SharePoint Out of the Box vs Sprocket 365
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most powerful platforms for building digital workplaces. It provides a solid foundation: pages, document libraries, news, search, and a growing set of web parts, and for many organisations, that foundation is enough to get started. But as soon as you move beyond basic content publishing and start building something more ambitious, the gaps become apparent quickly.
Sprocket 365 was built specifically to fill those gaps. After delivering hundreds of intranet and knowledge base projects across industries and organisation sizes, the team at Sope kept encountering the same requests from clients: requirements that SharePoint almost covered, but not quite. Rather than building bespoke solutions for each client, those recurring requirements were bundled into a single, affordable product that any SharePoint tenant can install and use.
This article explores two of the most common scenarios where SharePoint out of the box falls short, and how Sprocket 365 addresses each one.
Scenario 1: Building a Knowledge Base
The first scenario is less about polish and more about fundamental capability. SharePoint can store documents. It can publish pages. It can be searched. But a proper knowledge base, the kind that organisations use for policy libraries, onboarding portals, health and safety hubs, or structured team wikis, requires much more than any of those things individually.
SharePoint, out of the box, is not a knowledge base. Here is why, and how Sprocket closes the gap.
There Is No Wiki Navigation
A knowledge base lives or dies by its navigation. Users need to be able to browse a hierarchy of topics, drill down from broad categories to specific articles, and always know where they are. Think of how a well-structured wiki feels: a left-hand tree of topics that expands as you navigate, with clear parent-child relationships.
SharePoint has no built-in equivalent. Its left-hand navigation exists, but it is flat, manually maintained, and not designed to represent a content hierarchy. As content grows, it becomes unmanageable.
Sprocket's Knowledge Hub solves this with a purpose-built wiki-style left navigation. Pages are organised into a hierarchical tree that editors manage with drag-and-drop. Readers see a clean, expandable navigation panel alongside their content, exactly the experience they expect from a knowledge base. The navigation updates automatically as pages are added, moved, or archived.
Documents Are Not Pages
Many organisations store their policies, procedures, and controlled documents as Word files in document libraries. SharePoint makes this easy. But a Word document sitting in a library is not a knowledge base article: it cannot be read in the browser as a proper page, it cannot be searched at the paragraph level, and it provides none of the engagement or compliance features that a knowledge base needs.
Sprocket's Document Converter bridges this gap. Word documents can be converted into SharePoint pages with a single action, preserving formatting and structure. Once converted, they live as proper wiki pages within the Knowledge Hub, searchable, readable in-browser, and able to take advantage of every feature that pages offer. Documents can also be exported to PDF directly from the page when a downloadable version is needed.
No Compliance or Read Tracking
For policies, safety procedures, and compliance documents, simply publishing content is not enough. Organisations need to know who has read what, and when. They need to be able to send reminders to staff who have not yet acknowledged a critical document. They need an audit trail.
SharePoint has no built-in capability for any of this.
Sprocket's Read Lists feature, built into Knowledge Hub, allows administrators to define which pages must be read by specific users or groups. Users see a checklist of pages they are required to read and acknowledge each one explicitly. Administrators get a full audit view of completion rates across the organisation and can send automated reminders to users who have outstanding items. This turns a knowledge base into a compliance tool, without any custom development or third-party software.
Search Does Not Understand Structure
SharePoint's search is powerful across the tenant, but when you are inside a knowledge base you usually do not want results from across the entire organisation. You want results from within that knowledge area: the HR portal, the safety hub, the IT wiki. SharePoint's out-of-the-box search cannot be easily scoped to a specific section of content without custom configuration.
Knowledge Hub includes contextual search that returns results scoped to the current knowledge area, with filtering by section and page type. Users get relevant, focused results rather than a mix of content from across the tenant.
Pages Do Not Connect to Each Other
A hallmark of a good knowledge base is that related content surfaces naturally. Reading a policy on expense claims should show you related articles on travel booking, reimbursement processes, and approval workflows. SharePoint pages have no built-in mechanism for this.
Sprocket's Related Pages web part allows editors to manually curate connections between articles, or for connections to be surfaced automatically based on metadata. This encourages users to explore further and reduces the chance that important related content goes unread.
No Structured Page Experience
A SharePoint page is a blank canvas. That is powerful for flexibility, but it means that knowledge base articles look and feel different from one another depending on who authored them. There is no consistent header, no reading time estimate, no previous/next navigation to move through a sequence of articles.
Knowledge Hub wraps every page in a consistent, structured experience: showing reading time, surfacing related pages, providing previous and next navigation for sequenced content, and rendering the full wiki tree navigation alongside the content. Every page in the knowledge base feels like it belongs to a coherent system.
