07 Dec
Top 10 SharePoint Intranets For Enterprises
In a market brimming with different types of collaboration and communication solutions, Office 365 SharePoint Intranets are widely adopted by both medium and large enterprises.
Modern SharePoint Intranets bring together different digital workplace activities and tools under the same digital roof. Such collaborative synergy ensures information consistency and uniform knowledge distribution under a centralized communication platform.
With dozens of vendors offering SharePoint Intranet solutions, partnering with the one who not only understands your business needs but is well-acquainted with Microsoft and SharePoint technologies is critical to your digital workplace transformation.
To make your life easier, below, we present you with a list of the popular SharePoint Intranet solutions available in the market, along with a description of their features, pros, and cons to help you make an informed purchase decision.
A Glance at the Top 10 SharePoint Intranets for Enterprises
1. Powell 365
Powell 365 intranet by Powell Software is a framework-based SharePoint solution that offers building blocks to build your intranet. You can customize your intranet without using any code. The solution provides good multilingual capabilities with support for 60+ languages out-of-the-box. Moreover, it offers a multi-device experience with a responsive and intuitive mobile design.
Powell 365 can be deployed in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Optimization of the Microsoft Teams experience is another exciting feature. Pricing starts at $1.00 per month, per user.
However, just like any other framework-based intranet, this solution might take time to plan and build.
2. ElevatePoint
The ElevatePoint intranet by ElevatePoint provides 250+ drag and drop templates for publishing intranet content. The solution can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise. It uses calendar views to unite shared calendars of HR, IT, community events, and so on. Social media capabilities like RSS feeds and discussion forums are included in the intranet.
Additionally, the autocomplete search feature allows users to find content quickly and easily. Depending on your organization’s size and service needs, the vendor provides custom price quotes, starting at $2 per month, per user.
3. Bonzai
Bonzai is a SharePoint intranet solution developed by Dynamic Owl, an Office 365 consulting company. Design governance, predictive navigation, and global search are the key features of this solution.
Smart connectors, built-in administration tools, intuitive UI are some additional capabilities to consider.
Bonzai uses targeted notifications, two-way communication, and comprehensive content analytics to make company-wide communication effective. Its mobile-responsive design allows employees to work from anywhere.
Pricing for this intranet solution is on a per-user basis, including setup, onboarding, and training fees.
Bonzai is a ready-to-use product for SharePoint. Consequently, customization can be difficult.
4. Mesh
Acuvate Software’s Mesh intranet is the World’s best Employee Experience Platform. It is built with the motto of ‘Delivering The Right Content At The Right Time To The Right Person.’
Built by a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Mesh is one of the very few solutions that bring the best of Microsoft Azure technologies into the SharePoint intranet ecosystem. It provides a host of AI features, including Azure cognitive enterprise search, content personalizers powered by LUIS and Azure ML, knowledge mining, flexible integrations with back end systems, multilingual systems, and chatbots.
Mesh is built for medium and large organizations looking to reduce the time to find information, improve knowledge worker productivity, and leverage modern collaboration and communication tools. As a result, it may not be ideal for startups and small scale implementations.
The tool provides cognitive multimedia search capabilities and delivers search results across textual, images and video content, spread across all your business applications.
Mesh is a ready-to-use solution for SharePoint. Additionally, it’s flexible architecture is designed to accommodate any customizations.It is also available as Microsoft Teams App and Mobile Application.
5. Valo
Valo intranet by Blue Meteorite is another ready-to-use SharePoint solution. The product can be deployed within one to four weeks and supports both cloud and on-premise deployment. Targeted news publishing, intuitive page templates, localization options, and event hub are some core features of Valo.
The vendor offers a 5-tiered pricing model and gives the flexibility to pick the features you need.
Valo Intranet can be fitted to your corporate brand without coding. It allows a responsive user experience in mobile browsers and the Valo Intranet mobile app, which is available for both iOS and Android.
Again, since it’s a ready-to-use product, you may be limited by the usage of custom code.
