Microsoft SharePoint Information Architecture: Everything You Need to Know
What is SharePoint Information Architecture
SharePoint Information Architecture (IA) is the framework for organizing, managing, and structuring content within a SharePoint environment.
It involves the strategic design of navigation, site hierarchy, taxonomy, and metadata to ensure that users can easily find and interact with the information they need. Effective IA supports user experience, data governance, and compliance, enabling easy access to resources and collaboration. SharePoint’s content management enhances document control, retrieval, archiving, and real-time collaboration with Microsoft 365 integration.
Key Components of SharePoint Information Architecture
An efficient SharePoint information architecture is built from several key components:
Sites and Site Collections: These are the fundamental building blocks of SharePoint, where each site can host multiple sub-sites.
Pages: These are used to display content within a site.
Lists and Libraries: These store data and documents within a site.
Content Types: These define the schema for items and documents within lists and libraries.
Metadata and Taxonomy: These provide a structured way to classify and organize information.
Navigation: This allows users to move through the site and find the information they need.
Search: This enables users to locate content across the SharePoint environment with enhanced search capabilities like filters.
SharePoint Structures
SharePoint intranets and portals consist of team sites and communication sites, providing access to pages, lists, and libraries. One factor simplifying information architecture in modern SharePoint team sites is Microsoft 365 Groups. It simplifies permissions and collaboration by giving a group access to resources like Planner, OneNote, and SharePoint team sites. These groups are only for team sites, making it easier to manage information architecture.
Team Sites: SharePoint Team Sites connect users and their team to internally shared content and resources. Team sites are used to store and collaborate on files or to create and manage lists of information.
Department Sites: These sites are tailored to meet the needs of specific departments, such as HR, Finance, or Marketing. Department Sites are designed to reflect departmental structures with different libraries and permissions for management, the department staff and public internal content.
Communication Sites: These sites are used to share information broadly across an organization, often featuring news, events, and resources.
Collaboration Sites: These are sites designed for extended team collaboration and can include document libraries, task lists, calendars, and discussion boards. Collaboration Sites are designed to allow sharing of enterprise content with externals, such as projects, workgroups and knowledge management.
Hub Sites: Hub sites connect related sites together, providing a unified navigation, menu, layout and search experience across multiple sites. Hub Sites can be used to create Navigation Portals providing navigation support for SharePoint users through navigation webparts such as Hero web parts or Quicklinks.
Home Sites: These serve as the landing page for an organization’s Intranet, providing a gateway to other sites and resources.
Landing Pages: The first page displayed when you navigate to a SharePoint team site or any other SharePoint site. Landing pages contain web parts to display information about the site content and also the site structure.
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Differences in SharePoint Sites and Permissions
Understanding the differences in SharePoint sites and permissions is crucial for an effective information architecture:
Team sites focus on collaboration and come with a range of tools for team members to work together. Communication sites, on the other hand, are designed for sharing information with a broader audience, often featuring a more polished, media-rich design. SharePoint sites help in organizing content and managing permissions effectively, whether accessed through the SharePoint mobile app or directly via the web. SharePoint’s integration with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft 365 enhances these capabilities by enabling collaborative real-time editing and secure synchronization.
Team Sites vs. Communication Sites
Permissions in SharePoint are highly customizable. They can be set at the site, library, folder, and item levels. There are three default permission levels: Owners (Full Control), Members (Edit), and Visitors (Read). Custom permission levels can also be created to suit specific needs. Team sites typically have more granular permissions to facilitate collaboration, whereas communication sites often have more restricted permissions to ensure content integrity.
A key factor for efficient and effective collaboration on documents is an enterprise-wide permission concept building upon Office 365 Groups, Azure Security Groups and SharePoint Permission Groups. This makes organizational changes and internal people management (joiners, changers and leavers) easy to handle.
In general, permission inheritance and breaking permissions on a folder level should be organized very strictly to allow for proper information governance and overall performance.
Permissions
An effective SharePoint information architecture (IA) requires collaboration among various roles, including Intranet owners, Departmental business owners and key users, IT administrators, and hub owners. SharePoint offers various site deployment options, permission models and mobile app compatibility, making it a versatile solution for different organizational needs.
While SharePoint Online is more restricted from an tenant-specific, individual change level, it is built for enterprise collaboration and document management with an open API for specific integration or access requirements.
Here’s a brief overview of each role and their contributions:
Roles and Collaboration in SharePoint
Responsibilities: Manage overall communication and coordination of the Intranet.
Tasks: Work with business owners and IT admins to set up global and hub navigation.
Focus: Planning and implementing top-level navigation.
Organization Intranet Owners
Responsibilities: Represent major areas like Operations, Sales, HR, Marketing, and Engineering.
Tasks: Ensure their department is well-represented in global and hub navigation.
Focus: Involved early in planning to meet business and user needs.
Departmental Business Owners
Responsibilities: Partner with intranet and departmental owners.
Tasks: Implement navigational structures, start pages, and hubs; enforce governance policies, site creation and usage.
Focus: Planning, implementing, and maintaining IA as the organization evolves.
IT Admins
Responsibilities: Manage hub-level content, branding, permissions, and navigation.
Tasks: Work with departmental owners and IT admins to plan, create, and manage hubs.
Focus: Lifecycle management of hubs within the intranet.
Hub Owners
Responsibilities: Manage site-level content, branding, permissions, and navigation.
Tasks: Associate sites to hubs as needed.
Focus: Ensuring sites meet business and user requirements.
Site Owners
Responsibilities: Keep site content updated and publish news.
Tasks: Make changes to sites and pages, work with site owners.
Focus: Implementation and ongoing management of content.
