🧐 So, what's this all about?!

By far, one of the most popular requirements on any SharePoint Intranet, which is comprised of multiple communication sites or team sites, is the ability to aggregate content based on a specific type or theme.

And the number one use case of this is company POLICIES.

In fact, the words 'policies' and 'Intranet' have been scientifically proven to never be more than two sentences apart in any Intranet design workshop!

A common Intranet Policy scenario:

Induction Person: Hey, new joiner person! Make sure you read up on our company policies (🥸)

New Joiner Person: Ok sure (🙄). Where can I find them?(🤔)

Induction Person: They're on the Intranet (😋)

New Joiner Person: Here we go....(🥱)

...10hours later

New Joiner Person: (😭)

🔥 The Problem with company policies on a SharePoint Intranet...

Policies are... well... let's call them a necessary evil!

Nothing generates excitement amongst your Intranet user base like a good old policy hunt (that's sarcasm, by the way!)

The problem is that on many company Intranets, policies typically get buried within separate department sites, making them extremely frustrating to find and read.

While this 'multiple department site' setup is shockingly bad for the end user experience... it actually has merit for the owners of the policies.

Departments typically have their own Intranet site for a reason. That reason is typically permissions. SharePoint is great for facilitating the governance of data with site permissions.

Every department's policies (and content in general), typically live on their SharePoint site, which suits them perfectly as they own their own content, and nobody else can edit or alter it 🔐.

And therein lies the problem... how do we satisfy the two opposing requirements:

• Department Owners: We want to own and maintain our policies on our department sites which we control
• End Users: We don't care about control, we want all policies available in one place

Fig. SharePoint Intranet Site Owners vs Intranet End User requirements

🧯 The Solution: We do both. We roll up the policies into a single site page whilst letting them "live" on individual department sites.

And now we get to the point of this post (finally! 😮‍💨 I know that was a long introduction!)

The solution is where we leave 'beginner' SharePoint behind and we start to use the more advanced capabilities of SharePoint Online (but don't confuse 'advanced' with 'difficult', this is surprisingly easy!).

Let's clearly outline the requirement from both user's perspectives:

• End User: As an end user of the company's Intranet I want the ability to access all company policies from a single page So that I can get quick and efficient access to them and save time (and my sanity)

• Department Site Owners As department site owners on the company's Intranet We want all our department policy documents to be stored on our individual sites So that we can have complete control of how they are maintained

Fig. SharePoint Intranet Site Owners vs Intranet End User requirements - Solved!

The solution recipe calls for the following ingredients:

• A centrally managed set of document type tags which can be used across site boundaries.
  • We will use the Term Store within the SharePoint Admin Centre for this.
• A way to make these tags available within the document libraries on our department sites
  • We will use Content Types for this with a managed metadata column.
• All policy documents within our department sites tagged as 'policy' via our new content type
  • This one is self-explanatory!
• A single Policies site page published on our home site which will aggregate all policy-tagged documents from all department sites.
  • The highlighted content web part is going to be the secret sauce here (poetry in motion! 😉).

When we combine all the ingredients and bake on high for 60minutes, we will have something like this:

Fig. SharePoint Intranet Site Our Policies Roll Up site page

🎥 Watch the SharePoint Tutorial below to see exactly how to do this step-by-step and/or read my description below that.

📄 Step-by-Step (beginner friendly 😘) on how to tag and roll up content on your SharePoint Intranet sites.

✅ Step 1: Let's create the centrally managed set of tags within the SharePoint Online Term Store

(Note: You need access to the SharePoint Admin Centre to do this part. Don't worry if you don't have it, you will know exactly what to ask for (from somebody who does have it) once you're finished reading this section)

Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Centre and:

1. Select 'Content Services' from the left-hand menu
2. Select 'Term Store'
3. Click the three dots beside 'Taxonomy' and click 'Add Term Group' and give your new term group a name

Fig. Create a SharePoint Term Store Term Group

4. Select the three dots beside the term group you just created and then click 'Add Term Set' and give your term set a name which represents the category of tags you wish to create ('Document Types' in my example)

Fig. Create a SharePoint Term Store Term Set

5. Select the three dots beside the term set you just created and click 'Add Term' and add the first tag you want in this category
6. Repeat step 5 until you have all the tags you require.

Fig. Create a SharePoint Term Store Term

Step 1 complete 🎉

✅ Step 2: Let's make these tags available from within our document libraries by creating a new Content Type which points to our new Term Set

(Note: You still need access to the SharePoint Admin Centre to do this part. Don't worry if you don't have it, you will know exactly what to ask for (from somebody who does have it) once you're finished reading this section)

Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Centre and:

1. Select 'Content Services' from the left-hand menu
2. Select 'Content Type Gallery'
3. Click 'Create content type'

Fig. Create a SharePoint Content Type

From the fly-out menu on the right-hand-side:

4. Give your new content type a name
5. As we are targeting documents, choose 'Document Content Types' and the 'Parent Category'
6. Choose 'Document' as the 'Content Type'
7. Click 'Create'

