An Intranet in Days, Not Months: How SharePoint Templates Accelerate Implementation

How long does it take to launch an intranet? The traditional answer — three to six months of requirements gathering, design, development and testing — is no longer the only one. With industry-specific SharePoint intranet templates, an SMB can have a professional, brand-aligned intranet live in days.

In this article we cover when it makes sense to start from a template instead of a custom project, what AvantIT’s 22 SharePoint templates include, and what a typical implementation looks like.

The problem: intranets that never leave the drawing board

Most SMBs already pay for Microsoft 365 — and SharePoint Online is included in the licence. Yet many still rely on mass email and shared drives, because the “intranet project” always looks too big:

• Budget: a custom intranet project typically starts in the tens of thousands of euros.
• Time: months of discovery meetings before anything visible exists.
• Risk: without a concrete reference, it’s hard to know whether the end result will actually be adopted.

The outcome is familiar: the intranet gets postponed to “next year” — every year.

The alternative: start from an industry template

An intranet template is not a blank page with your logo — it’s a complete structure designed around the day-to-day reality of a specific sector. A law firm doesn’t communicate like a factory; a clinic doesn’t organize documents like a construction company.

That’s why AvantIT’s templates are organized by industry — banking, healthcare, construction, education, manufacturing, retail, pharmaceutical, public sector, real estate, insurance, logistics, energy and more — 22 in total, each with a live demo you can explore before deciding.

Every template ships with:

• A communication home page with company news, highlights and quick links
• Department pages (HR, Finance, Operations) with documents and contacts
• A searchable people directory
• Document library structures with metadata appropriate to the sector
• Navigation and branding adjusted to your identity during implementation

Template vs. custom: when to choose which

Criterion	Template	Custom
Time to launch	Days	3–6 months
Initial investment	Low and predictable	High, variable
Fit for the sector	High (designed for the industry)	Total (designed for the company)
Adoption risk	Low — you see the demo before buying	Depends on discovery
Complex integrations (ERP, internal apps)	Phase 2	Included in the project

The rule of thumb we use with clients: start with a template if the priority is internal communication and document management; move to custom development (SPFx web parts, integrations, Power Automate workflows) once the intranet is alive and teams start asking for more.

A template is not a dead end — it’s standard SharePoint Online, so everything you build later sits on the same foundation.

What a typical implementation looks like

1. Demo and selection (day 1) — explore the live demos in the template gallery and pick the one closest to your reality.
2. Brand adaptation (days 2–3) — colors, logo, imagery and copy adjusted to your company; permission structure defined with your IT.
3. Content loading (days 3–5) — migration of the first document libraries and creation of the initial news items.
4. Training and launch (day 5+) — a training session for content editors and a launch announcement to your teams.

In parallel, we leave basic governance configured — who can create sites, external sharing policies, naming conventions — so the intranet doesn’t turn into the folder chaos it came to replace.

What comes after the intranet?

A living intranet is the foundation for the rest of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem:

• Document approval workflows with Power Automate
• Internal apps (leave requests, ideas, helpdesk) with Power Apps
• AI-powered search across company knowledge, preparing for Microsoft Copilot adoption

That’s why we push to launch fast: every month without an intranet is a month in which company knowledge stays scattered across inboxes.

Conclusion

If your company already pays for Microsoft 365, the question isn’t “can we have an intranet?” — it’s “why don’t we have one yet?”. With an industry template, the investment is a fraction of a custom project and the result is live in under a week.

Explore the live demos in the SharePoint template gallery or talk to us for a guided 30-minute demo with your industry’s template.