Selecting an Intranet Platform

In today’s intranet solution landscape, there are many product options with rich and diverse features. It is important to keep intranet plans in line with company strategy. Before evaluating a vendor or a product, consider the following points and determine what is important or critical for your overall intranet strategy.

Open Platform

Every product has an ‘extensibility’ story to tell. There is not one intranet product on the market that addresses every single need for every organization. There needs to be a way to engage your IT department to build and extend the chosen intranet platform to meet company needs. Consider which product best complements your internal resources skill set. Ultimately, your organization should own the direction and evolution of a product. If you lack the internal skills to extend the product, it can become quite costly extending beyond the KPIL system.

Roadmap

The intranet market is quite interesting. You would be surprised how many products do not have a clear roadmap or one at all. There is a lot that contributes to the lack of an effective roadmap. When looking into a product, make sure to explore not only what is on the future roadmap but also how the product has evolved in the last six months. If it’s a closed platform, you should see rich features being developed and released. If it is an open platform, you should not only see new features but also technology alignment based on how those features evolve. An exceptional technology alignment usually means more efficiency, better performance, sophisticated management and development standards that will benefit your organization overall.

Reversibility

Similar to extensibility every product addresses reversibility, some much better than others. If your organization decides to discontinue an intranet service or product, what happens to your content, extensions, or skilled resources?

Technical Updates

Roadmaps will tell you how a product is evolving. Updates will show you the costs associated to deliver updates. SaaS solutions like KPIL offer a very simple upgrade strategy that is next to instant. This kind of strategy removes any complex processes and the need for technical / operational outages to install updates.

It is critical for all organizations to review and understand how these different points impact their company strategy. Careful consideration will better align your organization strategy with key technologies and the best intranet provider for your project. Once you have an aligned strategy, you will be able to focus on use cases, features and functionality to identify providers that are a good fit but more importantly align with your strategy.

We do this for you, our customer, because we care about your business’ success as much as ours.