Should you build or buy your intranet? Off-the-shelf versus custom build
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Checkout our video of this webinar on Youtube: https://youtu.be/CfcpRcuBunY The digital workplace features high on the list of priorities for companies going through digital transformation. Many are re-assessing their intranet understanding that it can make a serious difference to their efforts in terms of social, collaboration, adoption and employee engagement. The intranet is often seen as the thing that ties the digital workplace together. It's the organisational operating system. What are the key points and questions to consider as you choose your intranet technology? In this structured walk-through of the arguments we'll help you decide. If you’ve got Office 365 as your digital workplace platform or if your company is running SharePoint on-premise a key consideration will be how to move forward with your intranet. In the last couple of years SharePoint off-the-shelf intranets have become more and more popular and many companies have jumped on board. However, custom build has not gone away - we still see lots of companies going down this route for a variety of reasons. In this webinar we answer the following questions: - What are the pros and cons of each approach? - What are the risks? - What are typical costs? - What about support and other ongoing costs? - A quick look at the off-the-shelf market - What are the typical functionalities offered by intranet-in-a-box products? - What to look for in an off-the-shelf product? - Is there a middle way? Can you build and buy? - What are the factors in your own business that may point to a specific solution? - What should small companies do? - What should large companies do? Checkout our video of this webinar on Youtube: https://youtu.be/CfcpRcuBunY
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Should you build or buy your intranet? Off-the-shelf versus custom build
- 1. © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
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- 4. © 2017 Content Formula Ltd SharePoint intranets in-a-box v2 https://www.clearbox.co.uk By Clear Box Consulting
- 5. What you will learn in this session You’ll be able to make an educated choice on the right type of intranet for you business What an off-the-shelf intranet is and what a custom built intranet is The pros and cons of each option © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
- 6. What do we mean by Off-the-shelf and Custom build? © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
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- 28. What factors do we need to consider? © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
- 29. © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Relevance Speed Cost Scope Access
- 30. Relevance © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf • 100% relevant to your business • Generic requirements are well catered for • Important to choose the product that most closely aligns with your business needs • May become less or more relevant over time as the business and product both change 3 2
- 31. Speed © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf • Takes a lot of time • Many phases to work through • 1-2 years for a large organisation • 3-6 months for a smaller organisation • Up and running very quickly • Still requires some planning • Training and content integration can take some time 1 3
- 32. Cost © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf • The broader your requirements, the more it will cost • £25k - £1m+ • Implementation costs might be similar to Off-the-shelf • Ongoing management and maintenance is expensive • Save some money on licence fees • Up front costs are far lower • Implementation costs on a par with custom builds • Maintenance of the application should be lower cost due to economies of scale • Monthly licence fee per user, or a perpetual licence 1 2
- 33. Scope © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf • Blank canvas with limitless possibilities • Delivering lots of features will eat up budget quickly • Need to build your own integrations with other systems • Mature products offer a wide range of features and integrations ‘out-of- the-box’ • Potential to add instant value in many areas of the business • New features released by the vendor over time as part of a road map 2 3
- 34. Access © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf • Providing access from any device and any location is possible but might require a lot of work • Infrastructure needs to support remote access • The user interface needs to be designed and coded with mobile devices in mind • Typically built with modern working in mind • Usually the provided via an infrastructure that supports remote access • User interface optimised for different devices 1 3
- 35. Final scores © 2017 Content Formula Ltd Custom build Off-the-shelf 11 14
- 36. Smaller companies Off-the-shelf tends to make sense because: Speed of delivery works well with smaller companies The costs are lower Less reliance on in-house technical support and knowledge © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
- 37. Is there a middle ground? © 2017 Content Formula Ltd
- 38. O365 & SHAREPOINT INTRANET MADE FOR BUSINESS
- 39. Web form builder Advanced news system • Audience targeted news • News channels • Mandatory, subscriptions • External news sources CMS • Governance • Audit management system • Metadata • Must read Notifications Language support Full Responsiveness Branding CSS builder Phonebook Personalized link collection Dynamic megamenu Dynamic Footer O365 video integration Extensible Configurable Site provisioning enginge: • Project / workspaces / communities of practice … What is Wizdom
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Notas do Editor
- I'm Dan Hawtrey and I am the founder and Managing Director at Content Formula. We are an intranet and SharePoint consultancy based in London in the UK. We've been consulting on, designing, building and even managing intranets for over 10 years now.
