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Native SharePoint, native extension or standalone platform: which path should your organization choose?
Public sector organizations share the same design constraints: staff spread across entities and sites, short-term contracts and, in public works or schools, many employees without a computer. The technical path does not fix the usual causes of failure on its own, but it decides who pays, where data lives and what you can demand at acceptance. It must also hold over time: under its Modern Lifecycle Policy, Microsoft gives a minimum of twelve months' notice before support ends with no successor (Microsoft, 2024).
This white paper describes the conditions under which each path is the right choice, without grading anyone, and gives your committee the tools to decide on written evidence. The intranet specification template picks up where the framework leaves off.
What's inside:
- Three paths, three real products: what native SharePoint with Viva Connections covers in 2026, what a native extension deployed in the tenant adds, and the price of a standalone platform.
- The twelve-criterion matrix: five public sector criteria (procurement route, data and hosting, accessibility, employees without a computer, multi-entity governance) and seven classic criteria, with a method to weight them without bias.
- Procurement and data: the questions to settle with procurement before the RFP, five reversibility points to write into the contract and a map of data residency, personal data and accessibility obligations.
- Frontline workers: what Microsoft 365 F1, F3 and E plans allow for the intranet, and how to test license-free access in a demo.
- The five-year total cost grid: nine cost lines for each path, to fill with your own figures in a low and a high scenario, including the costs that quotes tend to forget.
- 25 requirements ready for your RFP: five blocks (procurement and contract, data and security, accessibility and inclusion, functional and contribution, durability and support), each requirement with the proof expected at acceptance.
- A four-step method: diagnose, weight then score, tender, accept, with the deliverable expected at each step.
Why download it:
A framework that grades nobody. The matrix states the conditions under which each path scores, and the weighting remains your committee's decision.
Requirements that impose no technology. Each of the 25 requirements is verified through a document, a demo or a test, and applies to all three paths, native alone included.
A cost you can defend. The five-year grid separates licenses already owned from new spending, so that you can present your executive with a credible range rather than a single figure.
Obligations quoted with their sources. Data residency, personal data and accessibility commitments are taken from published texts, with what each one means for your project.
