Intranets – private web-based networks for employee use – have been around since the 1990s, but as happens with so many technologies, they have been transformed in both purpose and appearance over the last quarter-century.

Today, with the COVID-19 virus forcing many employees to work from home, there are new requirements for today’s next-generation intranets.

We spoke to seven modern intranet platform providers and found that the notion of intranet itself has been transformed. Part portal, part communications app, part collaboration tool – today’s intranets check a wide variety of boxes for organizations of various sizes in the COVID-19 era.

Not your parent’s intranet

Early intranets were essentially web-based portals that linked to corporate information and document sources. As technology improved, they linked to employee-facing applications as well.

However, this first generation of intranet largely failed, as employees rarely visited them. Even when they did surf the intranet, they didn’t stay for long, as the point of a portal was to find one’s way quickly somewhere else.

To make matters worse, developers had to custom-build such intranets, an expensive proposition that limited the ability for organizations to update the content and functions of their intranets in a lightweight, cost-effective manner.

All modern intranet platforms address these challenges of early intranets in one way or another. MyHub, for example, focuses on simplicity by offering an intranet platform that nontechnical people can set up and use. The software focuses on information sharing and engagement as many intranet platforms do, but MyHub’s simplicity expands its reach and usability.

At the opposite extreme from MyHub is LumApps. The LumApps intranet is an employee communication platform that LumApps’ customers, or the consultants they hire, can fully customize. Many of them bring a fully consumerized brand experience to their intranets, taking full advantage of the depth of customizability in the platform.

Employee communication across the organization

LumApps is also an example of an intranet platform centered on employee communication – not just in departments or for teams, but across an entire organization. Think social media – only for employees communicating about work-related matters.

LumApps, in fact, continues this social media aspect beyond the walls of the organization, helping employees leverage social media to advocate for their organizations.

Another company focusing its intranet platform on employee communication is Vialect. Its Noodle platform facilitates employee-to-employee interactions via instant messaging, for example, as well as providing knowledge and document management and search capabilities.

This jack-of-all-trades intranet can also run either in the cloud or on-premises (most of the other offerings are cloud-only). The on-premises option is particularly useful for heavily regulated industries.

Jostle also centers its intranet platform on communication-based alignment across departments. Jostle’s primary differentiator is its central organization via curated “views” rather than pages.

It organizes all employee information into seven of these views, including events, news, discussions, people, library, teams, and listings. The idea is to create a “virtual water cooler” that brings together employees as they spend time on these views.

Build community via enterprise apps

In Noodle’s and Jostle’s case, knowledge and document management support its primary goal of fostering employee communication. In other cases, accessing document stores such as Microsoft SharePoint or other enterprise apps is the central function of the platform.

The intranet platform from Adenin, for example, leverages an artificial intelligence-driven digital assistant to provide an all-encompassing digital workplace experience across multiple enterprise apps.

Adenin’s central visual metaphor is the “card,” which works much like portlets did in first-generation intranets. Cards can be prebuilt, configured from templates or custom-built to access third-party APIs.

Adenin’s goal with this application support is to reduce “application hopping,” where employees need to run several apps at once to get their jobs done. With Adenin, cards serve the same purpose, consolidating employees into the same collaborative interface.

Tribe also provides centralized access to enterprise apps, and in fact considers itself to be more of an integration hub than a portal. Where Tribe differs from the other intranet providers is its support for external, customer-facing communities as well as internal, employee-facing ones.

Tribe offers gamification for both types of communities, while its communication hub and integration capabilities focus more on its internal intranet uses.

Remote teams for COVID-19 and beyond

The seventh company on our list is Blink. Blink’s claim to fame is its support for remote workers – those employees who rarely if ever sit at a desk.

Two of Blink’s most important constituencies are bus drivers and healthcare workers. Because of these employees’ remote work conditions, they can tend to feel isolated from other employees as well as their company, leading to poor job satisfaction.

Blink provides access to corporate apps and information primarily via a mobile app, although a web-based interface more suitable for a computer is also available. Such workers rarely need a Microsoft 365 account, which means they often have no company email address – so Blink provides single sign-on access to such employees via a personal email.

Employers have the advantage of being able to remotely wipe the mobile app if a phone is lost or stolen or an employee leaves the company. But the biggest win is the reduced turnover that Blink encourages by shifting such organizations to a more employee-centric culture.

It’s no coincidence, furthermore, that bus drivers and healthcare workers are essential personnel during the COVID-19 era, putting their lives on the line to serve their communities. Blink is predictably experiencing increased demand from organizations that support such remote, essential workforces.

The other providers in this article are also experiencing unusual shifts in demand because of the coronavirus. Existing customers are adding advanced features and optional modules to support expanded work-from-home processes.

Others are reporting customers in adversely impacted industries such as travel and hospitality putting their subscriptions on hold, while industries that are able to operate in WFH mode are adding users to their subscriptions.

For the employees that the pandemic has affected – which is essentially everyone – the communication capabilities in today’s intranets are a godsend. WFH can be an isolating experience, so any tool that reduces isolation and fosters community is a positive force in today’s troubled work environment.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of the analyst firm Intellyx, which advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps suppliers communicate their agility stories. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.

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