“The symptoms of an ailing intranet are not hard to recognize: poor adoption, irritated users, failed tasks, and ingenious (but unproductive) workarounds in order to avoid the intranet altogether.”
- Forrester Research
Using this analyst quote to push their message, US-based CMS vendor Ektron has started promoting eIntranet, a new intranet application focused on making it easier to deploy a “best practice intranet”. eIntranet comes with a set of so-called widgets with key functionality or integration to popular applications aimed at reducing implementation cost and time.
Needless to say, you’ll still need implementation assistance before you can launch with eIntranet. Besides considering the purely technical aspects of getting it up and running, you will need to go through proper planning, including user experience and interaction design, persona development and a way to address intranet governance in order to achieve satisfactory adoption, happy users, completed tasks and “no workarounds”. Widgets alone are not going to solve these tasks.
According to Ektron, eIntranet has more social capabilities than established intranet competitors (see recent coverage: Focused intranet vendors; moving in on the market?), but with a list price of USD 250,000 for an organisation with 4,000 users, eIntranet is also not exactly a cheap way to reboot your intranet. To compare, Australian specialized intranet vendor Intranet Dashboard is priced at USD 4,000 per month for 4,000 users.
European intranet expert Jane McConnell has defined 3 stages of intranet maturity. Stage 1 intranets is where the intranet will become the “way of working” within 3 – 4 years. These intranets are characterized by lack of strategy, a low level of resources spent and a very low degree of management attention. If this is you, then eIntranet can definitely help you kick-start the intranet process and brings several benefits to the table.
More advanced intranets with major leaps in the last 12 months in key areas such as the integration of business applications into the intranet (stage 2) or when the intranet is the “way of working” today (stage 3) has less to gain from eIntranet, I would say. Stage 2 and stage 3 intranets also has a riskier implementation path to eIntranet with complex migration and potentially few business gains compared to what is already on the existing intranet.
Ektron is far from an early adopter when it comes to traditional website focused and experienced CMS vendors offering intranet solutions:
- EPiServer offers a product called Relate+ which “signals the end of the passive intranet era”.
- Kentico is scheduled to release a Intranet Starter Site during this quarter, which will contain basic templates and functionality for an intranet.
- Sitecore calls their solution and Intranet Portal and promises “a full-featured, easy-to-use intranet in just one week”.
Worth mentioning as another and widely adopted option is obviously also Microsoft SharePoint.
Forrester has correctly identified the symptoms of an ailing intranet. Whether eIntranet is the right tool to address it should become apparent over the coming months, as more reference customers learn the new tool.
Carolyn Douglas - CEO, Intranet Connections July 8th, 2010 17:58
Janus you mention some great points that should be considered in the planning stages of an intranet and that price should not always dictate the deciding factor for selection of intranet software. There is a vast difference in product pricing from free offerings to a quarter of a million dollars as you’ve indicated for eIntranet. We are priced at under $10,000 for unlimited users, and we continue to hear that budgets are tight even at that price. I am hoping intranet software has not entered a commodity market, and no one product has the golden key for creating intranet success – that’s just marketing ploys. We talk a lot about intranet success on our blog and tweets, and it takes more than the chosen platform. It’s not all about price but in these economic conditions pitching out $250,000 for an intranet platform is a hefty price even for 4,000 users. It will be interesting to see if eIntranet can gain traction.
Kelly Swanson July 9th, 2010 17:58
As an expert in both products, Certfied Developer and Administrator in Ektron, I can say that without a doubt that Intranet Connections is far more affordable and easier to deploy for maximum ROI. The level of support you get from Intranet Connections beats a years worth of support at Ektron. I am not going to sit here and bash Ektron but I could just for the levels of support that are non-existent. It is of course a very flexible platform that you must program from the ground up. In no way is it an out of the box solution like Intranet Connections. Plan on months of development to get it to a level that is Intranet Connections. It is a fantastic .NET solution. We use it exclusivly on our website. But for our Intranet, I would never think of using it because of its complexity. To reach the ease of use needed to attain Intranet Connections has you would need to completely redesign Ektron to something like SiteCore. $250,000 is too much for Ektron. We only paid $56K for the full unlimited Enterprise package for two URLs and Unlimited Devs which was renewed this year so you better check who your buying it from. Buy from Ektron not a broker.
When Looking at Intranets: Should you Build or Should you Buy? « Intranet Connections Blog August 17th, 2010 17:58
[...] Boye, founder and managing director of J.Boye recently wrote a blog post “eIntranet: A costly toolbox for stage 1 intranets” where he indicates at 4,000 users eIntranet would cost [...]