Embrace versus Sharepoint: your guide to the ideal intranet for your organization

The software solution that you ultimately choose should of course give you the greatest possible chance of the desired behavior of your employees and thus fulfill the goals of your organization. That's why you need a deep insight into the possibilities of various intranet solutions, as well as a keen eye for the specific requirements of your organization. With this guide, we'll help you get started with this, so you can enjoy your social intranet you can create not only a powerful tool for effective collaboration, but also a vibrant hub where engagement, innovation, and productivity flourish.

Two topics are key: the role that the social intranet will play in your organization and which distinguishing factors are important. We explore the impact of the social intranet on four crucial aspects: increasing awareness of the strategy, strengthening the connection between employees, stimulating knowledge sharing and achieving effective collaboration.

In addition, we zoom in on a few distinguishing factors that determine which intranet best suits the organization, such as flexibility, usability, interaction and costs, and explain how the Sharepoint and Embrace intranet perform in these areas.

In the conclusion, we briefly summarize the main differences between the two intranets.

What is the role of the intranet?

In short, your social intranet contributes to the success of your organization as a whole and of your employees in particular. It's a powerful tool that connects you, allows you to collaborate effectively and share knowledge, ultimately leading to higher productivity, more innovation and a positive work culture. That is why organizations often link the goals of their social intranet to ambitions such as increasing awareness of the business strategy, promoting connectedness, stimulating knowledge sharing and facilitating collaboration. (Evolve, 2021)

“Our social intranet is now in the heart of the organization. As a result, our field of view has become much wider and we are a lot more decisive. '

Rob Boekelaar, director of De Lispeltuur primary school (SaKS)

Raising awareness of strategy

Imagine always being able to keep your colleagues informed about your organization's goals and direction. Here, a social intranet acts as a central platform where leaders and other key figures within your organization can share their strategic vision, from the boardroom to the workplace.

Through regular updates and communication on the intranet, you can keep everyone up to date with the latest strategic initiatives, business goals and achievements. This not only increases the engagement of your employees, but also enables them to better align their daily activities with the broader goals of your organization. The platform is, as it were, a compass that aligns everyone for the successful execution of your business strategy.

Catholic Schools Together (SaKS) is very successful at this. So successful, in fact, that it earned them third place in Evolve's benchmark study in 2021. They wanted to be innovative in primary education and were looking for a medium to promote collaboration and innovation; the social intranet Sam became the solution. Thanks to their thorough process guidance, attention to the needs of their employees and continuous adaptation to new developments, Sam is now in the heart of the organization, making them more effective.

Increasing connectedness

Organizations - rightly - often attach great importance to a sustainable work community where everyone feels connected, regardless of location or department. Social intranet plays an important role in promoting this sense of connection between all employees.

Interactive features such as chat, discussion forums, and social groups make it easy to connect with your colleagues, both professionally and personally. This promotes a strong team spirit and increases trust between you and your colleagues, which improves collaboration and productivity.

In addition, the social intranet offers space for recognition and appreciation. You can share your successes and achievements with your colleagues, creating a positive and stimulating work culture. Increasing connectivity via an online platform strengthens team spirit and reduces the sense of isolation for external or decentralized employees.

For the Groningen Environment Service (ODG), this was the main reason for implementing a social intranet. For example, the organization held a name contest among their employees and their social intranet is now going through life as Wad. The launch of the platform took place during the pandemic, allowing ODG to immediately use Wad to maintain an interconnection. For example, a question about how everyone fared working from home led to a whole load of photos and video updates of their work situation. The social aspect of Wad was embraced from the start.

Stimulating knowledge sharing

Sharing knowledge is invaluable for innovation and growth within your organization. A social intranet offers a structured environment here, where you can easily share and distribute knowledge and expertise to all employees.

With features like wikis, knowledge bases, and Q&A sessions, you can share information, best practices, and past lessons with others. This leads to greater efficiency, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again and can benefit from the expertise that exists within your organization.