Content Creators
Role: Use and view content across all navigation levels.
Engagement: Intranet owners and other key roles should interact with consumers to ensure content is accessible and useful.
Content Consumers
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In modern SharePoint, the traditional hierarchical structure is replaced with a “flat” approach, where individual sites (formerly called site collections) are created for each topic or task. This simplifies management and allows for easy navigation adjustments without breaking links. Various methods, such as roll-up web parts and inline hyperlinks, hubs and links in your site navigation connect sites and content, ensuring a cohesive experience.
The SharePoint mobile app experience is enhanced with AI-infused features that understand user work patterns, helping to find expertise, content, and resources, thus boosting productivity and focus while on the go. This integration of AI allows users to create personalized views, news posts, and seamlessly access SharePoint sites, as well as switch between multiple accounts effortlessly. The mobile app experience ensures that users remain productive and focused, even when they are away from their desks, by providing search functionality and seamless integration with other Office apps.
There are three levels of navigation to consider:
SharePoint Navigation
Purpose: Provides a consistent top-level navigation across all sites in your Intranet.
Content: Typically includes categories like Home, About Us, News, Resources, and Policies.
Implementation: Enabled with the SharePoint app bar on your home site, appearing on the left side of every site and page.
Goal: Helps users browse major sections of the intranet and find essential content quickly.
Global Navigation
Purpose: Organizes related sites by project, department, region, or concept.
Content: Shared navigation elements defined by the hub owner, displayed above local navigation.
Implementation: Established on the designated hub site and applied across all associated sites.
Goal: Facilitates discovering related content, applying consistent branding, and enabling search across associated sites.
Hub Navigation
Purpose: Provides site-specific navigation for individual sites.
Content: Persistent links that appear on every page of a site.
Implementation:
For team sites, it appears on the left side (quick launch area).
For communication sites, it appears at the top of the page.
Goal: Supports users in exploring and navigating within a specific site, ensuring they can move easily between pages and find site-specific content.
Local Navigation
Common Models for Navigation Design in SharePoint
The organization of sites and content depends on your organization’s structure and user needs. SharePoint’s close integration with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft services like Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory enhances its functionality.
The mobile app works with both SharePoint Online and on-premises SharePoint Server versions 2013 and higher, providing flexible deployment options for different organizational needs. Here are common methods:
By Department
Benefits: Users are familiar with department-based navigation, making it scalable for various organization sizes.
Governance: Use personalization elements like information barriers and audience targeting to ensure proper content access.
Maintenance: Update navigation as departments and teams change.
By Task or Scenario
Benefits: Helps users learn about general concepts or perform common tasks (e.g., "get reimbursed").
Governance: Manage high-volume sites carefully to optimize page performance and access.
Maintenance: Update navigation as organizational information changes.
By Geographic Location
Benefits: Facilitates collaboration and community-building among similar disciplines, and considers regional laws and mandates.
Governance: Governance details may vary by region. Multi-geo configuration helps manage site creation, data retention, and storage policies.
Maintenance: Update navigation when locations change, and plan for multi-geo considerations for global businesses.
By Portfolio
Benefits: Organizes content by type, offering flexibility as the business grows.
Governance: Ensure proper content access, especially for large, international organizations.
Maintenance: Reflect organizational changes in navigation as portfolios grow.
Each organization may require an indivual approach for the SharePoint navigation considering organizational structure, global presence and also business process organization.
Depending on the user experience and expecations explicit navigation options provide easy access along known structures where SharePoint Search makes finding content over different sites easy, especially when using system and organization-specific metadata.
Pages in team and communication sites use dynamic web parts to update content from other sites, such as News and Highlighted Content, and includes SharePoint Online integration for enhanced functionality.
SharePoint Pages
Types of Pages
Home Page: Overview and introduction to the site's content.
Navigation Pages: Help users decide where to go next with summaries and options.
Destination Pages: Endpoints with detailed information for reading, printing, or downloading. Ancillary pages can be added for supplementary details.
Audience targeting prioritizes specific content for particular audiences via SharePoint web parts, page libraries, and navigational links. Multilingual Considerations means you can translate site elements manually to cater to diverse populations, including site names, navigation, and footers.
SharePoint Personalization Elements
Columns and content types aid in organizing documents and pages, enhancing search functionality. By defining specific columns and content types, users can classify and categorize content effectively, making it easier to filter, sort, group, and retrieve information. This not only enhances the organization of documents but also improves search functionality, enabling users to locate relevant content more efficiently.
Additionally, it is essential to avoid excessive nesting of folders in document libraries, as this can create a cumbersome and complex structure that hinders discoverability and usability. Instead, consider creating topic-specific libraries and utilizing site columns to organize content within these libraries, promoting a more streamlined and user-friendly experience.
Metadata Architecture in SharePoint
Examples of SharePoint Information Architecture Models for Document Management
Here are some examples of IA models that organizations can use as references:
Flat Architecture
A simple structure with fewer levels of hierarchy, making content easily accessible with minimal navigation steps.
Hub and Spoke Model
One central hub site or several hub sites connect related sites, providing unified navigation and search while maintaining the autonomy of individual sites.
Hierarchical Architecture
A more complex structure with multiple levels of sites, useful for larger organizations with diverse departments and content types.
Business Process Architecture
Sites and content are organized based on business objects and processes with role based business user access and responsibilities, ensuring that users have quick access to relevant information and tools. An integration into the companies' ERP and/or CRM systems allows for metadata synchronization and use inside sites and document libraries.
For more detailed guidance on setting up and managing your SharePoint information architecture, visit the official Microsoft documentation on SharePoint Information Architecture, Principles of Information Architecture, and Information Architecture Models and Examples.
