Questions to ask your intranet vendor

If your organization has decided that an intranet is one of the best tools for increasing employee engagement, connecting your people, and improving internal communication, I have some good news and some bad news for you.

First, the good news. You’re right! A modern intranet has a positive effect on engagement, communication, and culture. And now the bad news: finding the right intranet might take some work...

If you’re a regular reader of this blog—or just beginning your research—you know by now that choosing the right intranet can be extremely overwhelming. There are so many different vendors out there, each offering different product features, pricing, design, customizability, and information architecture—any of which may or may not be aligned with your organization’s needs.

We’ve written before about the purpose of an intranet, and how the role it’ll play in your organization really depends on your specific use case. For example, are you looking to build a stronger company culture? Do you want a place to store documents? Do you want a more active communications tool? Although some intranets can fulfill multiple organizational needs at once, many are geared towards only one or two particular use cases.

Even if you know what exactly you’re looking for, attempting to sift through the noise is going to be a monotonous, even painful, process—especially without any guidance.

So we’ve created a resource page for you to help make things a little bit easier. This resource provides a list of questions to ask intranet vendors, and covers a wide variety of product and feature-related topics which are essential for deciding whether an intranet’s features are the right fit for your organization.

This list of questions is derived from actual questions people have asked our Sales team, and covers the following topics:

• Adoption and participation rates
• Targeting content and other information to the right people
• Ensuring must-see content is read
• Mobile capabilities
• Notifications and associated noise
• File sharing and storage
• Secure sharing of employee data
• Branding
• Configuration and onboarding
• Updates, improvements, maintenance, and uptime

They’re questions that we think are really important for differentiating one intranet from another. Hopefully, you’ll take this list and be able to make a more informed decision on which intranet features and functions are a good match for your org. Good luck!

Wondering what you should be asking your intranet vendor?