In addition, sharing knowledge via the intranet helps you identify internal experts, making it easier to consult them for advice or collaboration on complex issues. This way, you have a shared knowledge pool that promotes innovation and professional development within your organization.

As a knowledge organization, the healthcare organization is HVO query a social intranet is indispensable: it plays a crucial role in sharing knowledge within the organization. Their HVOquerinet has grown into a great digital meeting place, which their employees like to use to exchange information and collaborate. For example, thanks to the A-Z knowledge base, colleagues can easily find and share relevant information on various topics. In doing so, their intranet promotes a culture of knowledge sharing.

“We were looking for a real collaborative platform. Our research showed that Embrace not only met our technical needs, but also certainly with the social needs: bringing people into contact with each other. '

Paul Goedhart, ICT specialist at Clafis Ingenieus

Realizing cooperation

Without collaboration, it will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to make a success out of innovation and projects. With a social intranet, you can create a digital space for seamless collaboration between teams, departments, and even external partners.

Thanks to collaborative features such as shared documents, project management tools, and virtual meetings, your colleagues can communicate and collaborate effectively, no matter where everyone is. These features facilitate an integrated approach to projects, leading to better communication and less risk of errors and misunderstandings.

In addition, the social intranet offers transparency in the progress of your projects and responsibilities, making you feel more involved with the end result. Encouraging collaboration via the intranet ensures a streamlined workflow and a more efficient use of resources, ultimately leading to higher productivity and better results.

This goal was the common thread for Bert, the social intranet at engineering firm Claris Ingenious. Clafis has integrated their social intranet with Microsoft 365, making the Microsoft landscape more accessible to their employees — without making things more complex. This way, members of a project group can easily access the same documents and work in them at the same time, making it a lot easier to work together. In doing so, the social intranet stimulates mutual cooperation.

Which differentiating factors are important?

When choosing the right intranet, it's crucial to take differentiating factors into account. These help you answer why you should choose one intranet over the other.

That is why it is useful to map these out in advance, so that you can not only be well informed, but also ultimately choose the solution that best suits your organization. Here, factors such as flexibility, user-friendliness, costs and platform interaction can have a major influence.

“We didn't have a SharePoint administrator in-house and therefore didn't want to build it ourselves. That's why we opted for a ready-to-use solution and ended up at Embrace. '

Functional manager at an official work organization

Flexibility: how much participation and freedom do you want to have?

Ask yourself how important it is for you as a client to be able to control what is being built. A software solution that literally has to serve the entire world has different advantages and disadvantages than a so-called out-of-the-box solution, which is often developed for end users in a specific region, industry or organization. In fact, such software providers often work according to the principle of co-creation. In this situation, you usually have more guidance from your supplier, more participation in the (further) development of the software and a greater chance that user needs that you submit can be met.

Developed by Microsoft, SharePoint is renowned for its adaptability and versatility. It offers a wide range of features and capabilities that you can adapt to your organization's unique needs. Users can create sites, subsites, and pages and organize them in various ways, giving them some flexibility in designing their intranet.

On the other hand, Embrace stands out for its profound focus on flexibility and personalization. The platform is designed to evolve with your organization and can adapt to changing needs without requiring a lot of technical knowledge. Embrace offers an intuitive interface that allows users to easily configure and customize their intranet environment, making it a great choice if you value speed and convenience when customizing your intranet.

For example, a work organization chose Embrace at the time because they did not have the expertise to arrange everything themselves. “We didn't have a SharePoint administrator in-house at the time, so we didn't want to go down the road to build it ourselves. For that reason, we opted for a ready-made solution and thus ended up with Embrace through the tender,” says their functional manager.

Usability: What are your users' skills?

Also check beforehand how digitally skilled the colleagues who need to work with the intranet are. Is everyone an IT person? Then they can't help but think of an environment that may be a bit more complex from a technical point of view. Or is IT just the proverbial “necessary evil”? Then user-friendliness is very important. In practice, of course, it's never 100% one or the other, but since your users' skills have a huge impact on the adoption of your intranet, it's good to be aware of this.