- We still build bespoke intranets but, for the last year, we've also been offering off-the-shelf intranet products. And we are now the exclusive UK partner for Wizdom – a highly rated intranet-in-a-box product.
- In fact, Wizdom was the highest rated intranet-in-a-box product in the latest independent report by Clearbox consulting. Go to clearbox.co.uk to get a copy of that report.
- After the session you’ll be able to make an educated decision on the type of intranet that is right for your business We will explain what an off-the-shelf intranet is, and what a custom built intranet is We will look at the pros and cons of each option Near the end of this webinar – around 40 mins from now, we’ll have a 15-minute section for questions. You’ll be able to type your question in the chat area. We will read out the questions that come in and we’ll do our best to answer as many as possible.
- Firstly, what do we mean by Off-the-shelf and Custom build?
- Off the shelf : Essentially this means that you buy the intranet software, like a software product that you would buy from a retail store – literally taking the box off-the-shelf. You don’t have the opportunity to send the software company a list of requirements and wait for them to build it. They’ve built it already – you just decide if it does what you need it to “out of the box”, and you buy it and use it in the way that the software developer intended.
- Custom build: Essentially this means that you decide on specific requirements and you write up the requirements and draw up the plans. Then you brief someone to build the software to your exact specification – matching your exact business needs. What is built is for you and your organisation, nobody else
- What off-the-shelf options are there and what features do they offer? Just like there are Off-the-shelf software products for other situations, there are ones that cater for intranets. This makes sense because many organisations have many similar requirements But not all Off-the-shelf intranet products are the same. There are a few different types:
- Firstly , there are ones that are standalone E.g. Facebook @ Work. They don’t require an underlying technology platform, like SharePoint for example.
- Then there are products that do require an existing platform that they are installed into – this might be a platform like SharePoint, or maybe Drupal
- Some products interact with an existing platform, but do not actually sit within it. So they have a custom interface and features, but they display content from and write content to another platform.
- Others are installed into a platform and allow you to use all the regular features of that platform alongside the new ones that the product gives you
- Finally , there are products that are really just a set of templates – these are typically less mature products and require more time to install and configure
- Also , these products can come as self-hosted, cloud hosted, vendor hosted and so on. Sometimes the same product is made available for each of these scenarios by the vendor Self-hosted means that you install the software on your own servers Cloud hosted means that you install the software on a cloud hosting platform – like Azure for example. Vendor hosted means that the software company hosts the software for you
- What features do these off-the-shelf intranet products typically offer?
- Branding : Normally each product will allow you to apply your company’s logo and branding – so that the intranet looks like it belongs in your organisation, aligned with other media, both printed and on-screen. Some products allow you lots of flexibility with branding and look and feel.
- News and announcements. This has been an intranet staple for years and most, if not all, intranet products will offer this. Usually with the ability for employees to comment on the stories, or at least rate or ‘like’ the articles. Quite often there will also be different types of news or ‘channels’ that you can filter by, or even subscribe to. Sometimes you will be able to set up email alerts
- Events . It’s fairly common for intranet software to provide a facility for you to publicise organizational or industry events. Typically, in a calendar format, but also in a list of ‘upcoming events’. Often different types of events are supported, with controls so that you can filter to the type of event that you are interested in. Less common, but sometimes included is the ability to register or subscribe to an event. But at the very least there is normally an option to add an event to your calendar
- Policies and procedures. Having a central place for all company policies and procedures is a big win for an intranet. This is often a key part of the content. Most intranet software has a feature for storing, organizing and searching for policies and procedures – regardless of the department that owns them
- Department sites. Although some intranets are more focused on tasks and less centred around the structure of the organisation these days – there is still generally a need for a ‘shop window’ for the different departments or functions within the business. These are typically dual purpose – a concierge desk for the department’s internal customers, providing them with access to frequent tasks or questions as well as key people in the department. However, they also provide an entry point for staff within the department to the ‘back office’ type information – KPIs, collaboration areas and so on.
