Administrator experience in intranets and EXPs 

In our latest Intranets and Employee Experience Platforms report we evaluated leading digital products against eight scenarios. The sixth of these real-world business scenarios is ‘Administrator experience’. 

What we explored 

It’s important for all users to have a good experience when working with an intranet, particularly where there is a decentralised model to intranet management. We therefore wanted to see how easy it was for administrators and publishers to manage the site as a separate experience from end-users. We explored: 

• The different menus and options that were open to admins. 

• What tools were available to build or configure the home page(s) and / or other landing pages. 

• Mechanisms for managing content life cycles with easy ways for people to update content and / or associated dates.  

• How multiple languages were supported from a user and publisher point of view. 

Note that we don’t dictate a long list of specific features, but instead consider common employee needs. We then ask the vendors to demonstrate how they would address the scenario in whatever way they see as the best approach.  

What we found 

Unfortunately, admins can sometimes be overlooked in favour of end users and the experience here can be quite different. The average score here, for example, is 3.5 vs the score for Scenario 1 at 3.9 out of 5. Overall, we would like vendors to bring parity in experience between the front and back end (and across admin screens more generally in some places) – although there are products that do better than others. 

Additionally, the admin experience isn’t always something vendors voluntarily demo during product selection, so we would advise you ask to see how this works. In advance, you should also think about how your platform is going to be run and by who. A decentralised publishing approach may mean page creation and governance needs to be simple. Perhaps IT colleagues will be actively managing aspects of the site, so access to technical tools might be wanted. You’ll find simple and comprehensive approaches among the products we’ve reviewed, so be prepared to consider what your colleagues will work best with. 

Regardless of the overall admin approach, governance and content life cycle tools should be easy enough for publishers to use so they keep on top of associated actions, while also be comprehensive enough to effectively manage the site. We’ve found this is still an area of inconsistency, despite poor governance often being behind poor employee experiences. We’ve noticed that customers are now feeding this back more frequently too, so we hope to see improvements in this area. 

Multi-language needs vary between businesses, but again we want to reflect the choices available to meet the needs of those who have requirements in this area. There are generally good auto translation options across the products we’ve seen, both for publishers to then edit but also for end users to translate on-the-fly. Those organisations that have publishers that work in different languages may find options too simplistic overall, but some products such as Omnia do include excellent tools that allow for side-by-side comparisons and tracked changes. 

How SharePoint and Viva fared in this scenario 

Administration for sites, and particularly for a whole intranet, can soon feel very complex. Part of the challenge with SharePoint is that settings can be spread across multiple locations. However, for administrators of SharePoint pages, the experience is consistent and accessible. For governance, reporting will show usage against storage quotas, but it is much harder to find unused sites because they don’t generate usage data. By design, SharePoint reflects a low-governance philosophy by Microsoft, where anyone can create a site. This can be blocked, but there is no nuanced middle-ground. SharePoint makes it easy to create a multilingual experience, supporting around fifty languages for both the interface and for content, although there is a machine-translation option. 

Overall, this is how the products scored in this scenario: 

For more information on this topic and other scenarios, download our comprehensive free intranet review report today. Get the insights you need to make informed decisions and improve your internal communications strategy.