Is SharePoint the Best Choice for Your Intranet?

SharePoint can be a solid intranet for some companies and a frustrating one for most. Where you land depends on what your organization needs an intranet to do, and whether SharePoint was actually built for it.

Microsoft built SharePoint as a document collaboration platform over two decades ago and has layered communication and engagement capabilities on top ever since. The result is a platform with significant depth, but one where the intranet use case often requires more configuration, governance, and ongoing maintenance than teams anticipate going in. Most organizations can’t afford that compounding overhead.

According to Axios HQ's 2025 State of Internal Communications report, 10% of communications leaders spend 10 or more hours each week producing critical updates, and another 20% spend five to ten. When your platform makes it harder to publish updates or keep content current, those hours compound. And when there's no way to confirm who actually saw the update, that time investment has no guaranteed return.

The risk of defaulting to SharePoint because it's already in your Microsoft 365 subscription is that you spend months configuring something that was never quite right for the job, only to migrate to a purpose-built platform once adoption stalls.

We make Jostle, an employee hub and SharePoint alternative, so we have a stake in how you answer this question. What we can offer is a clear framework: five jobs every intranet has to do, scored honestly against what SharePoint actually delivers.

We’ll give SharePoint credit where it’s due while also giving you the full breakdown of where things can go wrong.

The five jobs your intranet has to do (and how SharePoint scores on each)

Most intranets serve five core jobs:

• They store documents and policies
• They publish news that employees read
• They reach every employee in the company, not just the ones at a desk
• They build a sense of organizational connection
• They stay current without becoming a maintenance project for IT

SharePoint scores differently on each:

Let’s dig deeper into how SharePoint handles each of these jobs.

Job 1 — Store and find company documents and policies

This is the job SharePoint was built for, and it shows. Here’s how SharePoint delivers an exceptional document management experience:

• Document libraries handle version control automatically.
• Multiple people can co-author Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files at the same time without overwriting each other.
• Per-file permissions let you scope sensitive content to the right people.
• Metadata and tagging make documents findable across teams.

If your team co-authors files daily and needs robust version history, SharePoint is hard to beat for this job. This is where 25 years of Microsoft development are clearly visible.

Jostle's Library handles policy docs and reference materials too. Instead of replacing Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Library syncs with OneDrive and Google Drive so you can keep document collaboration in tools you already use.

And for finding answers quickly, JostleAI’s Ask A Question searches your library and returns permission- and context-aware replies directly from existing resources.

Job 2 — Publish news employees actually read

SharePoint has the pieces needed to publish internal news: the News web part, communication sites, and hub sites that tie them together. It can publish news, but what it can't do as well as others is become the place employees check daily for company updates.

Employees who think of SharePoint as a document repository rarely open it to check company updates, and communication sites don't reliably change that without significant change management investment. Announcements get published and largely go unnoticed.

Done well, this job means the right people see critical updates without the comms team chasing them down. That requires targeted distribution so messages reach the relevant teams rather than everyone at once, push notifications for urgent announcements, and confirmation that key messages were actually read.

SharePoint doesn't handle any of those natively. Viva Connections adds some reach, but it requires additional licensing and setup, and still depends on employees having adopted Teams as a daily habit.

On the other hand, Jostle's targeted News with Sign-offs handles all three:

• Leaders target messages by team, location, role, or any combination of the three
• Notify push notifications send urgent posts to recipients' phones
• Sign-offs confirm who's read the update, so comms managers have concrete data on what's landing

The result is fewer follow-up emails, fewer "did everyone see this?" Slack messages, and a comms team that can move on rather than chase down.

Job 3 — Reach every employee, including frontline and deskless staff

Microsoft 365 is per-user. That means anyone without a Microsoft 365 license is excluded from a SharePoint intranet.

For a 500-person company with 200 frontline workers (warehouse staff, retail associates, healthcare aides, hospitality crews, manufacturing operators), adding M365 licenses adds significant ongoing cost. Microsoft's frontline-worker tier (F1) lowers the cost compared to a full enterprise license, but many companies still don't provide Microsoft accounts to non-desk workers at all.

Eventually, the SharePoint intranet quietly becomes "the office intranet." The warehouse never sees the safety update. Retail associates miss the new policy. And the hospitality crew finds out about the schedule change from a manager forwarding a screenshot. That disconnect leads to a two-tiered employee experience, where some people are informed and others are perpetually catching up.

Job 3 done well means every employee can access the intranet regardless of whether they have a company email address or a Microsoft 365 account. For frontline teams, the phone has to work as the primary access point, with updates targeted by location, role, or shift.

Jostle approaches this differently in two ways. The native mobile apps on iOS and Android are designed as a primary access point rather than a scaled-down desktop experience. That means frontline workers checking in from a phone get the same targeted News, recognition, and resources as anyone at a desk.

