A whole new guide to intranets and employee experience platforms

We have been writing reviews of intranet products for around six years, exploring their features against common business scenarios and sharing the results in published reports. Our newest intranet report is due out in early in 2022, and we’ve made some big changes. We’re sharing the first of our news now, but sign up below to find out more about the biggest change as soon as we announce it.

SharePoint or not, it doesn’t matter to our report

We previously published two intranet reports, one on SharePoint intranet in-a-box products and another on independent intranets. In 2022 these two sets of products will be merged in our new report. Here’s why we’ve made that change:

• SharePoint shouldn’t always be an automatic decision when considering your intranet landscape, which I’ve explored in detail in a separate blog post
• We want to highlight the best systems on the market – we currently review around 75 products and appreciate that this is a lot to absorb, so have reduced this report down to around thirty
• Products have evolved and there’s been a shift in the way vendors discuss their software, meaning it’s no longer easy to differentiate between products that need SharePoint and those that stand alone.

To expand the third point a little, we’ve included a couple of products that, traditionally, may not have been described as an ‘intranet’. Plus, we’ve found that ‘traditional’ intranet products have been choosing to drop the term. So, we want to reflect the best of digital employee experience platforms (particularly for desktop, although we’ve introduced a scenario that focusses on mobile) and feel that this report will give readers a comprehensive study of the best.

Exploration of dozens of products

The report will include twenty in-depth reviews of the best products on the market. This also includes an analysis of SharePoint Online and Viva Connections, which will allow you to compare intranet products against Microsoft’s standard offering. Here is the complete list of included products.

The report will also include a selection of overview reviews, which will highlight other excellent products on the market. We feel these are still worth considering, so we’ve presented some useful information for you to decide whether to explore them in more depth during your selection process.

Assessment against business scenarios

All of our in-depth reviews are structured around ten business scenarios that we’ve formulated following our work with clients, as well as the trends we’ve seen in the industry. We don’t look for a tick-list of features, instead we want to see how products address the common challenges that businesses face. We score these scenarios, giving you a way to compare different products equally so you can focus-in on the areas that matter most to you. There will also be plenty of screenshots and a presentation of technical information that’s typically tricky to gather.

This may all sound familiar to those of you who have used our reports in the past, but each review is packed with more detail than we’ve written before. We’re confident that every reader will be able to find a combination of business scenarios that mean the most to you, so you really can compare the best solution for your organisation.

What’s next?

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Are you a vendor?

We have created a dedicated space for software vendors so you can read about these changes, as well as how to be involved in our reports.