- Collaboration spaces. Intranets are not just about broadcasting information and the occasional question or comment. As intranets have evolved to be more than information stores and more digital workplace tools, the emphasis on employee collaboration has increased. Why work together on improving processes and iterating knowledge over email, when you can have a more tailored and open experience on the intranet.
- Collaboration spaces typically allow groups of people from any part of the business to share documents, edit documents together, share announcements or milestones etc. They are typically used for both short-term projects with a defined end point, or for ongoing topic area communities like ‘health and safety’
- Search is probably the area where the least time is invested in the range of intranet products that are available. Often the search is barely modified from the search that comes with the underlying platform. This is sometimes because the underlying platform has quite a lot of features. The problem with search is that it’s how you use it that counts.
- Typically, you’ll have the ability to provide different pre-set search verticals or scopes. Toggling these options will limit the search to a particular area of the intranet. Then there are refiners or filters – these allow you to restrict the results based on the categories of information you are looking for. And there are ‘promoted results’ - the ability to provide manually tailored search results for particular terms that people are commonly searching for.
- That is just a sample of the features commonly found on intranet products, but there are others too – here’s a selection of others that we’ve seen being offered:
- So, off-the-shelf products do offer a lot of features. But a custom build can give you exactly what you want and nothing superfluous. As a rule of thumb, if you find that your requirements are fairly generic and the same as those offered by intranet-in-a-box products, you should probably opt for buy, not build. If however your requirements are specific to your business processes and are unlikely to be offered by software vendors, you should build a custom solution. Deciding what is best for your business depends on a few factors.
- Relevance – How relevant or tailored is the intranet to your particular business and processes? Speed – How quickly can a useful intranet be up and running? Cost – How much does it cost, both in the short and long term? Scope – How wide is the scope of things that the intranet can help your business with? Access – How easy is it to allow access from anywhere, any-device and at any time? Now we are going to score both custom built and off-the-shelf intranets against each of these factors. We’ll use a rating scale of 1-3. With 1 being poor and 3 being good.
- If you deploy a custom build or an off-the-shelf intranet, how relevant will it be to your particular business? Custom build A custom build can of course be made 100% relevant to your business, since it is completely custom. So it scores highly in this category. We give it maximum points for relevance. Off-the-shelf An off-the-shelf option is highly unlikely to be 100% relevant. However, many companies tend to have fairy generic requirements for their intranet and the good intranet software vendors cater for these well. In order to increase the relevance, it will be very important to choose the product that most closely aligns with your business needs. But, that business need will change over time and you may find that the intranet product becomes less or more relevant in the future. If you select wisely then this could be a 2. But select poorly and it could be a one! Scores Custom build wins 3-2 on relevance then – as it can be perfectly tailored to your organisation.
- Which option will allow you to deliver an intranet that adds value, but quickly! Custom build A custom build is typically going to take a lot of time – even before you start building or coding, you have to spend a lot of time gathering requirements and writing the specification – including creating wireframes. You will probably want to do some early testing too – using interactive prototypes. If the project is really broad in scope, there’s even a danger that all this will take so long, that the business imperatives change during the process! It’s not unknown for this process to take 1-2 years in large organisations although in smaller ones it’s realistic to see 3-6 month timelines. Therefore, we will have to give Custom-build a rating of 1 for speed. Off-the-shelf You might think that off-the-shelf is going to be up and running in less than an hour. And, while that is true with some products, you’re typically going to need to spend at least a few days researching your business, planning your intranet and configuring it to make more sense for your business. Then there’s the need to train your admins and content owners. But, overall, we’re still looking at a much much shorter time to deliver something useful to the business. So, off-the-shelf scores a 3 here. Scores Off-the-shelf easily wins this round with a 3-1 victory. It allows you to be up and running much more quickly