Scenario 2: Building a Modern Intranet
A modern intranet needs to do a lot. It needs to surface the right news to the right people, help employees find colleagues, provide quick access to tools and systems, support team pages that stay current without manual effort, and deliver a consistent, branded experience. SharePoint can tick some of these boxes, but building a truly polished intranet without compromise is where it starts to struggle.
Navigation and Branding
SharePoint's global navigation is functional but rigid. Customisation options are limited, and achieving a distinctive branded experience: custom fonts, colours, logos, and multi-level navigation, typically requires either accepting the defaults or investing in custom development.
Sprocket's Header web part replaces SharePoint's native navigation with a fully configurable branded header. It supports multi-level navigation menus, custom logo placement, and design options that let the intranet feel like an extension of your organisation's identity rather than a generic SharePoint site.
People and Org Charts
SharePoint includes an Org Chart web part, but it only displays a single level of hierarchy at a time and requires users to click through each person individually to explore the structure. For any organisation with more than a handful of people, this quickly becomes unusable.
Sprocket's People Hub provides a proper org chart view that renders the full hierarchy at once, making it easy to understand reporting lines and team structures at a glance. Alongside the org chart, People Hub offers a list view with search and filters, so you can answer questions like "show me everyone in the IT department" or "who is the project manager in the Sydney office" in seconds. Because People Hub draws directly from Microsoft 365 profiles, team pages that include a People Hub web part stay automatically up to date without any manual maintenance.
News and Communications
SharePoint's built-in News is genuinely good. It supports per-site authoring, optional approval workflows, pinning, and targeting. For many organisations it is the right tool, and Sprocket does not replace it.
Where Sprocket adds value is in how you surface and organise that news. With multiple configurable News web parts on a home page, communications teams can differentiate between company-wide announcements, team updates, and external news feeds, each with their own visual treatment. Combined with SharePoint's News Digest and Auto-News Digest features, employees can receive personalised email summaries of what they have missed, reducing the risk that important communications go unread.
Events
SharePoint's Events web part covers the basics: listing and displaying calendar events, but it does not support rolled-up events from across multiple sites, and the display options are limited.
Sprocket's What's Up web part goes further by aggregating events from across the tenant, supporting category-based filtering, and pulling in personal data from Microsoft 365 profiles such as birthdays and work anniversaries. This makes it possible to surface a richer, more personalised events experience on the home page without any custom development.
Quick Links, App Launchers, and Navigation Tiles
A common intranet requirement is a visually engaging row of tiles linking out to key systems: HR platforms, service desks, finance tools, project management apps, and so on. SharePoint's Quick Links and Hero web parts can do this, but they offer limited control over visual styling and cannot be personalised per user.
Sprocket's App Launcher and Buttons web parts give much more flexibility, supporting icons, custom colours, and personalisation so that employees can choose which apps appear in their launcher. Paired with the My Teams web part, which shows a user's Microsoft Teams spaces with member counts and direct navigation links, this creates a genuinely personalised jumping-off point for the working day.
Bookmarking and Saved Content
SharePoint has a built-in "Save for Later" feature that lets users bookmark pages. It works, but it is limited to pages and is not highly discoverable.
Sprocket's My Favourites extends this concept to any SharePoint location: document libraries, list views, event pages, and more. Users can bookmark exactly what they need and return to it quickly, mirroring the kind of personalised navigation employees expect from modern productivity tools.
Putting It Together
The honest reality of building an intranet entirely in SharePoint out of the box is that you end up making compromises. Requirements get descoped. Pages look generic. Org charts frustrate people. Navigation is inflexible. Each of these compromises is individually small, but together they add up to an intranet that employees tolerate rather than rely on.
Sprocket provides the 30+ web parts and enhancements that let you build the intranet you actually want, without custom development, without compromise.
Web Parts & Features Comparison
The table below lists every Sprocket 365 web part and feature alongside the closest SharePoint equivalent, so you can see at a glance where the platform extends what Microsoft provides and where it fills gaps entirely.
