Should your next intranet be on SharePoint 2013?

The launch of SharePoint 2013 at the start of this year marked the ten-year evolution of Microsoft’s intranet and collaboration platform. In this time it has grown from a fairly simple document-centric tool to cover a range of uses:

• as an intranet for published information, both corporate-wide and for business units
• as a portal to glue together other systems such as employee services
• for team and project collaboration
• for storing and disseminating documents
• as a means of connecting employees through profiles and social media.

DWG’s latest report, “The SharePoint 2013 Intranet: An evaluation of SharePoint 2013 as a platform for enterprise intranets”, takes a critical look at what has changed – and what is still missing. The report is intended as a brief for decision-makers, with an emphasis on counterbalancing a technology-driven perspective on SharePoint with a look at likely business drivers, risks and implementation demands.

[cta]Download executive summary: The SharePoint 2013 Intranet[/cta]

The main changes

Although there are many technical improvements, the ones that intranet managers and users are most likely to notice are:

On top of this, Microsoft is also strongly promoting a cloud-based approach. Companies opting for SharePoint 2013 through the Office 365 offering will benefit from more frequent updates and better integration with Yammer. The price, however, is that one of the most powerful new features, search-driven publishing, is not supported. This makes it harder to do things like internal news syndication, “most popular stories” and an internal You Tube style experience.

Shortcomings

Although the improvements above are welcome, there are areas in which SharePoint still trails rival offerings.

• There is some support for mobile devices, but most organizations will have to start from basic building blocks to develop a satisfactory experience, or hope that Microsoft will release further apps for the main mobile platforms.
• The “newsfeed” social experience does not pick up on all activities within SharePoint, so it is a less complete dashboard of what is happening than it first appears. Microsoft has indicated that this will be replaced by the Yammer service it acquired in 2012, but details of the full integration are sketchy and in the interim the social experience will be fragmented compared to rival platforms.
• The user experience is variable. Newer components are relatively well designed, but older features have barely been updated, leaving tools like blogs, wikis and surveys looking dated.

Deciding to upgrade

For some intranet managers, there will be no choice about upgrading – either the IT team or the cloud-hosts may decide it is a necessary step. For this scenario the report discusses some preparatory steps and the aspects of SharePoint 2013 that are over-and-above a typical upgrade plan.

For others on earlier versions of SharePoint or even other platforms, the business case will depend very much on how well SharePoint 2013 fits with your intranet or digital workplace strategy. In the report we look at three case studies of companies that are upgrading. For many it is the improved social experience that matters. For others, while they acknowledge that the current features may not be quite right, they are backing Microsoft because they believe in its future commitment to this area.

As with any intranet, the bottom line is that you need to be honest about what problems you want to fix: if the root cause isn’t the technology, then the solution isn’t technology either.

[cta]Download executive summary: The SharePoint 2013 Intranet[/cta]

Categorised in: Intranets, Research reports