Reports are attached to sites, not to audiences, so there is no native way to say what share of the finance team in Germany saw a given news post. And intranet numbers sit apart from your Viva Engage and newsletter numbers, so the reach of one message across surfaces stays out of view. Before you report on the intranet, fix three scopes in writing:
- Channel scope: which surfaces count as the intranet here: named SharePoint hubs, the SharePoint app in Teams, the newsletter, and whether Viva Engage is in or out.
- Population scope: the base for every percentage, whether headcount, Entra ID accounts, licensed users or the targeted audience group, with the number written next to it.
- Time scope: the window, and how you handle the reset when a site is redesigned and URLs change.
A sentence such as “Intranet reach means unique readers of organisation news across the four corporate hubs and the SharePoint app in Teams, as a share of all employees with an Entra ID account, over a rolling 28 days” is unglamorous, and it is what makes the rest of the report defensible. Our notes on which intranet metrics matter and the limits of SharePoint native analytics take the next step.
Once the definition is fixed, use the data to adapt your strategy: move what nobody reads, and reach the populations the intranet misses through another channel. Communication Insights shows intranet readership by department and country, alongside Viva Engage and email, in one dashboard. To see who actually reads your intranet, book a 15-minute call with Jérémy via his Calendly.
Frequently asked questions
What is an intranet in simple words?
An intranet is a private company website and network that only employees can access. It is where they read company news, find policies and resources, use internal tools and look up colleagues. Unlike the public internet, it is closed to outsiders.
What is the difference between an intranet and an extranet?
Access. An intranet is used for an organisation’s internal purposes and is closed to outsiders. An extranet is a network the organisation uses to exchange information with business partners, such as suppliers or distributors, usually through guest access or a separate portal.
Is SharePoint an intranet?
SharePoint is the platform many organisations build their intranet on, not the intranet itself. The intranet is the arrangement of home site, hub sites, communication sites, news and navigation you design on top of it, plus surfaces such as the SharePoint app in Teams that deliver it.
What are examples of intranets?
Public examples include the winners of Nielsen Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual. The 2023 winners were AbbVie, CDPQ, Humana, Infosys, iRobot, Lifespan Health System, MetLife, OCBC Bank, ServiceNow and Żabka Polska, from five countries and six industries.
Is Viva Connections part of the intranet?
Yes. Viva Connections, now called the SharePoint app in Teams, is built on your SharePoint home site and brings intranet news, a dashboard and resources into Teams on desktop and mobile. For frontline employees it is often the only place they meet intranet content, so leave it out of your reporting and you miss them.
How do you measure intranet usage?
SharePoint site usage reports give unique viewers, visits, time spent and popular content per site for up to 90 days. To see readership by department or country, or across the intranet, Viva Engage and email together, you need an analytics layer that joins those sources to your organisational structure.
Sources
Further reading
• Viva Connections Analytics: How to Measure Intranet Adoption in Microsoft 365
• SharePoint in 2026: How to Analyse Intranet Performance
• The Top KPIs to Measure Intranet Success in 2026
• Digital Workplace Measurement: Why Your Cross-Channel Totals Do Not Add Up
• Intranet adoption rate: healthy SharePoint benchmarks
If you want to see what cross-channel reporting looks like against your real data, Tryane runs a 15-minute walkthrough with no slides. Book a slot with Jérémy.