Trends and predictions for SharePoint intranets in 2025

The rise of Viva Engage

Now that we are in 2025, we expect the momentum behind Microsoft Viva Engage to continue building. Interestingly, we’ve noticed an increase in client interest in Engage, potentially influenced by the shutdown of Workplace by Meta. However, this isn’t the main reason for its growing popularity. Microsoft has made significant investments in Engage over the past few years, establishing it as a user-friendly tool for enterprise social networking. While Engage is easy to start with, leadership and community ownership are required to ensure communities are active and successful.

Microsoft 365’s strength lies in its integration of various tools – SharePoint as the intranet, Teams for collaboration, and Engage for social networking. We see these combinations among our clients, and it allows organizations to create a comprehensive employee experience. Content flows rapidly within Engage. Connecting its content with the intranet allows internal communicators to curate and highlight key discussions by topic or community in SharePoint, enhancing visibility and engagement.

Microsoft’s ongoing investments in Engage are evident, with features that surface content from Engage in Microsoft Search and Copilot results. This not only amplifies the discoverability of Engage content but signals its success as an employee engagement tool. Engage has an active and robust roadmap, marking it as a strong candidate for increased adoption in 2025 with an increasing interplay with SharePoint intranets.

SharePoint goes web publishing

SharePoint is evolving fast, offering advanced features that enhance the content creation experience for internal communicators. Some notable improvements include:

• Brand center: Introduce custom fonts to align with organizational branding.
• Flexible layout sections: Move beyond the traditional three-column layout to a flexible twelve-column design, including options for resizing and overlapping of web parts.
• Design ideas: Leverage AI to get suggestions on how to present content effectively.
• Enhanced media support: Features for image cropping, shaping, and dedicated video pages cater to diverse communication styles.
• Editorial card web part: Curate content in an engaging manner. Be warned! You might fall in love with this new web part.

One of the standout features is Copilot, which supports page creation and editing directly within SharePoint. This capability could revolutionize how we build content based on prompts and sourcing material.

However, with these advancements comes the need for governance. Organizations must establish guidelines to ensure consistency across content, especially when utilizing features like custom fonts or design suggestions that could lead to inconsistency in the content published on the intranet and the overall look and feel of sites, for example, department and team sites.

The continuous improvements in SharePoint pages give internal communicators in 2025 many options to present their messaging in more attention-grabbing and engaging ways than ever before.

Role of AI in internal communications

AI is a leading trend, and we expected it to be transformational in 2025—though not in a comprehensive way. There is considerable interest from organizations about adopting tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant that integrates with your organizational data. Some have already started this journey and others are still in an evaluation phase. We see an increasing interest for AI in an intranet context. We built FreshMind, the AI capabilities within Fresh, to address those needs, and we expect the next step in the AI space to be AI agents.

AI agents are scoped programs that can perform tasks autonomously on behalf of a user. Agents can transform how users interact with their intranets, and we should be on the lookout for more innovations around this topic in 2025.

However, while AI agents can become the primary interface for how users experience work, it is important to remember that human curation of content remains essential. Successful intranets reflect an organization’s culture and values, and humans are best equipped to understand their unique contexts; not just the organization’s digital space, but also the many nuances that define an organization.

Email is not going away

Despite the transformational character of AI, email remains a primary communication tool within organizations. Email is a reliable channel for reaching employees. It is simple to use for both senders and receivers, and it has been around for ages, making it a reliable and common communication tool.

A good newsletter solution helps internal communicators create targeted and curated content for their employees. When connected with analytics such as open rates and click-through rates, it gives communicators the visibility into how their messaging performs via the email channel.

We believe that email is not going away in 2025, and to support this prediction, we’ve launched a Newsletter feature with our first release of 2025.

As a summary, we see the following trends and predictions for 2025:

1. Viva Engage will gain momentum as a key player in employee engagement with an increasing interplay with SharePoint intranets.
2. SharePoint goes web publishing, significantly enhancing how internal communicators create new posts and content pages in their SharePoint intranets.
3. AI will play a significant role, but human involvement will remain crucial for curating relevant content.
4. Email will continue to be a staple in internal communication strategies.