At first glance, SharePoint intranet may look appropriate for organizations using Office 365. But its functionalities only go so far, making HR managers, IT leaders, and internal comms teams look for a SharePoint alternative. A study by AIIM found that two-thirds of the organizations using SharePoint face low adoption rates due to inadequate training (67%), complexity in navigating the platform (66%), and lack of technical expertise (51%).

If going with SharePoint is not viable, how can you find an alternative intranet solution to fill the gaps and meet the demands of your workplace? Look no further than InfinCE, the all-in-one internal communications and intranet packaged platform designed for the modern workplace.

Why is InfinCE a better alternative to SharePoint?

Criteria

Setup & Deployment

  • Fast and easy to set up without any coding.
  • Hardly any customization is needed apart from white labeling.
  • Can be set up even without the support of an IT team.
  • Complex and time-consuming to set up.
  • Customization can be done only by an expert SharePoint developer.
  • Requires rigorous IT team support to complete the setup.

Ease of Use

  • Easy-to-navigate, simple, and user-friendly interface.
  • The learning curve is minimal, allowing users to get started in minutes.
  • Complex and less-intuitive features that are difficult to navigate.
  • Long learning curve - Requires rigorous training that results in low adoption rates.

Pricing

  • Costs $5/user/month with full access to all intranet features, including maintenance.
  • 30-day free trial and a test drive option (a fully configured account active for 3 hours).
  • Costs $12.5/user/month with full access to all intranet
  • Hidden costs include implementation, customization, maintenance, employee training, and administration costs.

Customization

  • Agile experience. Want to add a new feature? Send an email to the developer to get the feature added.
  • Don't expect frequent updates with new features to enhance productivity.

Long Term Use

  • Easy management of files and transfer of ownership with a single click.
  • Can get messy in the long term - File retrieval becomes complex and so are a lot of other functions.

Experience

  • Seamless experience across all devices, including mobile.
  • No need to switch between multiple business apps, as you can integrate them in one place.
  • Need to use separate Microsoft apps for the best experience. (Teams for collaboration, Planner for task management, Viva Engage for social feeds, MS Project for task management)
  • Mobile experience isn’t engaging. Hard to navigate, less intuitive, data sync issues.

Integrations

  • App marketplace with a growing collection of ready-to-use business apps.
  • Easy app installs and subscription management.
  • Integrations are complicated.
  • Requires technical prowess to get SharePoint to work with the other applications.

Security

  • Virtual private server. Your own dedicated cloud.
  • Role-based Access Controls (Safeguard unauthorized data access by allocating roles with precise permissions)
  • Susceptible to downtime, data breaches, and unauthorized access associated with shared, public clouds.

Support & Maintenance

  • 24/7 concierge support from our dedicated team.
  • Personalized support and help provided by human agents.
  • Approachable, fast, and responsive support to plan and deploy the right solution for your business.
  • Support is usually handled by bots that are less empathetic with user concerns.
  • Absence of personalized support and help.
  • Users face considerable delay in receiving support.

By giving everybody across your diverse workforce a voice, InfinCE helps boost employee engagement and also fosters a sense of belonging, community, and connection.

InfinCE is a scalable, user-friendly cloud platform that can be configured in less time. There is no need to rebuild the intranet every time you add more users. SharePoint users need to pay more to integrate additional features, such as custom branding, analytics, mobile access, etc. SharePoint intranet gives the best results only when it’s used along with the Microsoft 365 products suite, which can incur additional costs.

Encouraging employees to post their updates, wins, stories, and achievements on company or team dashboards and social channels can create a positive brand image that, in turn, will enhance your talent hiring and retention processes.

By surfacing success stories and updates from across your organization, InfinCE helps build a positive workplace culture and inspire employees to actively connect with the work they do.

InfinCE mobile app offers a highly interactive and engaging experience that fulfills the needs of distributed teams. Employees can download the InfinCE mobile app on their iOS or Android device and stay connected with their colleagues and perform their duties from anywhere, at any time, using any device. Companies can also customize the mobile app’s interface to reflect their branding and deliver a highly engaging experience to their workforce.

