Integrations and services in intranets and EXPs 

In our latest Intranets and Employee Experience Platforms report we evaluated leading digital products against eight scenarios. The fourth of these real-world business scenarios is ‘integrations and services’ which includes M365 applications. 

What we explored 

Digital workplaces are often a fragmented set of tools, so we wanted to see how the products helped simplify an employee’s experience. For example, integrations with systems to reduce the number of sites, apps, or platforms someone must visit, which could be through links, iframes, or fuller integrations, and where an ‘external’ activity is brought through into the intranet. Additionally, the Microsoft suite is pervasive, and many companies want their intranet to work well alongside their M365 investment, even if they have chosen not to use SharePoint as a publishing platform. This scenario explores: 

• How integrations with common enterprise systems, such as Salesforce, Workday, or Zendesk, were presented on the intranet. 
• How the products supported sources such as SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox and Box as cloud file sources to collaborate and share. 
• What kinds of content could be integrated into the intranet product from SharePoint.  
• How an integration worked with MS Teams, covering notifications, conversations, documents, and calls.  
• How far Viva applications have been integrated, particularly Viva Engage and Viva Connections. 

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 

We’re often told by vendors that this is a scenario where requirements can vary greatly from client to client. While we agree, we want to reflect how flexible or not products are when it comes to addressing these requirements. The average score here is 2.6 out of 5, which is low due to the prevalence of ‘optional scores’ that reflect the additional time and / or cost effort required here for organisations to achieve what they desire. 

The majority of products we’ve reviewed include open APIs for integrations, with some vendors providing pre-built integrations and others leaving it entirely open to clients to request (then build or work with the vendor to build). For example, Involv has developed an integration with CV Warehouse, a jobsite platform, which displays vacancies on the intranet. Some vendors offer developer portals or other support for admins to set up integrations from a suite of options. Some products make good use of Power Automate too, such as Appspace Intranet that displays the output as Adaptive Cards. 

As you may expect, SharePoint intranet-in-a-box products typically integrate very well with M365 applications. As an example, Atlas builds onto standard Microsoft functionality to expand what’s on offer – such as Viva Topics that is integrated into Atlas web parts, where Viva Topic cards show for related metadata rather than the default behaviour of only appearing over a mentioned keyword.  

Across all products we generally saw good integrations with Teams, but integrations with other M365 applications varied in quality between products. Surprisingly, SharePoint integrations were missing or very basic in some products – given its strengths as a document management solution, we feel the quality of integrations here should be improved. 

Overall, vendors tend to take a variety of approaches when it comes to integrations. As a result, this is an area where we’d urge you to identify exactly what your expectations are of the platform (do you want two-way integrations with key business systems for example) and of the vendor (do you want them to support with integration development?). 

How SharePoint and Viva fared in this scenario 

Integration between M365 applications is generally strong, but there are areas where SharePoint and Teams aren’t integrated as tightly as you might expect. Multiple vendors have connectors that will work with the Viva Connections dashboard feature, and this offers the most direct integration with SharePoint. A second route is to use Power Apps, which can be embedded on a SharePoint page and made to work well on mobile too. The third possibility is the Teams app store. Finally, there is the full-development route using APIs and SharePoint Framework (SPFx). These approaches offer simple or sophisticated integration options, and vary in terms of complexity to implement, so the support of IT or a technical partner will be needed. 

Scores 

Overall, this is how the products scored in this scenario (but please see the report for more detail on what the + means):