- So far it’s been quite easy to score the two different options. But, when looking at costs – things become a little more complicated! We have to consider the initial purchase cost, the cost of implementation, ongoing management and maintenance as well as any licence fees that may exist. All of these things combine to give us a “total cost of ownership” Custom build The first costs with custom build are the initial design, build and implementation costs. As we know from the previous step, custom builds take time and that means quite a lot of money up front. The more ambitious the project and the broader the requirements set, the more it’s going to cost you, especially if you want to develop an intranet that is user-friendly and provides a rich user experience. To give you a very rough guide: we can deliver a basic custom-built intranet for around £25k but we’ve also worked on some projects that go into 7 figures. Then there’s the implementation phase, where we upload content, train admins and content owners and promote the new intranet – this incurs a cost as well, but arguably it’s on a par with an off-the-shelf intranet – as you also need to do all these things with that route too. Then there’s the ongoing management and maintenance. Because you have built a custom application, this is likely to be quite costly – you will have to support the platform at multiple levels: Content management and governance, User support, Minor Enhancements, Break fix support for the intranet, Software support for the platform that it sits on, and often Hardware support too for the servers. And finally, licence fees. Because you are building from scratch you should save money here – though you will still likely need to pay licence fees for the underlying technology – like SharePoint or MS SQL Server databases for example. Despite the lack of product licence fees, the other costs have mounted up with the custom build route. So we will give it a 1 for cost – as in it will cost a lot! It can be cheaper if you don’t invest more money in evolving it over a 5 year period. But, that tactic is likely to lessen its relevance significantly to the business over time. Off-the-shelf With off-the-shelf, the upfront cost for design and build is going to be far lower – basically just the cost of branding. But, the implementation will still involve some cost – possibly on a par with the custom build route. You still have to configure the intranet, add content, train admins and content owners etc. Then there’s the ongoing management and maintenance – some of this cost will be internal and on a par with the custom build route. But responsibility for maintenance of the application will sit with the vendor, and they will have the benefit of economies of scale – as their support teams will support other customers with the same application, so the costs should be lower here. Then there are the licence fees – typically a per user monthly cost from the vendor, but in some cases an upfront perpetual licence for the software as a whole. This is the area where the off-the-shelf costs will be higher. But what you get for this, at least in the case of a monthly per user licence fee, is a constantly evolving intranet and feature set and hopefully, if you’ve selected a good vendor, some sort of guarantee that the software won’t break. Overall, we’ll give off-the-shelf a 2 for cost. All things considered then, off-the-shelf is likely to edge it on cost and wins 2-1. It’s slightly cheaper than the custom build route if you plan to evolve the intranet over time (which you absolutely should do!).
- Which route is going to give you a broader base of capability – allowing your intranet to deliver value in more areas of the business? Custom build A custom build route offers you a blank canvas – with limitless opportunities. However, delivering lots of features across a broad scope will quickly eat up even the most significant budget and will take a long time to deliver. Therefore, it’s likely that you’d want to add to the scope of what the intranet can do over time, as it evolves. A common way to do this without re-inventing the wheel is to integrate with the many other business systems that an organisation will typically be making use of. But, again, because of the need to build these integrations yourself, you may face additional costs versus an off-the-shelf product that has pre-existing connectors for other business software. So, realistically, in order to keep the cost and timelines palatable, it’s likely that you’ll need to limit the scope of your custom built intranet. Therefore, we’ll give this a score of 2. Great potential, but reality keeps the score lower. Off-the-shelf An off-the-shelf product – particularly a mature one that has been developed over several years – is likely to offer a wide range of features and pre-build integrations with other common systems like CRMs and LMSs. This means that right ‘out of the box’ there is a lot of potential to add value in many areas of the business – and this can be made available quickly and relatively cheaply in the short term. Furthermore, if the product provided on monthly per user cost model - like Software as a Service, or SaaS for short- then there will be a road map of new features that will be drip fed into the product over time. This will further boost the potential scope of your intranet. It’s definitely a score of 3 for off-the-shelf on scope. Scores With a score of 3-2, it’s off-the-shelf that snatches victory here. With a broad scope both out of the box, and – if based on the SaaS model - more likely to deliver further capabilities quicker and more cheaply as time passes too.
