Top 10 Intranet Portals

Important news about Intranet Portals

2024. Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business



In a decision that seemed both inevitable and mildly perplexing—rather like the discovery that your towel has mysteriously disappeared from a perfectly ordinary pocket dimension—Meta has decided to bid farewell to Facebook Workplace, its plucky little business communication platform. The company, with the sort of optimism usually reserved for the moments before a disaster-prone starship launch, is now pivoting towards the infinitely buzzier realms of AI and the metaverse, which it insists will revolutionize work as we know it. Workplace will keep its lights on until September 2025, but for those feeling abandoned, Meta recommends embracing the newly Zoom-acquired Workvivo as a replacement—though, admittedly, Workplace’s revenues were never going to rival the ad-fueled billions from Facebook and Instagram. Still, it was a useful reminder that Meta's ambitions stretch far beyond cat memes and oversharing.


2023. Box announces Hubs, a custom portal to share specialized content



Box has introduced Hubs, a novel tool tailored for crafting centralized microsites to share specific types of content. Essentially, Box Hubs enables users to curate content from their Box account and disseminate it to their chosen audience in a customized and curated manner within their business. The potential applications for this tool are virtually limitless. It manifests as a specialized portal intended to house items such as HR policies, brand assets, or the most recent pricing details for a sales team. In conventional files and folders, these scenarios might lose their clarity, but within a portal, their purpose remains evident. The hub format offers a meticulously curated set of information for easy searchability—a concept that Box co-founder Levie acknowledges was not fully explored until the emergence of ChatGPT last year.

2023. Microsoft ditches Yammer brand and goes all-in on Viva Engage



Microsoft has confirmed that it’s finally discontinuing Yammer, the enterprise social network it acquired over a decade ago for $1.2 billion. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to make Yammer widely adopted by integrating it into its core Office suite of products, the company has focused on developing related communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, which was integrated with Yammer in 2019. Then, two years ago, Microsoft introduced Viva, promoted as an “employee experience platform” similar to the corporate intranet of the past. In the subsequent months, Microsoft has been accelerating the development of Viva and last year it launched Viva Engage, which was described at the time as an “evolution of the Yammer Communities app.”


2023. Cleary raises $4.5M to reinvent the intranet



Cleary, one of the startups aiming to rejuvenate the intranet, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The concept behind Cleary is to provide a comprehensive employee experience platform. As businesses strive to manage their SaaS expenditures, this approach may prove to be advantageous. Cleary integrates a communications platform, wikis, tools for recognizing employees (at least virtually), an employee directory with organizational charts, a search tool that consolidates a company’s knowledge base from various third-party tools and a Q&A service for live events. It connects with HR tools like Workday and ADP, communication services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Slack, as well as authentication services from Okta, Microsoft and Google.


2022. Microsoft wants to add Stories to corporate portals



Microsoft plans to introduce Stories to the enterprise with the aptly-named Stories feature, a forthcoming addition to the company’s Viva “employee experience” (i.e., intranet) platform. The Stories format of bite-sized content, which became popular partly due to its effectiveness in capturing attention, might seem contrary to the kind of corporate clients who use Viva. After all, major corporations prioritize productivity above almost everything else. However, Microsoft argues that this isn’t the case — there is a demand for fleeting photo and video slideshows within the workplace because they offer a “fun, familiar way” to stay connected with colleagues.


2022. Happeo lands $26M to provide a central intranet portal for employees



Happeo, a startup creating intranet software to connect employees with company resources, has secured $26M. Happeo seeks to link teams and individuals in an “organic manner,” enabling them to establish channels and pages around projects and shared interests. The platform consolidates resources and apps in a searchable main portal, featuring a launcher that lets employees access various software. Happeo’s “federated search” feature can probe across a company’s different internal tools. Additionally, the service — which integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace — provides a space to host shared files and documents. On the backend, an analytics dashboard displays metrics such as channel, page and post engagement, as well as search activity (e.g., the most queried keywords).


2022. Microsoft is elevating Viva from pure employee portal to job support platform starting with sales



When Microsoft introduced Viva last year, it positioned the platform as an employee portal where users might access information such as parental leave policies or other internal communications related to company policies and culture. However, it appears that Microsoft has grander plans for Viva than merely delivering essential information typically found on an employee intranet. Today, it revealed the first of what could be several functions supported within Viva, starting with sales. The tool is built on Office 365 and optimized for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. By tagging a customer name or contact, Viva Sales can automatically pull documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails and other materials into the CRM tool. It allows a salesperson to utilize the tools they already rely on daily, including email systems like Outlook, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Teams. Viva Sales will be available at no cost to Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers.


2022. Joomla recommends to upgared to 4 version



Ah, behold the curious conundrum of Joomla, that whimsical free and open-source portal/website CMS designed for the delightful task of publishing web content with a flourish! In a recently unveiled spectacle of technological wizardry, Joomla has graced the digital realm with not one, but two new iterations: Joomla 4.1.3 and 3.10.9. These updates, sparkling with bug fixes and improvements that include a task scheduler, child templates, and an accessibility checker, are built upon the ingenious model-view-controller architecture—perfect for crafting formidable online applications, independent of the CMS itself. The illustrious Joomla 4.1.3 now empowers users to embark on the grand adventure of launching a website that can elegantly grow alongside their whims and their customers' ever-changing desires. While intrepid users may still consider the 3.10 version for new escapades, a gentle nudge towards Joomla 4 is heartily encouraged, as the 3.10 is swiftly sailing toward its End of Support (EOS) on the distant horizon, with less than half a year left for bug fixes and a mere year of security fixes trailing after that, all culminating on the fateful date of August 17, 2023. The 4.x version, a magnificent major upgrade that has graced our presence for nearly a year, is brimming with improvements and bestows upon its users the blessings of the latest production versions of PHP, which conspicuously enhance both the security and performance of your digital domain.


2021. Optimizely to acquire Welcome to help marketers drive Customer Experience outcomes



In a universe where digital-first realities swirl like improbable storms of data and algorithms, Optimizely—purveyor of all things brilliantly seamless in the realm of digital experience platforms—has decided to hitch its wagon to Welcome, a four-time Gartner-fêted titan of CMP, MRM, and DAM wizardry. Together, this new galactic powerhouse promises to arm marketing teams with tools so potent they might just bend the fabric of customer satisfaction itself. For marketers, laboring heroically in the hybrid work trenches, the stakes have never been higher: they must not only decipher the whims of the ever-evolving digital consumer but also do so amidst a marketing stack so fragmented it might as well be the galactic equivalent of Vogon poetry. With the stars aligning for streamlined, scalable content, the internal marketer’s experience will finally have a fighting chance to craft external customer experiences worthy of universal applause—or at least a mildly approving nod from a suspiciously sophisticated AI.


2021. Simpplr raises $32M for its intranet platform



Simpplr, a contemporary platform for creating intranet sites (or “employee communications and enablement platforms,” as the company refers to it), has secured a $32 million Series C. Simpplr is certainly not the sole intranet solution available, but the service is not only acknowledged by analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester, but also highly rated by its users, largely due to its emphasis on user experience. UX is its primary strength and distinguishing factor. Another distinctive feature is the company’s auto-governance engine. Analytics is also a domain where Simpplr aims to set itself apart. It assists companies in enhancing their workplace — and unless we can demonstrate areas for improvement and provide insights on how to optimize processes, we risk becoming just another ineffective tool.