Hey everyone! I'm new here and looking for some insights on intranet platforms since I'm involved in employee experience projects alongside our IT team. We have a large frontline workforce in retail and logistics who don't use Microsoft accounts or have company emails, so SharePoint isn't suitable for us. I'm hoping to gather insights from those who have experience maintaining these types of platforms. What should I look for in a solution? What works and what doesn't? Are there any common pitfalls I should be aware of? I've checked out a few names like FirstUp, Igloo, Interact, LumApps, MangoApps, Simpplr, Unily, and Workvivo, and I'd love your thoughts on integrations, maintenance concerns, mobile usability, and what you'd change if you had to implement one of these again. Thanks in advance for your help!
4 Answers
I agree with the others about having some form of identity management in place. It’s essential for keeping things secure and organized as you scale.
Do your users have any centrally managed accounts, like AD, Google, or anything similar? It's crucial for accessing secure intranet resources. If you're using Okta, that's a good start!
I'd need to know more about your setup. If the idea is to have employees access a secure local site, some form of authentication is necessary. Just letting anyone access it could be risky. You might want to consider using something like Active Directory or EntraID since it could integrate well with SharePoint. Without identity management, you could run into a lot of issues later on, though I'm not a retail sysadmin so I can't speak to all the best practices.
Just a heads up, Microsoft does offer frontline worker licenses that are cheaper than full licenses. But you'll still need some sort of identity platform for authentication on your intranet. Having separate logins for each platform can be a hassle for employees.
We know about those licenses but we're trying to simplify things and avoid multiple logins. We currently use Okta for identity management.
We're using Okta for our identity management.