- With the arrival of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, greater levels of remote working and proliferation of smart phones – How and from where you access your organisations systems, including the intranet, has changed dramatically. So which of our two options better caters for more modern ways of working? Custom build As we have already seen, a custom built intranet gives you lots of control and a broad scope. This means that providing access from pretty much any device via any location is totally possible. However, you will need to do a lot of work to make it work well and it can get really quite complex. To begin, you will need to make sure that the infrastructure enables a connection to be established from anywhere using an internet connection – perhaps using a VPN, perhaps not. Then you will need to make sure that your user interface (UI) is optimised for multiple devices – including smartphones and tablets. This adds a lot of time to the design, development and testing parts of your initial build, and incremental improvements thereafter. It can all be done, but it comes at greater cost, complexity and longer timelines. Therefore, we’ll give custom build a 1. Off-the-shelf Off-the-shelf intranets are usually – or should be – built with modern working in mind. Therefore, they have already done the hard work of designing and implementing an infrastructure that supports access from multiple devices from different locations without the need for cumbersome VPN tokens or software. Also, they have UI support for different devices baked in to their processes – with expert UX designers and Front-end developers ensuring the compatibility. Ease of access is really a core strength of the majority of off-the-shelf intranet products and we give it a score of 3 here. Scores Off-the-shelf wins this round with a score of 3-1. A major benefit of most Off-the-shelf intranets is that they make it easy to access from anywhere, any time and on any device
- Now that we’ve rated the two options in terms of relevance, speed, cost, scope, and access. Let’s take a look at the overall score. Off-the-shelf edges the overall score by 14-11. Although off-the-shelf came out on top overall, that doesn’t mean that off-the-shelf is right for everyone. If control and relevance are the absolutely focus for your business and you are prepared to wait and spend whatever it takes, then custom build would be easily the best option. It just all depends on where your priorities lie. It’s clear that in some areas, a custom build approach is better – in others an off-the-shelf option would make more sense. That’s why it’s important to run a discovery project – so that you can understand where your organisation’s priorities and business needs lie. You can then make an informed decision based on the outcome of that research. You might think that you already know the answers, and you might be right, but it’s still worth validating your position as it will be a long road ahead and difficult and expensive to change course.
- And what about company size? If you are a smaller company – how does that affect things? Well, it depends on the company. However, for the most part, smaller companies will tend to be better off with the off-the-shelf route for the following reasons: Smaller companies tend to work faster and more flexibly, so the speed with which you can start using an Off-the-shelf intranet will be an advantage The costs – especially the initial capital investment – are much lower. There is less reliance on in-house technical support and knowledge. Unless you are a software development company, you’re not likely to have the right personnel on board to effectively manage and maintain a custom build
- So far, we’ve talked about delivering an intranet in two different ways – where you do your research and then choose one route or the other. But, what if you’re not sure. It’s a big call and a big commitment. Maybe there’s an off-the-shelf product that allows you to also customise – giving you the best of both worlds.
- That was the question we asked ourselves a few years ago. It’s why we’ve chosen to resell Wizdom and have since become the exclusive UK partner for Wizdom.
- Wizdom is an Off-the-shelf intranet product for SharePoint. It gives you over 50 features out of the box, ready to use within weeks not months or years. But, crucially, it does something that many other Off-the-shelf solutions do not. It installs natively into SharePoint, meaning that you can build custom features around it, or add in other third party apps right alongside it. This makes integrating other systems such as CRM or ERP really easy. And it gives a completely seamless experience for users.
- I’m going to switch to a demo site now to show a glimpse of a few features
- What all this means, is that you are not forced to choose between a traditional Off-the-shelf product or ‘going it alone’ with a custom build. You can install, configure and launch a fully featured Wizdom intranet within a couple of weeks – providing value to the business right away. Then, in the background, you can develop your custom components and roll them out to the business when they are ready. Your employees will see the Wizdom elements and the custom elements as one unified intranet. They won’t be jumping from one application to the other.
- Over the last 10 years we’ve worked on hundreds of intranets and we’ve observed that – on average – every intranet is 80% the same in terms of the features and content. Of course, not the actual content itself but the types of content. Every intranet has news, department pages, policies and procedures, for example. Only the remaining 20% is specific to the organisation. This is why Off-the-shelf intranet products have become so prevalent. But the problem with most Off-the-shelf products is that they only give you the first 80%. To get 100% of what you need, you have to take the long - and costly - custom build route. The Wizdom approach has been designed to negate the need for that. Deliver the 80% early, and add the 20% afterwards.
- We have some time now to answer any questions that you might have about what we’ve talked about on this session. All you need to do is type your question in to the group chat area. Dan and I will do our best to answer as many as possible over the next 15 minutes or so.