6. Unily
Unily is another popular SharePoint intranet with a cloud-first focus. The solution provides powerful UX, mobile support, and flexible integrations with popular business apps.
Its out-of-the-box feature set includes multilingual communications, email broadcasts, forms and workflows, collaboration sites, and real-time notifications.
The pricing starts from $4995 per month and scales based on the number of active users you have.
Since it’s a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) offering, it can be prone to bugs, and content management could be glitchy.
7. Akumina
Akumina SharePoint Intranet by Akumina, a Microsoft partner, helps build and deploy branded employee workplace experiences.
The intranet’s persona-driven, audience-targeting engine delivers relevant, personalized, and contextual content to the users.
Akumina’s global search functionality lets you find information across all applications in your enterprise. Collaboration tools like project management, task management, and discussion boards are included in the intranet.
It is a cloud-based offering that is available on any device in your preferred language. Pricing is available on request from the vendor.
8. Core
Core’s Beezy-powered SharePoint intranet lets your teams collaborate and communicate with out-of-the-box functionality that includes capabilities like news feed, calendar management, discussion forums, blogs, content management, and search.
The Intranet can be easily branded to reflect your company’s logo.
The in-built knowledge center leverages SharePoint’s native Managed Metadata System to classify content with easy-to-use tagging mechanisms.
The embedded Smart AI bots enable users to self-service routine tasks. API allows for integration with other Microsoft products, such as Teams, Office 365, etc., and also third-party applications.
Moreover, the solution is platform-independent and works on any device. You can contact the company directly to know about the pricing packages.
The vendor works with local third-party SharePoint houses for branding customization, so make sure you are comfortable with the local partner. Moreover, some users feel that the search functionality provides sub-optimal utility.
9. OneSource
Developed by MicroFocus, OneSource Accelerator for SharePoint is a Content Management System delivered as-a-service that allows you to create content-rich intranet quickly, sometimes even in a matter of weeks.
Easy-to-use drag and drop interface, full corporate brand compliance, and components like polls, tabs, news feeds, and galleries are some of the features to look out for.
Complementary web analytics and fast-load times on high-latency networks are some of the other interesting capabilities.
Employees can access the Intranet on any device, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop.
As with any other SaaS offering, this solution is also prone to bugs and glitches.
10. Involv
Involv SharePoint intranet, developed by a company of the same name, comes with built-in templates to allow users to create and share content easily.
With numerous checklists, best practices, and possibilities for customization, configuration of your intranet solution is done in a matter of a few days.
Integration with existing Office 365 applications, engagement analytics, and a fully-brandable mobile interface are some of the features of this solution.
The vendor has a 4-tiered pricing structure that depends on the number of users in your organization, with an option to go for a one-time payment or a monthly subscription.
Choosing the right SharePoint intranet
A modern SharePoint intranet acts as the core of the digital workplace and brings all your business applications under one common interface. It facilitates a unified technological platform that is future proof, scalable and can address the different needs of a modern workforce.
However, just having an intranet does not guarantee the success of your workplace transformation endeavors.
There are a ton of things to keep in mind when you’re choosing an intranet solution and vendor, including –
- Intranet features
- Technical capabilities
- Vendor’s reputation
- Business requirements
- Cost and so on.
For further insights, you may also consider reading research reports from industry experts including Gartner’s Market Guide for Intranet Packaged Solutions. This guide helps application leaders gain a closer look at 20 vendor solutions including Acuvate’s Mesh.
And as you delve deeper into the exciting world of SharePoint Intranets, don’t forget to consider our SharePoint Intranet solution Mesh, which has the capability to revamp knowledge management, communication, and collaboration in your organization. Some key features of Mesh include:
- Azure cognitive enterprise search
- AI-driven content personalizers
- Knowledge mining
- Expertise finder
- Multilingual capabilities
- Internal communication tools
- Collaboration tools
If you’d like to learn more about Mesh, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI and digital workplace consultants for a personalized demo.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug