And it was mostly because there are obvious omissions in the SharePoint intranet reports. When you think of intranets, there are products that go beyond those that we were featuring. So, the obvious ones are things like Unily or Interact or Google Maps that were really big products that people often asked about and are very popular in the marketplace. And we just hadn’t reflected them so we needed to make sure we addressed to that balance.

Something else is one is that there is a belief that the implementation of a SharePoint product will be easier or quicker, but actually, the implementation is pretty much the same between them. Especially if you end up using a cloud version of an independent intranet product, it’s exactly the same process. It’s just as quick or quicker in some respects as well than having to configure SharePoint and get everything set up in the background.

And that concept that SharePoint is free is also a little bit questionable. So if you have Microsoft licenses, then obviously you do have SharePoint. But, if I revisit the topic of our previous podcast when I spoke around frontline workers, do you really want to set up a Microsoft license for your frontline worker who will end up with all of the other stuff that’s automatically set up off the back of it, even just an email address. Does a nurse really need a company email address? Is there a way that you communicate with them that’s different? Or, a barista or someone who works in a shop, they don’t necessarily need that level of technology that goes with getting one of these licenses.

And also even though yes, using SharePoint by itself, you may choose to develop it. There are costs there. So you either have to get an expert in-house or maybe work with an agency externally. And so there’s time and there’s development therein actually just wrangling with SharePoint in its pure naked form as it were. And so there are hidden costs there. And there are cost savings and benefits you get from having a vendor and even a SharePoint intranet-in-a-box product. The vendors are very knowledgeable. They have a huge amount of experience in case studies and examples that they bring with them and can help with that strategic journey. So actually by not going with a vendor, you may actually lose out on all of that wealth of knowledge that you can just draw on as an intranet manager.

And the last point really that’s the key one is the document repository isn’t the only requirement that you need to think about. So, that’s what SharePoint does do well. And it’s what a lot of businesses use, even if they don’t use hub sites or communication sites or anything like that. The document repository and storage and knowledge retrieval side of things is what’s used. But there are loads of other requirements that your business will have. And so only thinking about that and making that the primary reason why you choose a SharePoint intranet, whether it be by itself or with a product, is just something you need to question and actually think about the rest of your needs and the rest of what your business needs overall to make sure you’re choosing the right thing.

So, I see that in some of our interactions of some that desire of, I wish I didn’t have to know so many parts and pieces to manage my communication and collaboration. And the interesting on the frontline worker where we have seen people move in that direction of say a Unily, it can come down to costs of the frontline worker that you don’t want to bloat the licensing and go beyond what you really need in licensing so you can have that communication channel and that’s what you’re trying to get versus all these other things being tacked on.

And then you have to make decisions of what you turn on, turn off, what you enable because now you have that extra responsibility managing these assets with a broader community of people. Maybe they don’t need that asset. So I think you bring on very important points. And I think the vision of what a company has of what the intranet needs to be is important. And that’s what journey do I want to take and where am I going because you don’t want to get to a dead end with that intranet either where you’ve… Yeah, it’s easy in the beginning stages, but when we get to the more challenging needs that an intranet provides or needs to have from an integration standpoint, that’s where it could… You might see the other side of the benefit where now this is a challenge when I’m at this part of the journey.

So, the traditional approach of it being like a tree where things spread out and mega menus and that sort of approach, there are some products that don’t do that. A lot of them do, but there are some that don’t and they embrace a Teams or communities or a groups kind of structure. And it curates the content based on who it is that’s within them and what it is they’re doing. So it can be quite flexible in the way that it’s approaching that content, but also it could feel quite rigid if you want that traditional structure.

If you don’t want to approach something in that kind of slightly more flexible way, then it’s something that if you are going out and looking for an independent intranet, just need to think about that and what’s right for the business. But an example would be Communifire, for example, they have a spaces approach. So everything they have is built by that group of people. You could have an HR group, which is the people that work in HR, and then you could have an HR space, which is where the actual policies and questions and that kind of thing come from there.

So, SharePoint products tend to either have their own commenting system or own the social areas that maybe don’t integrate that well with the whole platform, or they try to use Yammer. And so they use Yammer for commenting, but then those comments kind of disappear or don’t quite hang together properly. Whereas, within an independent intranet, because they don’t have that need to work around SharePoint and other Office 365 tools, they can choose to but quite often they have their own maybe discussion boards. They kind of go a little bit old school with forums and discussion boards or their own built-in commenting systems and activity feeds that you can tie everything together. So it then has that flexibility of being both flat in terms of maybe the reference material, but actually, the sense of community can be built through and brought through a lot stronger.

And then beyond that, it’s things around user experience and the experience for publishers to make sure that that is covered enough because as an intranet manager, you have an awful lot to do. And if the way that you have to do it is painful, then that can reflect in what you’re doing on the site and actually what the engagement levels can end up being for the people that are using it. And then also we’ve got things like finding and sharing. Search is one of those things that always comes up when we come to review intranets with clients, the search is always one of those things where people say it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t bring things back. And so we look at the way you use that. These products will surface information or allow users to feedback if they’ve not been able to find something, so then improve that search you’ll findability across the whole site. So we really kind of bounce between technical and user-based things. It’s quite a broad approach that we take across those 10 scenarios.

We know people will go to either the desktop app, or they will go to the suite of options. And so they haven’t necessarily looked at them too closely. So for those businesses that use the whole Office 365 suite of apps, SharePoint intranet may actually be the better solution just purely because of how easy it is then to access everything and to get all that information into one place. Whereas, an independent intranets on the whole, that’s one of the patchier areas where they don’t do it quite as well across the board. And some just don’t even want to consider doing it so it’s not something they’ve even looked at.

It does do a lot of things very well, but there are things that are still missing there. And so I think, in fact, we’ve covered Microsoft Teams in the employee mobile app report, because that was one of the things that we were getting asked about, whether people should do something else or use a Microsoft tool. But, it could be something as time goes on that we look at Microsoft Teams and think about how it sits within the world of intranets and how they do complement each other. But certainly, at the moment, we’re not hearing from clients that they want to replace their intranets with Teams. We’re hearing that they just want to be able to make sure that they complement each other. And that’s, I think, the challenge at the moment is just to make sure that they do work well and people who maybe do go just into Teams and not into the intranet get that information still, or are still able to get some of that experience and don’t miss out if they had gone through intranet in the first place.

And for some people, that’s a very early SharePoint. And so those, that reputation and that experience is quite difficult to shake. And when you’re outside of the world of intranets and outside of the world of SharePoint as a user in HR, then hearing from the people that made this product, you have this horrible memory of, is that are you going to actually listen to them? Are you going to believe them, or are you going to believe the world of HR technology that’s out there? And some of the other products that actually maybe speak to you in a different way that doesn’t have that memory connected to it. And that’s something I’m interested to see whether the world of HR does kind of start to listen to Microsoft or not.

So we’ve reviewed it in that context rather than in the context of being an intranet. But we were quite impressed with it as we were going through and seeing the different features and especially from a communications perspective. So live events, although that’s something again that Microsoft can do, but live events are done very well through Facebook and the whole community feel and the variety of things that you have at your disposal as a communicator to write messages and to share the news. But we’ve not come across any clients asking about it instead of an intranet. It’s always been an additional platform if they’ve decided to use it.