Though SharePoint is there for over a decade, only recently it got evolved as a full-blown Intranet tool. There are lot of vendors offering custom Intranet built on top of SharePoint blending them with business apps and offering an ‘Intranet in a box’ solutions. Microsoft’s has shifted its focus from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint online with its Office 365 integration.If you wonder what benefits SharePoint could offer, you could check this ultimate list of benefits.This has become a great motivation to the market trend where SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solutions are preferred over anything else.
SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box, what to look for?
In such a scenario, today we discuss the top 7 things to consider in a SharePoint ‘Intranet-in-a-box’ solution. Without much ado, let us get started.
News Publishing
Content Management & Collaboration in work is the key advantage of SharePoint. Publishing official broadcasts to all employees via email is not an effective means of communication anymore. Ideally, your SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solution should have options to publish news.Hubfly Digital Workplace solutions not only have that, but publishing department specific news is possible. For ex, you could push a IT related news or event only to the IT department and so on.
Custom Branding
This is another feature you should look for in a SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solution. If you don’t have options to customize the look and feel to match your company branding that is not going to align with your organization.Not just having a logo of your company in the dashboard, but we are talking about options to skin your dashboard to match your color branding too.
Mobile Friendly & Responsiveness
There are many SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solutions that claim to be mobile friendly and 100% responsive. But if you look close, the mobile responsiveness might be only for select features and pages.You should ensure that the Intranet is responsive and mobile-friendly for all sites & pages across the complete platform. Even better is to check if they have an exclusive mobile app. With a mobile app, you could literally carry your Intranet in your pocket.That will make a huge difference for people working remotely.
Line of Business Apps
SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solution as the name suggests means a list of add-in apps that could help leverage your employee’s productivity. Also, they have a unified experience everything within their Intranet dashboard, eliminating the need to login to multiple applications to perform each of their tasks.Hubfly Digital Workplace for example have a lot of useful line of business apps like, Asset Management, Timesheet Management , Leave Reaquest, Meeting Room Booking, Service Request, Workflow forms etc. You literally get all these apps packaged free of cost, if you opt for it. Likewise, there might other vendors too offering similar solutions
Support for Hybrid Deployments
Though Cloud implementations are gaining admiration, there is still a need for Hybrid deployments. For instance, consider if you have some confidential data and for compliance reasons that should be stored in your local servers then Hybrid implementation is the answer.You might already be running on Office 365, a service model that will ensure you automatic updates and lot other benefits. With Hybrid implementation, you don’t have to compromise anything. So, have a look for if the SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box solution supports Hybrid implementation.
Multilingual Solutions
Support for multilingual solutions is a requirement for all multinationals. So, check if the SharePoint Intranet-in-a-box offers support for the languages you require.Most vendors have a trick of running a machine translation as a quicker option. So, you should also ask them how they created their multi-lingual solution. Automatic or machine translation doesn’t look professional and may not suit for most languages.You should also be ensuring if the Intranet uses SharePoint variations to support multilingual options. It is not advisable to have SharePoint variations to enable multiple languages.
User-Friendliness of the Product?
This is the first thing you might have to look in. (although we have added it last here). See, the whole idea of moving to an Intranet-in-a-box solution is to have a better user experience and eliminate the need for SharePoint expertise for all your employees.You should ensure that the solution you have shortlisted is really easy to use even for non-techy employees.As we said, there are lots of vendors offering Intranet-in-a-box solutions. Hubfly Digital Workplace has everything in the list (of course, except the Multilingual option, which we are working on) and much more like intuitive AI bot based interaction that is set to take your workspace truly digital. Intranet as a Service is going to be the future and we request you to take the pointers discussed here and get yourself transformed with an Intranet solution sooner than later. If you are interested, you could try our FREE no-obligation trial here.