And for workers who aren't carrying a phone on shift, JostleTV streams News, Activity, and Shout-Outs to shared screens on factory floors, break rooms, and hospitality back-of-house, extending reach without requiring anyone to log in. Individual employees can still have their own logins, but they don’t have to to know what’s happening around the organization.

Job 4 — Build a sense of organizational connection

Employee connection is harder to pull off inside SharePoint. The platform has a people directory, and you can find colleagues through it. What's missing is the social layer that makes employees feel connected to the broader organization. Features like recognition in a shared feed, lightweight polls, and company-wide activity streams require additional Microsoft tools rather than being available natively in SharePoint.

Microsoft's response to this gap is Viva Engage, which evolved from Yammer. Viva Engage adds community features, conversations, and recognition that can be embedded in SharePoint or Microsoft Teams. You essentially end up stitching together multiple Microsoft apps to create the kind of connected experience that a dedicated intranet platform offers in one place.

Job 4 done well means recognition happens regularly and visibly, employees can find subject-matter experts across departments without knowing who to ask, and company milestones feel like shared moments rather than HR announcements.

Jostle’s Activity feed and Shout-Outs give recognition a dedicated, visible home separate from News, so culture moments don't compete with operational updates for the same space. Shout-Outs can also tie back to company values, which keeps recognition connected to something larger than individual performance.

The People directory supports search by role, location, department, or skill, and syncs with systems like Active Directory, Entra ID, OKTA, and HRIS platforms to keep employee data current without manual upkeep.

Job 5 — Stay current without an IT specialist running it

Page sprawl accumulates quickly but quietly on SharePoint. Old pages pile up, broken links go unfixed, and search starts returning noise or nothing at all. Permissions also become hard to manage at scale: once departments start running their own sites with their own access rules, no single person has a clear view of what's published, who can see it, or whether it's still accurate.

HR or comms teams that inherit a SharePoint intranet without prior experience typically hit a wall within a few months. The IT overhead is one cost. The deeper cost is employee trust, as once outdated content starts appearing in search results, employees stop using the intranet as a reliable source and start asking colleagues instead.

Job 5 done well means HR or comms can publish, target, and retire content without filing IT tickets. Governance controls live in the platform (country-of-access restrictions, scoped library visibility, transparent moderator roles) rather than in spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. And search returns what the person is actually looking for.

Jostle's governance is built for non-IT owners. Features like Mandatory Moderator, Library Volume visibility scoping, and country-of-access restrictions can be managed directly by an HR or comms generalist without any SharePoint-specialist training. Reporter Groups extend that to News, letting subject-matter experts publish directly without creating an IT bottleneck. With all that accountability built in, it’s much easier to keep your employee hub and resources accurate and up to date.

How to use these scores to decide for your company

If Job 1 (documents) is the highest priority and the other four jobs are nice-to-haves, SharePoint is the right call. That holds especially if every employee already has an M365 license and you have a SharePoint admin on staff or budget to hire one.

Go in with realistic expectations: the news and connection layers will need dedicated change management effort, and the intranet's primary identity will be "document hub." For some organizations, that's exactly what they need.

If communication, frontline reach, or organizational connection matter as much as documents, or more, SharePoint is working against your actual needs. Those jobs require native capability that SharePoint doesn't have, which means add-ons, additional licensing, and ongoing configuration work. Low adoption follows. So does an HR or comms team quietly absorbing maintenance work that was never in their job description.

If you’ve already deployed SharePoint and adoption has stalled, you’re paying the maintenance cost without the corresponding benefit. That low adoption is a signal that SharePoint is not a good fit for your use case. And evaluating an alternative makes practical sense.

A purpose-built intranet for the jobs SharePoint struggles with

SharePoint is a strong foundation if documents are the job. Where it struggles is everything that happens around the documents: getting people to actually show up, keeping them informed, making the organization feel like more than a file structure.

Jostle's employee experience platform is built for that part. It works alongside Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it, so teams that rely on SharePoint or Google Workspace for document collaboration can keep doing that while Jostle handles the intranet experience those tools weren't designed to deliver.

For most organizations, that means a single place where critical updates reach the right people without a follow-up email, where a warehouse worker on a break room TV sees the same safety notice as the director reading it on a laptop, and where a new employee can find a subject-matter expert without knowing who to ask.

The organizations that get the most out of Jostle tend to have one thing in common: they actually want their people to use it. HR or comms runs it day to day, frontline employees are part of the picture from the start, and culture isn't an afterthought sitting in a different tool.

If that's the intranet you're trying to build, book a demo to see how Jostle makes it easier than SharePoint.