Intranet & Navigation
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Site header & branding | Basic theme colours and logo | Header: fully branded header with custom logo, colours, and multi-level navigation |
| Global navigation | SharePoint hub navigation (applies to hub site only, not associated sites) | Sprocket Header can be configured once and deployed consistently across all sites in a hub. Every associated site shares the same navigation without per-site configuration |
| Quick links / tiles | Quick Links, Hero web part | Buttons: styled link tiles with icons and custom colours |
| App launcher / system links | Quick Links | My Apps: personalised launcher for internal and external applications |
| Microsoft Teams access | Teams app separately | My Teams: surface your Teams spaces with members and direct navigation |
| Reusable content blocks | SharePoint text web part | Reusable Content: define a content block once and reuse it across multiple pages |
| Alerts and banners | SharePoint site notifications | Alerts: configurable alert banners with urgency levels, scheduling, and audience targeting |
| Favicon | Not available | Site Settings: set a custom favicon for your SharePoint site |
| Back to top button | Not available | Site Settings: adds a floating back-to-top button on long pages |
| Custom CSS and JavaScript | Not available | Custom CSS & JS: inject custom CSS and JavaScript across the site for advanced styling and behaviour |
| Site templates | Not available | Template Gallery: deploy professionally designed SharePoint sites in minutes using a curated library of ready-to-use templates |
News & Communications
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| News articles | SharePoint News (pages) | News Hub: enhanced news roll-up with filtering, layout options, and cross-site aggregation |
| News digest emails | News Digest / Auto-News Digest (built-in) | Works alongside built-in M365 digest features |
| Daily news briefing | Not available | Daily News Feed: curated daily news summary displayed on the intranet |
| Rich text and content | Text web part | Rich Text: enhanced text editing with additional formatting options |
| Page feedback | Comments (basic) | Page Feedback: structured feedback submission with admin review |
| AI content summary | Not available | AI Summary: AI-generated page summary to help users quickly assess relevance |
People & Organisation
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Org chart | Org Chart web part (single level) | People Hub: full hierarchy org chart with drill-down, list view, search, and filters |
| People directory | People search via M365 search | People Hub list view: searchable, filterable directory with profile cards |
| Team pages / people lists | Manual content updates | People Hub filtered view: auto-updates from Microsoft 365 profiles |
| User profile / account | My Profile (M365) | My Account: surface profile information and quick user actions on the intranet |
| Timezone display | Not available | Timezone Clocks: display multiple time zones for distributed teams |
Events & Calendar
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Events calendar | Events web part (per-site) | Calendar: configurable calendar with colour-coded categories and default filters |
| Rolled-up events across sites | Not available out of the box | What's Up: aggregated events from multiple sites, plus M365 profile events like birthdays and work anniversaries |
Documents & Lists
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Document library view | Document Libraries web part | Documents: enhanced document display with filtering, metadata columns, and pagination |
| List view | List web part | List View: configurable list display with column control and filtering |
| List item detail | Not available | List Item Properties: display a single list item's properties as a formatted detail view |
| Location / office finder | Not available | Location Finder: interactive office and location directory |
Knowledge Base & Compliance
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Wiki-style navigation | Flat left nav (manual) | Knowledge Hub: hierarchical tree navigation with drag-and-drop editing |
| Document to page conversion | Not available | Document Converter: convert Word documents to SharePoint pages |
| Read tracking & compliance | Not available | Read Checklist: track who has read required pages, with reminders and audit reporting |
| Scoped knowledge base search | Requires custom configuration | Search: scoped search within the current knowledge area |
| Related content | Not available | Related Pages: surface related articles within a knowledge area |
| Page reading time | Available on SharePoint pages | Built into Knowledge Hub page experience |
| Sequential page navigation (prev/next) | Not available | Built into Knowledge Hub page experience |
| Page history / version visibility | Version history in library | Page History: display page revision history inline on the page |
| Table of contents | Not available | Table of Contents: auto-generated in-page navigation from headings |
Presentation & Layout
| Feature | SharePoint Out of the Box | Sprocket 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Accordion / FAQ | Collapsible sections (basic) | Accordion: collapsible Q&A and content sections with additional layout and styling options |
| Hero / feature banner | Hero web part | Hero: enhanced hero banner with additional layout and styling options |
| Image carousel | Not available | Image Carousel: rotating image display with captions and links |
| Image gallery | Image Gallery web part (basic) | Image Gallery: filterable gallery with lightbox and layout options |
| Step-by-step process | Not available | Steps: visual numbered steps for processes and guides |
| Process / workflow diagram | Not available | Process: visual process flow with stages and descriptions |
| Embed external content | Embed web part | Embed: CSP-compliant embed with support for scripts and iframes |
| Analytics integration | Not available natively | Analytics: Google Analytics and Application Insights support |
SharePoint is the right foundation. Sprocket 365 is what turns that foundation into the intranet or knowledge base your organisation actually needs.
If you are ready to get started, try Sprocket 365 for free or explore the getting started guide.