While SharePoint demands users have a certain level of technical knowledge, InfinCE is the right choice for teams that lack the bandwidth and technical prowess for setting up and scaling an intranet. InfinCE offers a social media kind of interactive experience that modern employees are familiar with.

A Quick Snapshot of InfinCE Features & Benefits

InfinCE is a modern social intranet platform for improving internal communication and collaboration within an organization. Offering a range of modern workplace management tools, from collaboration and productivity applications to essential IT setup, InfinCE becomes the one-stop platform for managing your entire business.

Benefits of InfinCE Digital Workplace Intranet

Better cross-functional collaboration among employees.

Enhanced workforce productivity and engagement.

Complete mobile access to the intranet, including data and tools.

Effortless and secure file sharing, both within and outside the organization.

Quick assimilation of company culture and values by new employees.

Whatever your use case may be - team communication, document creation and sharing, managing information assets, video meeting, or virtual collaboration, InfinCE has everything you need to handle all aspects of your business - in one place.

Why Do You Need a SharePoint Alternative?

Microsoft SharePoint is a web-based document management and collaboration platform for organizations to store, manage, and share documents and data within their network.

Despite having a multitude of features like document management, collaboration spaces for teams, mobile access, and integration with various MS Office products, SharePoint is primarily used as a standalone document repository rather than a dynamic intranet site.

What are the Drawbacks of SharePoint Intranet?

Investing the time, money, and effort into building and maintaining a SharePoint company intranet isn’t for everyone. SharePoint has several drawbacks from a modern social intranet perspective.

Hard To Use

Users may require rigorous training to use SharePoint effectively. Due to its complex document management features, teams often report issues organizing files and retrieving content.

High Maintenance

It takes quite a bit of time and effort to set up the software, create custom functionality, and integrate with other systems. Companies may also experience downtime when the platform needs updates or optimizations.

Limited Collaboration Features

Remote and hybrid teams require stronger tools for effective virtual collaboration. Several competitors of SharePoint come with intuitive and more useful features for team collaboration, such as live chats, video conferencing, feed, customized dashboards, and more.

Customization & Integration Woes

SharePoint’s out-of-the-box intranet is typically hard and expensive to restructure. Social features and tools as well as news and publishing features are not built-in. These can be incorporated into a SharePoint intranet only through an integrated Yammer feed.

Limited Support for External Collaboration

SharePoint doesn’t offer all the external collaboration tools you may need to monitor and manage file sharing, communication, and partner projects.

Works Only For Static Communication

While SharePoint is effective for top-down communication, other modern intranet tools are better suited for companies that want to promote dynamic, open communication across all levels, and let all employees have their voices heard.

Fails to Support Frontline Employees

With SharePoint, it is not feasible to give frontline workers access to a streamlined intranet entry point that makes sense for their roles.

High Cost

The sheer cost of configuring SharePoint for your organization - from provisioning, to upgrades, to servers and more - can be a nonstarter. Moreover, SharePoint can be a good fit for companies that already have a Microsoft 365 license. Additionally, if you don’t have solid SharePoint expertise in-house, you may have to hire external help, which costs more.

Limited Branding Options

Due to the limited corporate branding features, SharePoint may look more like a Microsoft intranet than a customized company intranet.

Poor Mobile Experience

SharePoint doesn’t provide the kind of native mobile-first experience that modern employees expect from their employers. It fails to provide a user-friendly interface on both mobile and desktop platforms for both frontline employees and desk workers alike.

Making The Right Choice

The ultimate employee experience is built on a company-branded intranet that powers multiple use cases across your workforce. While SharePoint fails to deliver a modern social intranet experience for employees, InfinCE comes packed with all the essential intranet features that your organization needs to achieve engagement, productivity and collaboration, fast.

InfinCE is a cost-effective, easy-to-use employee intranet platform that offers a single work hub for your teams to communicate, collaborate, thrive, and align themselves to your organization’s goals. By eliminating inefficiencies and reducing context switching, we help you create a positive employee experience that will contribute to every facet of your company’s bottom line.

Want to see where InfinCE could take your business?