A lean, useful intranet is easier for employees to use and easier for you to look after. Content has a life: it is published, used, goes out of date and eventually needs to be updated or retired. We measure content age directly, alongside use, so you can see where each page, site or group of sites is in that life and what to do next. This gives content owners clear prompts to act and gives you the opportunity to keep the best content in front of employees.
Valuable content
Ranking views show which content employees consume most. Looked at by audience and location, they show who the content is valuable to, not just how many people opened it.
Knowing what is valuable tells you where to invest. You can keep that content current, link to it from more places and use it as a model for other pages.
Decline
Not every drop in use is a problem, but it is worth noticing. Reporting over a period you choose lets you compare engagement before and after a change, or across equivalent periods, to see where use is falling away.
We combine this with content age. Content that is both declining and has not been updated is a strong candidate for a refresh. Content that is declining but recently updated may need better promotion or a clearer call to action.
Audits
An audit starts with a question about scope. You can report on one page, one site, a selected combination of sites or the whole of SharePoint, so you can audit a single department’s content or the whole intranet.
Our freshness report shows how old content is, so you can see what has not been updated recently or within the timeframe you expect. Alongside use, it gives you evidence to decide, page by page, what to keep, update or retire, instead of reviewing everything by hand.
Review/retire
Content that has not been updated in the expected timeframe is, in our view, ignored and needs a decision. It should be updated if it is still needed, or archived or deleted if it is not.
Retiring content is good for employees too. Fewer outdated pages mean fewer wrong answers, cleaner search results and less storage to look after. It also helps Copilot work with content you trust. The result is a smaller intranet that does more.
Sprawl
Sprawl is what happens when sites and pages are created faster than they are retired. Employees find several versions of the same thing and owners lose track of what they are responsible for.
Reporting across the whole of SharePoint using Addin Analytics shows which sites are barely used and which have not been updated. For IT teams, this helps identify sites that can be retired.
Page/site/hub comparison
You can compare content at page, site and hub level, and across selected combinations of sites. This shows where use and freshness are strong, and where they are not.
Comparing like with like helps owners see how their content sits alongside similar content elsewhere, and helps you decide where to focus first.
Gaps
We identify gaps through our search metrics. Searches that return no results or are abandoned show what employees looked for and could not find.
We can see searches at every step of a journey, as well as by site and audience. This shows where in a journey a search happened and what the employee had just read, and whether one site or audience searches for something the others do not. A gap might be missing content, or content that exists under a name employees do not use.
Owner workflow
Good governance gives owners a short, clear list of things to do. Our reports show owners their own pages and sites: which content is ageing, which is not being used and what employees are searching for.
From there the workflow is simple. Review the content, then update it, retire it or leave it as it is. Then check the same view later to see the result. Because the evidence comes from reports rather than from audits, owners can act on it as part of their normal work.