Short answer: A company intranet portal in 2026 is the one place employees go to find procedures, forms, announcements and answers. Companies already on Microsoft 365 usually start with SharePoint, others buy a ready-made employee platform, and custom development fits when the portal must pull data from internal systems or answer questions from the company's own documents. Whatever the route, permissions decide whether the portal is safe to search.
Key takeaways
- SharePoint may already be paid for: Microsoft 365 Business Basic includes SharePoint team sites, so many companies own the building blocks.
- AI search inherits permissions: Microsoft states that Copilot only surfaces data a user has at least view access to, which makes messy permissions a visible problem.
- Hebrew needs a test: SharePoint lists Hebrew as a supported language, but each translated page is a separate version and navigation is translated by hand.
- Search is the feature people use: a portal that cannot answer "where is the vacation form" gets abandoned.
Three ways to build an employee portal
| Route | Fits when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| SharePoint and Microsoft 365 | The company already works in Teams, Outlook and OneDrive | Needs governance; site sprawl and old permissions carry over |
| Ready-made employee platform (Staffbase, Simpplr and similar) | Internal communications to large or frontline teams is the main goal | Per-user licensing, limited control over data and integrations, uneven right-to-left support |
| Custom portal | The portal must show live data from ERP, HR or case systems, or follow a specific workflow | Requires a clear scope and an owner for maintenance |
Inside Microsoft 365, the employee-facing layer is now called the SharePoint app in Teams (formerly Viva Connections). Microsoft's documentation says creating one requires an Enterprise, Frontline or Academic license, and more than one experience requires a Viva add-on for every user. Companies on Business plans should check this before planning around it.
AI search over internal documents
The most requested feature in a new intranet is a search box that answers in plain language. That is retrieval-augmented generation: the system finds the relevant passages in procedures, contracts or manuals and writes an answer with a link to the source. The explainer on how RAG document search works covers the mechanics, and training AI on business documents covers preparing the content. A dedicated AI agent for internal documents is one way to add this on top of an existing portal. For Hebrew content, model choice matters; Hebrew-capable LLMs compares the options.