SharePoint is a powerful intranet solution, but is sometimes known for its complexity and steep learning curve. New users may have trouble understanding and making the most of all features. That's why you should keep in mind that you'll often need to provide additional training and technical support to employees within your organization so that you can get the most out of the platform.

When it comes to user-friendliness, Embrace excels. It's designed with an intuitive interface that makes it easy for your employees to quickly get familiar with features and navigation. Such an intuitive user experience reduces the dependency on comprehensive training, allowing your colleagues to focus on their tasks instead of learning how to use the intranet platform.

Interaction: do you mainly want to send or do you want an online dialogue?

Set a communication goal for your social intranet. Do you mainly want to send information and maintain structured communication top-down? Or do you prefer open dialogue and encouraging interaction between your employees to promote a culture of transparency and collaboration? These goals are quite different and one platform is better suited to one than the other. In order to make the best possible choice, it is therefore important that you know what you want in this regard.

With SharePoint, you have a wide range of tools and features to promote collaboration and interaction between your employees. However, the platform places more emphasis on sending information and facilitating top-down communication within the organization, also known as top-down communication. It also supports document management, discussion forums, social networking opportunities, and integration with other Microsoft applications such as Teams. While it's a solid platform for disseminating information, it can sometimes be limited when it comes to promoting open dialogue with employees.

In contrast to SharePoint, Embrace focuses on promoting interaction in the form of two-way traffic. The platform encourages active engagement and dialogue between your employees, making your communication environment more dynamic and inclusive. Colleagues can share and discuss their input and ideas more easily, leading to a heightened sense of engagement and teamwork.

Costs: how much do you want to invest?

Of course, it is tempting to just look at those hard euros at the bottom of the line, but sometimes a larger upfront investment can pay off more in the long term than if you just cut corners and opt for something that actually only fits your budget, and to a much lesser extent with the wishes, ambitions and goals of your organization.

So consider what it may 'cost' in the broadest sense of the word. After all, even loss that cannot be directly expressed in euros, such as spending a lot of time because you can't find the right information or losing the overview because you have contact about a project via many different channels, ultimately costs you money. For an investment of this size, it is therefore important to take a good look at what it is worth to you.

SharePoint offers different pricing levels depending on the size and needs of your organization. It can be delivered as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription, which may be cost-effective for some companies. However, for larger enterprises with more complex requirements, licensing and implementation costs can be significant.

Embrace's flexible pricing structure makes their software attractive for organizations of all sizes. In addition, Embrace's lower implementation and training costs can contribute to significant savings in total cost of ownership compared to SharePoint. In doing so, Embrace positions itself as a cost-effective solution that offers value for money.

Conclusion: How to choose between Sharepoint and Embrace

When choosing between the SharePoint intranet and the Embrace intranet, there are therefore clear differentiating factors to consider, which depend on the wishes, ambitions and goals of your organization.

Organizations that need an adaptable solution with expandable functionalities may prefer SharePoint; there are dozens of additional products available worldwide that make Sharepoint user-friendly. However, it may require some technical expertise and is sometimes known for its complexity. On the other hand, Embrace excels in user-friendliness and flexibility, with a strong focus on personalization and social interaction.

In a nutshell, if you choose a SharePoint intranet, you're choosing an intranet as is. Do you want to enrich this with social interaction and extra functionalities, all in a more user-friendly way? Then Embrace's social intranet with SharePoint integration offers a solution.

Ultimately, just a list of features that you can compare is not enough to understand the difference between SharePoint and Embrace. It is therefore recommended that you do not limit yourself to simply identifying the specific needs and requirements of your future intranet, but that you also make reference visits.

A glimpse into the kitchen of organizations that are already working with the software solutions you have in mind and where the intranet plays the same role it should do within your organization can provide you with valuable and perhaps even decisive information. After all, the best idea of the (im) possibilities comes from the people who use it day in, day out.

Want to experience Embrace's social intranet yourself?

After reading this guide, are you curious about what our social intranet can do for your organization? Then we would be happy to talk to you about the possibilities of Embrace with a stimulating and concrete demo.