Four types of intranet product for SharePoint and Office 365

A quick video (also on LinkedIn), but here’s the transcript if that’s better.

There are four broad categories of intranet product for SharePoint.

Accelerators

Accelerators help the agency build your intranet from ready-made components on to SharePoint. Because they will also need to do bespoke coding to meet your requirements, deployment takes time, and your intranet may not get upgrades very often.

Examples:  Go Intranet | OneWindow | Injio | Fresh | Mesh

Applications

Applications are intranets that, while built to directly work with SharePoint, are separate systems. They are less affected by Microsoft’s changes, but also less able to take advantage of new SharePoint features.

Examples: Hoozin | Unily | Attollo | Elastic

Frameworks

Frameworks offer building-blocks for the vendor / agency to build your intranet on to SharePoint. They’re great if you need lots of flexibility, but may take longer to plan and build.

Examples: Akumina | MatchPoint | Rise | Powell 365 | Valo | LiveTiles

Ready-to-run

Ready-to-run products are installed ‘as is’ and with a few weeks of building, transform SharePoint into a fully-featured intranet. Such in-a-box products are frequently updated, and kept in line with Microsoft’s roadmap, but there are stricter limits on the use of custom code.

Examples: Hubfly | EasyShare | Attollo | Bonzai | Valo | Involv | Omnia | Beezy

Our research and assessments

We’ve set these categories, and some products products will straddle more than one, and some vendors might want to debate our defitions. But these categories are helpful in setting development expectations.

We’ve expertly evaluated 33 intranet products for SharePoint, so if you want to know which meet your needs and their particular strengths, download our report from clearbox.co.uk

It will potentially save you weeks of research time and help you feel confident you’re making the right choice.