What are potential candidates for an out of the box Intranet solutions based on SPOL

[Eric Deferm]

Our company has built a bespoke global enterprise intranet to manage our communication and collaboration.

Unfortunately, we are experiencing (too) many issues, limitations and challenges with the structure we put in place resulting in a low adoption rate, and are looking to develop an enhancement project to close the gaps, improve the UX, add more content and organise that content in a better way and stick closer to the MS roadmap (where our current implementation is lacking the flexibility to adopt new features (Office Groups, Teams) in an easy way).

We're evaluating several products (Portal Solutions (One Window Workplace), Brightstarr (Unily), Blue Rooster (Rise Foundation), RightPoint (Spark)), while looking for an Intranet as a Service.

Q1) What is your opinion on these Intranet as a Service providers. Do they offer a solid and future proof solution?Q2) Any customer experience with IaaS you can share?

Q3) Any recommendations on Intranet as a service product/vendors we should have a look at?

Q4) How do you feel the IaaS solution compares to Build it Yourself with a capable partner?

Q5) Any recommendations on (global) capable development partners based on your customers experience

[#2 · Accepted solution]

As a software development we built our own pattern for use with Office 365 based on the PnP and previous customer experience. The tricky part was finding a balance between delivering a solid information structure and user design with the flexibility for the customer to make changes and for us to do upgrades. We have also been looking at a few products on your list such as Unily and Attollo but haven't drawn any conclusions yet on if these have a better approach although they do have solid foundations found in common intranets.
I would say you need to do lots of due diligence including trying these in test tenants first. Consider how flexible they are for you to add apps, change page content and add new sub areas. How much of the design can be changed to suit your company brand with O365 pattern guidance. Upgrades and ability to use the latest O365 features would be paramount so you don't restrict your usage of O365 features.

[#3]

Check this whitepaper

http://www.clearbox.co.uk/sharepoint-intranet-in-a-box-products-compared/

[#4]

Hi Clause, tx for sharing this information, it's really helpful.