Nearly every SharePoint intranet RFP that lands on our desk has the same shape. A page or two about the organization, a feature list (news, events, employee directory, document library, search, mobile), a timeline, and a request for fixed pricing. What’s missing is the two facts a vendor would need to price the work honestly: who owns the content today, and how many SharePoint sites already exist.
Without those, every vendor guesses. One assumes a clean tenant and a communications team ready to publish. Another assumes 400 abandoned sites and no owners. Both write proposals, both look reasonable, and the numbers land anywhere from $40,000 to $400,000. The buyer then spends weeks trying to compare documents that were never describing the same project.
This post is for the people writing the RFP. It covers what belongs in it, what to leave out, and what to expect back. When the responses arrive, our guide to choosing a SharePoint consulting firm covers how to evaluate the firms themselves.
What Should a SharePoint Intranet RFP Include?
A useful SharePoint intranet RFP describes the current environment, names who will own the content, states the problems the intranet has to solve, and gives a budget range. It spends less space on features and more on facts a vendor can’t find out on their own. The feature list can stay, but it belongs at the end and it should be short.
Here’s what each part looks like.
The current SharePoint environment
State how many sites exist in the tenant, roughly how old the oldest ones are, whether there’s a hub structure, and whether you’re on SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server, or a mix. Say how many people have licenses and how many use SharePoint today. If you don’t know the site count, say that, and say you’ll share the admin center report with shortlisted vendors.
That paragraph changes a proposal more than any other. A 60-site tenant with a hub is a design job. A 900-site tenant with no hub and no owners is a cleanup job with an intranet at the end of it, and pricing it as a design job guarantees a change order in month two.
Who owns the content
Name the roles, not the people. Who publishes company news? Who owns HR content, IT help content, policies? How many hours a week do those people have for the intranet after launch? If the answer is “nobody yet,” write that. A vendor who knows there are no content owners will propose a governance step and staff it. A vendor who doesn’t know will build a beautiful home page that goes stale in ninety days.
Our post on SharePoint page governance explains what ownership looks like in practice, and it makes a good appendix for the internal conversation before you write this section.
The problems, not the features
Write down what’s wrong now in plain sentences. “Employees email HR for the same three forms every week.” “There are four versions of the travel policy and nobody knows which is current.” “New hires take a month to learn where anything is.” Each of those points a vendor toward a specific fix. “Must have a document library” points nowhere, since every SharePoint site has one.
Integrations and constraints
List the systems employees need to reach from the intranet, such as the HRIS, help desk, LMS, and any line-of-business apps. Say whether single sign-on is in place. Note compliance requirements, multiple languages, frontline workers without desks, and anything about your tenant a vendor would trip over, such as a locked-down default environment or a pending tenant merger.
Budget range and timeline
Give a range. Buyers often withhold the budget so vendors “don’t just spend it,” but the effect is that every vendor guesses a different number and you can’t compare them. A range of $75,000 to $125,000 tells a vendor what depth of project you’re funding without committing you to the top. Our breakdown of what a SharePoint intranet costs explains what drives the number, and the Intranet ROI Calculator helps you arrive at a defensible range before you publish the RFP.
For the timeline, give the date that matters and why. A new public website launching January 1 that the intranet has to match is a real constraint. “Complete within 90 days” with no reason behind it just filters out careful vendors.
How you’ll score responses
Tell vendors how the decision gets made. If discovery quality counts for 30 percent and price for 25, say so. Scoring criteria force you to decide what you value before the proposals arrive, and they stop the lowest bid from winning by default.
What to Leave Out of a SharePoint Intranet RFP
Leave out the long feature checklist, the demand for fixed pricing before discovery, and requirements copied from an intranet product’s marketing page. Each one pushes vendors toward guessing, and guesses are what make proposals impossible to compare.
The 40-line feature checklist
Most intranet feature lists describe things SharePoint already does. News, events, people search, document libraries, quick links, mobile access, and Microsoft 365 integration all ship with SharePoint Online. Asking a vendor to confirm “supports news publishing: Yes/No” produces a page of yeses and tells you nothing. Keep the three or four features that are unusual for your organization, and drop the rest.