Fig. Configure a SharePoint Content Type

Your content type will open on the screen. Now: 8. Click 'Add site column' 9. Click 'Create new site column'

Fig. Create a new SharePoint Site Column

From the fly-out menu on the right-hand-side:

10. Give your site column a name
11. Select 'Managed Metadata' from the 'Type' choice list
12. Click 'Select'

Fig. Configure a SharePoint Site Column

13. Select the radio button beside Term Set you created in Step 1 above
14. Click 'Save'
15. Click save again on the next screen

Fig. Connect a SharePoint Site Column to a Term Set

16. You will now see your new site column added to your content type
17. Click 'Publish'
18. On the fly-out menu that appears, select 'Publish' and then 'Save'

Fig. Publish a SharePoint Content Type

Step 2 Complete 🎉

✅ Step 3: Let's add this content type to our Intranet department sites document libraries so we can tag our documents as policies

Navigate to a document library on any SharePoint site you intend to store your policies on:

1. Select 'Add column'
2. Scroll down on the pop-up window until you see an option for 'Add a content type'. Select it
3. Click 'Next'

Fig. Add a SharePoint Content Type to a Document Library

From the fly-out menu on the right-hand-side:

4. Choose the Content Type you created in step 2 from within the 'Choose content type' field (Note: If you just created the content type, it can take up to an hour to appear here. Patience is your friend here 🧘)
5. Click 'Apply'

Fig. Select your new SharePoint Content Type

Technically, we are done. But... to make it a bit easier to see what's going on, do the following:

6. Click 'Add Column'
7. Click 'Show or hide columns'

Fig. Show Hidden Columns within a SharePoint Document Library View

From the fly-out menu on the right-hand-side:

8. Tick the box next to the column name you created in step 2 above
9. Tick the box next to 'Content Type'
10. Click 'Apply'

Fig. Display Hidden Columns within a SharePoint Document Library View

This will help us see what content type we have applied to a document as well as what document type we have tagged the document with. Don't worry. You'll see this in action once I explain the next bit 😁

Now we need to tag our documents as policies:

11. Upload any policies to your document library
12. Select one (or more if you want to bulk update their metadata)
13. Click the details icon
14. Choose your new content type from the 'Content Type' drop-down field
15. Select 'Policy' from the Document type site column you created in step 2 (the managed metadata one)
16. Click 'Save'
17. Now you will see the Content Type and Document Type columns populated for each document you selected

Fig. Tag documents within a SharePoint Document Library with a Content Type and Managed Metadata

Step 3 Complete 🎉

✅ Step 4: Let's see how we can use the highlighted content web part to roll up these policies onto a totally separate SharePoint site

Now we are in a really good position. The hard work is done 💪. Now we will focus on how to use the highlighted content web part to roll up content from any SharePoint site where we have followed step 3 above.

I won't go through the creation of the full 'Our Policies' page here as we are primarily focusing on the roll-up of content method. I cover the build of the 'Our Policies' page in the video above, so check that out if you want to see it.

So, what you want to do next is go to any site page on a SharePoint site where you want to see your policies appear 🪄.

1. Add the Highlighted Content web part

Fig. Add the Highlighted Content Web Part to a SharePoint Site Page

2. Click the edit web part (pencil icon), and the web part settings will be displayed

Fig. Open the edit web part details options panel

Now we need to tell the highlighted content web part where to source our policies from and what tags to target.

In the 'Source' field, you have a couple of viable options depending on your scenario:

• All Sites in the Hub: Use this option if your department sites (where your policies live) are all associated with the same hub site (typically the case with an Intranet) and you want to roll up from all of them.
• Select Sites: Use this option if you only want to roll up policies from specific sites that you would like to specify.

I'll choose 'All Sites in the Hub' as that is my example scenario.

You can ignore everything else for now (it's all very self-explanatory) until you come to the 'Filter and Sort' options section.

• In the 'Filter' field, choose 'Managed Property'
• Once you select this option, some new fields will appear
• In the 'Find a managed property' field, type the name of the site column you created when you created your content type earlier. Mine was called 'ExampleDocumentTypeColumn'
• You will then be able to select the next field, 'Managed property name'
• Within this dropdown, you should see your site column displayed prefixed with 'owstaxId'
• Select it
• Change the value in the next field to 'Contains' (it will be 'Equals' by default)
• In the next field, type the tag you tagged your policies with (in my case, I type in 'Policy')
• You can then choose a layout you like the look of and specify how many documents you would like to roll up (I'll leave this to you to decide what works best for you)

Fig. SharePoint Highlighted Content Web Part Settings for Rolling Up Content

You can then repeat this process wherever you want to roll up your policies. Simple!

💡 Summary

So there you have it. You can now roll up content from any SharePoint site to a single location. Be very proud of yourself! 🍾🍾🍾

The example in this post is just that... an example... in practice, you would want to put some upfront thought and planning into what way you want to structure your information and, with that, what your tagging structure needs to be to suit your organisation's needs (the world is bigger than policies, after all!). This exercise should be core to your Intranets information architecture design.

That being said, once you do get your design and plan together, the implementation is pretty much as above!

Happy rolling and until next time, Dan