There is a significant interest in intranet products at the present moment. These are by no means new, with Orchidsoft and Intranet Dashboard having been around since the late 1990s. The complexity of using SharePoint as an intranet platform has led to many Microsoft partners developing intranet products based on either SharePoint or Office 365. Last year Sam Marshall and the team at Clearbox Consulting published SharePoint Intranets in a Box V2, in which they evaluated 26 solutions in considerable detail. There are of course many products based on proprietary and open source software and there is a list of over 60 of these on the Intranet Focus website. The list indicates which products are evaluated by Clearbox Consulting.

Most intranet managers probably little experience in the process of specifying and selecting software products, and that may also be the case with IT Departments more used to dealing with large scale enterprise applications. My new report on Intranet Product Selection has been co-authored with Martin Tate (Decision Evaluation Ltd) who has had many years of experience in IT product selection and has written an excellent book on Off-the-Shelf IT Solutions. The 14 page report sets out good practice in defining user requirements and undertaking the selection of a vendor. In particular we consider some of the contractual issues that may arise and which should be considered at the outset of the process. The report takes a generic view of intranet products as the principles are the same for Microsoft and proprietary products. Indeed you could replace the word ‘intranet’ by collaboration, social media and ESN, as examples, so the report has a wider relevance than just intranet products.

The report can be downloaded as a PDF from this site at no charge. It is the first of a new series of reports that will be published in 2017, using a report template created by Simon Flegg (Hub Graphics) and with the support of Val Skelton (BlytheSpark) as publisher.

Martin White