Fixed pricing before anyone has seen the tenant
A vendor who quotes a fixed price for an intranet without seeing the environment is either padding the number to cover the unknowns or planning to make it up in change orders. Ask instead for a fixed price on discovery, with a not-to-exceed range for the build that gets firmed up after discovery. That’s how experienced buyers structure these, and it’s how we structure ours. If your procurement rules require a single fixed number, say so in the RFP, and expect the number to carry a risk premium.
Requirements copied from a product demo
If the RFP asks for “AI-powered personalized content feeds,” “gamified employee recognition,” and “digital signage integration,” a vendor can tell it was written after watching an intranet-in-a-box demo. Nothing wrong with wanting those things, but they’re features of a specific product, and asking a native-SharePoint firm to price them is asking for a different project. Decide first whether you’re buying a product or building on SharePoint. Our comparison of SharePoint intranets and intranet-in-a-box platforms walks through that choice, including when the product is the right answer.
Design mockups as a requirement
Some RFPs ask for three home page designs with the proposal. A vendor who hasn’t seen your content, your brand standards, or your site structure is designing in the dark, and the designs will be pretty and wrong. Ask for examples of past work instead. Our SharePoint intranet examples post shows the kind of portfolio to expect.
A SharePoint Intranet RFP Outline You Can Use
Here’s the structure we’d want to receive. Each section can be short. Facts beat length.
- About the organization: headcount, locations, industry, and the business reason for the project
- Current environment: site count, tenant type, hub structure, license count, active users, and known problems
- Content ownership: roles that will publish and maintain content, and their available hours
- Problems to solve: five to ten plain-language statements of what’s broken today
- Integrations and constraints: connected systems, SSO, compliance, languages, frontline workers
- Budget range and timeline: a range and the real date, with the reason behind it
- Requirements: the three or four features specific to your organization, and nothing that ships with SharePoint already
- What you want in the response: approach to discovery, team and their SharePoint experience, references, and pricing structure
- Scoring criteria and process: weights, dates, who decides
If you can fill in section 2 and section 3 with real numbers, you’ve written a better RFP than most of what we see. The build itself, once a vendor is chosen, is laid out in our complete guide to building a modern SharePoint intranet.
What Good Responses to a SharePoint Intranet RFP Look Like
A good response asks questions before it quotes, proposes discovery as a paid first step, and names the people who will do the work. It should read like the vendor understood section 2 and section 3, and it should reference your problems back to you.
Be wary of responses that quote a fixed build price with no discovery, that describe the team as “our certified experts” without names, or that answer every feature line with a yes and every problem statement with nothing. Those proposals were written before your RFP was read.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an RFP for a SharePoint intranet project?
Not always. If your procurement rules don’t require one, a short written brief covering the current environment, content ownership, problems, and budget range gets you the same information with far less overhead, and it lets vendors ask questions. Formal RFPs make sense when policy requires them or when you’re comparing more than four firms.
How long should a SharePoint intranet RFP be?
Long enough to state the facts in the outline above, usually five to ten pages. Length beyond that is almost always a feature checklist, and the checklist adds work for vendors without improving the proposals you get back.
Should I include the budget in an intranet RFP?
Yes, as a range. Withholding it means vendors guess, and their guesses are what make proposals hard to compare. A range signals project depth without committing you to the top of it.
What if we don’t know how many SharePoint sites we have?
Say so in the RFP. The SharePoint admin center’s active sites report takes a few minutes to export, and sharing it with shortlisted vendors is a reasonable step. If nobody in your organization can produce it, that’s itself a finding a vendor needs to know about.
Should a SharePoint intranet RFP ask for fixed pricing?
Ask for a fixed price on discovery and a not-to-exceed range for the build that firms up after discovery. Fixed pricing on the whole project before anyone has seen the tenant forces vendors to price in the unknowns, and you pay for that padding whether the risk shows up or not.
Can a consultant help write the RFP?
Yes, and it often pays for itself. A short SharePoint intranet assessment produces the site count, the ownership picture, and the problem list that sections 2 through 4 need, so the RFP goes out with facts instead of guesses. If you’d rather talk it through first, tell us where you are in the process.
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