Why employee intranets are more essential than ever

Intranets may not seem like cutting edge technology, but they’ve been at the forefront of business IT for decades. Today, countless businesses use an makeshift intranet, built out of SaaS collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. But as new tools are adopted in the interests of helping users interact with one another, little attention is paid to the integrations that lie between different systems, meaning users need to constantly duplicate effort or risk losing track of important information. 

While existing intranet solutions can solve that challenge, they’re far from perfect – many have failed to keep pace with the rapid technological innovation which has defined the last few years – between multiple clouds, countless SaaS applications, and new AI deployments, these solutions quickly reach their limitations and fail to deliver the unified experience that your users need. So, what’s the best route forward? 

The collaboration conundrum

The rise of SaaS collaboration tools promised to revolutionise how we work, and, in many ways, they delivered. Users now benefit from real-time collaboration and intuitive file sharing, which helps to increase productivity across the board, but especially for remote and hybrid workers. 

But while these platforms provide significant benefits, they come at a cost – different tools are built for their own specific purposes, whether that’s file sharing, real-time collaboration, or asynchronous communication. While some solutions supposedly offer all three, usually at least one of these functions gets the short end of the stick, requiring new tools to be adopted. This leads to sprawling IT environments with multiple similar tools in place, which confuse or frustrate users and risk data being lost between siloes.  

This undermines collaboration and also poses a significant security threat – if you can’t be certain of where data is held, it’s near impossible to secure it. As such, constructing a central employee intranet helps keep your users productive and your data secure, while acting as a single source of truth – which is where Fresh Intranet comes in. 

Seamless, modern intranets

We’ve touched upon Fresh Intranet before – it’s a powerful solution developed by the Advania team that helps to combine the flexibility of modern collaboration tools with the simplicity of old-school employee intranets. In short, it delivers the simple, unified source of information that your users need in fast-moving IT environments. 

Built specifically for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Fresh Intranet doesn’t just integrate with your existing tools – it enhances them. It acts as the go-between for key Microsoft apps – connecting your Teams channels, SharePoint sites, and other M365 software together into a single unified system. This breaks down data siloes – important information no longer gets lost because it was put in a Teams chat that’s since been deleted, and users can easily stay in the loop through centralised dashboards. 

But it doesn’t end there – while innovations in SaaS have redefined collaboration, the nature of modern work has been reshaped by AI. Fresh captures this benefit too, with a built-in AI assistant, FreshMind. Since Fresh integrates apps across your IT environment, FreshMind becomes a one-stop-shop for all the information a user may need, acting as an intranet search tool that can surface documents in a flash, or point queries in the direction of internal experts who can help. 

Meanwhile, data is kept secure and easily manageable, all inside your Microsoft tenant, benefitting from Microsoft’s security without increasing your attack surface. FreshMind is also built to avoid any concerns around the AI surfacing confidential information, with configuration settings which limit what the AI can surface to users. 

Beyond basic integration

No two employees work the same way – they have different preferred workstyles, priorities, and responsibilities – and the tools they use should reflect that. Fresh offers an unparalleled level of user customisability, allowing everyone to build a dashboard that works for them, and highlights the information they need to see with targeted content streams. Plus, if you’re expanding your Microsoft estate – whether with new SharePoint sites, or by adopting apps like Viva Engage, these can be easily plugged into the intranet, ensuring it always keeps pace with the rest of the business. 

While building and deploying an intranet from scratch is often cost prohibitive, Fresh takes steps in the other direction through Fresh Connect – collections of pre-set templates and modules which allow you to quickly establish a tailored intranet at rapid speed, with an off-the-shelf approach. These pre-built components don’t hamper your ability to tailor your environment later on down the line, making them ideal for setting up a solution in a fraction of the time. 

As part of the Advania group, we’re uniquely positioned to help you deploy Fresh Intranet and build a fully integrated single source of truth for your users. If you’re interested in finding out more, or seeing how Fresh Intranet could work for your organisation, get in touch with us today to book a demo.