SharePoint along with other intranet options, are a great resource for businesses. They allow you to keep all your information in one place. From HR information to sales reports and general communications.
Intranet dashboard vs SharePoint is an important decision for businesses to make. Microsoft SharePoint has been on the market in various iterations for 20 years and is one of the most widely used intranet platforms in the world. Is it the best choice for today’s remote, mobile-first, employee- focused digital workplace. SharePoint is fully customisable. You can use it simply as a file storage solution or the central hub for all your business communication.
Microsoft SharePoint is used by over 190 million people from 200,000 different customer companies. It has also evolved into a powerful web-based collaborative tool that is part of the Microsoft 365 suite. However, a SharePoint online intranet is not always the perfect solution. Particularly in terms of how you can customise the platform for your business. As a result, there are several other intranets that you should be aware of.
What is a SharePoint intranet?
An intranet is a virtual area designed to help businesses manage their internal communications and operations. Intranets can help a company achieve a variety of objectives.
For starters, it can make it easier for employees to access critical data such as documents, templates, forms, and more. Allow employees to interact with, communicate with, and collaborate with one another. Furthermore, it promotes a positive workplace culture and serves to motivate employees through public recognition.
Using an intranet also allows for top-down communication from management to employees, as well as feedback from employees to upper management. Intranets were once built by specialised IT support who developed one-of-a-kind solutions for each enterprise. As a result, intranets were only used by the largest corporations.
When Microsoft introduced Sharepoint in the early 2000s, it was one of the first attempts to provide an “intranet-in-a-box.” It was designed to make intranet development accessible to those without advanced IT capabilities. By today’s standards, it was a vast improvement over what came before it, but it still required “Sharepoint specialists” like Amnu to set it up and keep it running.
Is SharePoint still the best intranet option?
SharePoint started early trends, but it came before the software-as-a-service revolution. This fundamentally changed how software was perceived and ultimately gave the end user control over their IT solution. Today’s alternatives to SharePoint can make it appear overly complex and intimidating without assistance and expert training from a team like Amnu.
For many years, Microsoft has been working on developing an online version of Sharepoint that meets the standards of modern solutions in an effort to shed its legacy. However, traces of its non- cloud ancestors can still be found. It is still obscured by technical jargon. Sharepoint consultants, certificates, and specialists are still full-fledged industries.
Cloud intranet dashboards vs SharePoint
HyperOffice is an example of a well-known cloud-based intranet platform. Implementing HyperOffice takes less time than Sharepoint, which can take several months. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of online apps can create a fully customised intranet page by simply dragging and dropping pieces. WordPress is another popular intranet portal.
Benefits of SharePoint intranet
SharePoint has a host of benefits that other intranet platforms do not provide. If you run Microsoft 365, you will be able to integrate all your other Office applications. You can create links from SharePoint folders to your OneDrive folders for easy access to files you regularly use. With Power automate you can create flows to automate once time consuming manual processes and you use a single sign-in so there aren’t lots of different account details and passwords to remember.
SharePoint promotes collaborative work. You can link to folders and files in Teams, and it allows multiple users to have the same document open at the same time so that you can work on something at the same time from different locations.
SharePoint is available as an online platform or hosted on- premises. The hosted, offline version is self-hosted by your company. Backups and updates will need to be maintained by in-house IT support within your local environment, whereas with the cloud version of SharePoint, Microsoft deal with all this for you. With the offline version of SharePoint, you will also need to be accountable for your data security.
There are different costs associated with both versions of SharePoint. The online version of SharePoint is included in your monthly Microsoft 365 licence plans, whereas SharePoint on-premise will require hardware and hardware maintenance as well as the cost of licences.
SharePoint online has the advantage of automatically receiving Microsoft updates and new feature roll outs. With an offline version, your IT department will need to install updates as and when required.
Advantages of using WordPress intranet
A WordPress intranet has several advantages. Because it is built in the same code, an intranet developed in WordPress can be fully maintained by a web development agency instead of requiring a Sharepoint developer specialist like Amnu. Because WordPress was designed with developers in mind, adding and updating features is simple. Integrations are easier to add than in Sharepoint. This would be much less expensive to host than Sharepoint’s specialised hosting infrastructure and would be comparable to running a regular website.
Of course, there are drawbacks to using a WordPress version. To access this intranet, users will need their own account, which cannot be linked to their Microsoft or Office 365 account. File collaboration will not be possible here, as it is with Sharepoint. WordPress will only allow a user to view and read a file. Although security will remain high, this may be seen as a disadvantage when compared to Microsoft’s closed-off approach. Other than WordPress, there are other options for internal intranets, and some will work better for your company than others. Each platform has advantages and disadvantages.
Expert guidance from Amnu
If you’re trying to decide which intranet platform is best for your company, one of our skilled team will be able to go over all of your requirements with you and help compare other intranet dashboards vs SharePoint and which will be the best option for you.