An intranet and document system your staff will actually open every morning.

Most companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi that run on Microsoft 365 already own SharePoint, often without knowing it. Files sit in personal OneDrive folders and shared drives, policies get emailed as attachments, and nobody is sure which version of a contract is the current one. A problem we often see is a SharePoint tenant that grew on its own, with hundreds of sites created through Teams and no structure behind them. The work usually starts with tidying that up before anything new is built.

Arabic matters more here than many vendors admit. SharePoint Online supports Arabic sites that render right to left, and communication sites can carry translated versions of each page. We set up the language settings, navigation and page templates so the Arabic intranet is a proper site rather than an afterthought, and we test layouts with real Arabic content, since mixed Arabic and English titles break in ways that placeholder text never shows.

Document management is where SharePoint earns its keep in UAE businesses. Trade licences, Emirates ID copies, tenancy contracts, visa files and supplier agreements all have expiry dates and need controlled access. We build libraries with metadata, retention and permission groups, then use Power Automate to send renewal reminders and route approvals, so the right people see the right file and a renewal is not missed.

Data location and access are real questions for regulated sectors. Microsoft operates cloud regions in the UAE, and many organisations here ask for their data to stay in country. We review your tenant settings with your IT team, apply sensitivity labels and sharing rules, and suggest confirming specific requirements under UAE PDPL or your sector regulator with your compliance lead, since the rules differ between a free zone entity and a government supplier.

Decisions made in the first two weeks shape everything that follows. The biggest one is whether to organise around departments or around work. A department structure looks tidy on an org chart but breaks the moment a project involves finance, legal and operations together, which in UAE companies with lean head offices is most of the time. We usually recommend a small number of hubs by function, with project and client sites hanging off them, and a naming rule that stops five sites all called Finance from appearing within a month.

It also helps to prepare a few things before we start. A list of the documents people search for most, the names of one owner per department who can make decisions, and an honest view of which shared drives are still in use will save weeks. If you have a separate HR, ERP or CRM system, tell us early, because the most useful intranets in this market pull leave balances, policy acknowledgements or customer files from those systems rather than asking staff to open three different tools.

Codeeo builds SharePoint from Dubai Silicon Oasis, with a team that knows both the Microsoft 365 admin centre and the way UAE offices actually share files. We can run workshops at your office with department heads, then keep the build moving on Teams calls and WhatsApp between sessions.