Editorial
The intranet industry is always changing. Microsoft, the giant in the room, often leaves vendors scrambling to integrate, complement or replicate the newest features it offers. Microsoft also frequently removes and reimagines features that have previously been heavily promoted — such as the recent retirement of Viva Topics – which forces vendors to consider whether they should also retire any associated features, or keep going with their own version.
Then there are broader digital developments, such as the explosion of AI, nibbling at the edges of the industry. Some vendors choose to adopt these developments and work to introduce solutions in their platform, while others wait to see what the world of work gets hooked on before making significant strategic decisions.
I’ve noticed five trends among the best intranet products, which are now starting to drive employee experience across the whole industry.
1. Embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Intranet and other digital workplace technology vendors worked incredibly quickly throughout 2023 to introduce AI features to their products. These are largely effective tools that fall into four categories:
1. Generative AI: Over half of the products we’ve reviewed now have generative AI features for written content. A few of the features stood out as particularly innovative. Oak Engage has an inbuilt policy template that is applied when a publisher wishes to create a new policy page. The AI then completes the template, generating a draft policy for review and editing. This is a helpful approach, although the template might feel either too restrictive or comprehensive for some.
2. Search and information finding: AI-generated “likely answers,” improvements with search result accuracy, chatbot / digital assistant interfaces and AI-driven search analytics are among the most frequent features. However, very few products have introduced AI into search; surprising, given how often “search” appears high on the list of improvements employees wish to see. AI could make real improvements for both end users and admins.
3. AI Support for Admins: For intranet managers, there’s great potential for automating routine tasks. For example, Copilot in SharePoint will soon be able to generate a SharePoint site from a prompt such as “Create an employee onboarding site featuring our company logo and using the Welcome to Contoso.pptx file.” It’s like the ‘Designer’ feature in PowerPoint. Just like fine-tuning AI generated text, additional prompts can be used to adjust the layout, branding and so on.
There’s also real scope for AI to assist with analytics and governance. Admin experiences are often considered secondarily to front-end users, yet this is where the real difference could be made where AI features do this right.
4. General UX enhancements: The final area is a catch-all for other AI features that still help improve overall user experience, such as auto translation and audience targeting. As another example, MangoApps can render an audio version of a page without the need to record. This is a great accessibility feature and a pseudo-podcast feature that will allow anyone to keep up with news without having to read.
2. Internal Communications as a Focus
These platforms have evolved, with many vendors have focused on internal communications teams as core product owners or stakeholders. While internal comms has been important for a long time, these platforms are now addressing internal comms needs and challenges head-on.
AI has emerged to support internal comms and some do this particularly well. For example, Sociabble has among the most advanced generative AI tools we’ve seen, where company and an individual’s context are applied by the AI to whatever it generates. This is still a fast-evolving area and we’re looking forward to seeing how it develops.
Another area that stands out is news flow management, such as through a calendar, Kanban board or something similar. It’s hit-and-miss, with a lot of products still relying on simple publication dates. Finally, there are inconsistencies around multi-channel approaches across these products. Internal comms folk will likely have to manage multiple comms channels and having a tool that will allow them to create once then share in many places is incredibly valuable. I expect to see a good range of additional channels, but it’s not unusual for platforms to only work with one or two. While all of this has improved over recent years, there is still room to grow and for these platforms to even greater support internal communicators.
3. Analytics Have Improved
Enhancements in analytics over the past year or so have allowed a good number of vendors to introduce a greater range and depth of reporting. There have always been vendors with strong reporting (such as Staffbase and Firstup), but more of them are approaching analytics by thinking “what improvements can be made using this data” rather than simply presenting lots of numbers.
However, this remains the area that would most benefit from improvements across the industry. I’ve been talking about it for years and vendors are listening, but it’s a slow-paced change. For one, AI in analytics would be a welcome addition. For example, with Viva Engage storylines, leaders can see a summary of popular and trending themes in employees’ posts. I’ve not seen much evidence of vendors exploring AI in analytics, but I think this would be a greater help for intranet managers than some AI features that have already appeared.
4. Engagement and People-Focused Features Are Strong
I’ve been impressed by the engagement and people-focused features that vendors have introduced over recent years. Historically, intranets offered a place for people to collaborate, but this has now largely moved to other tools like Teams. Social tools have also been around for a long time, evolving as consumer-facing social media sites have. It’s in the other engagement and people-focussed tools where platforms are really standing out.
For example, Unily has an “employee journeys” feature where information is presented to people based on a trigger date and associated workflow. This could be an onboarding date, or even a parental leave date, and provides a personalized experience while removing admin burdens from HR, comms, etc. Workvivo presents company values, allowing communicators and employees to tag posts with appropriate values like “going the extra mile”.
Peer-to-peer recognition features, events management, company awards management, live streaming and more are now more frequently built into these platforms. For those organizations with multiple tools offering these services, these platforms offer an opportunity to successfully consolidate.
5. Product Categories Are More Defined
The products we’ve reviewed have started to fall into four categories: social sites, communications platforms, modern intranets and mobile-first products.
Social sites and communication platforms typically focus on community content and/or internal communication needs. There’s often a parity of experience across device types because products take an overall simpler approach to features. An example here is ahead, where features particularly suit a mobile environment, so the experience is strong.
Modern intranets typically serve the needs of a classic intranet : document/policy storage and presentation, top-down communications, enterprise search, engagement tools and a variety of other features that vary between products. Many of these products lift and shift their platform into an app environment, which can be overly comprehensive for frontline or other mobile users. Some allow admins to control what mobile audiences see and simplify the experience. Interact is an example here, where admins have a great deal of control over both desktop and mobile environments.
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Some of these products are then reliant on SharePoint, Google, or something else, or are “independent” and operate without other software in the background. Understanding these categories and what approach is right for your organization will help you choose the right solution.
What This Means for You
Many of these technology trends are also being echoed by clients, showing that vendor roadmaps are being influenced by real needs as well as by technological advances. When you next review your intranet strategy, take the opportunity to identify new business and employee requirements to see whether these new capabilities will help your organization.
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