How do IT managers benefit from a ready-to-go intranet like Involv?

When making the decision to implement a new intranet or to migrate the current intranet to a new solution, organizations often get caught up in listing all their requirements and trying to meet all of them. This can make choosing a solution a real headache, up to the point where developing a custom intranet seems inevitable.

It does not have to be that way.

An often overlooked fact is that a ready-to-go intranet actually offers the vast majority of functionalities that most organizations are looking for. In fact, it offers many advantages compared to a custom intranet solution.

Here are 5 reasons why you should implement a ready-to-go intranet instead of developing a custom intranet.

1. Faster implementation

A custom intranet also has a custom implementation process, which often causes all kinds of issues. Ready-to-go intranets are designed to be implemented in a fast and efficient way. Procedures and migration best practices are available for the most commonly used applications, software, servers, databases and operating systems.

Deploying your Involv intranet actually takes less than 1 hour.

2. Less maintenance costs

One of the advantages of a ready-to-go intranet is the availability of standard functionality that would otherwise need custom development. This lowers maintenance costs, as there will be regular updates to fix issues and improve the system. If there is a bug in a custom developed intranet, you will need to find a solution for it yourself. A ready-to-go intranet does not experience these issues.

3. It meets the most important requirements

Organizations often get overwhelmed by the amount of features that is requested by all their different departments. In an ideal world, all of these requirements will be implemented into the new intranet without question and everyone lives happily ever after. In the real world, it is almost impossible to satisfy everyone, especially in large organizations. Even if you did choose to go for a custom intranet, it would most likely still be impossible to meet everyone’s requirements. Concessions are needed either way.

In our experience, the vast majority of requirements is very similar in most organizations. A ready-to-go intranet like Involv contains a solution for the most requested features.

4. There are still customization options

A question organizations often ask us is if they can still make tweaks and changes to the intranet to meet their specific needs. They absolutely can! Involv is a standard solution, but you can still choose to include or exclude certain elements of it. Most elements also have customization options.

We’re constantly asking our customers for feedback, which helps us develop the product even further. Updates are being rolled out to all Involv users automatically.

As Involv has grown from a company that’s been involved in SharePoint projects for more than 10 years, we do offer custom development. So if you do need a custom integration with your existing business applications we’re happy to get this done for you, or you can even ask another third party integrator to do the customizations. There’s no vendor lock in (we don’t like it and neither should you) so you’re free to choose any supplier you want.

5. Less technical knowledge required

Developing and implementing a custom intranet solution can be a real challenge. A lot of specialized technical knowledge and expertise is needed in a variety of areas.

A ready-to-go intranet like Involv requires significantly less technical knowledge, making it easier to implement and manage. Actually it’s been our focus from the start: we wanted Involv to be a platform that was easy to use for end users (less support questions) and easy to manage for IT managers.

A ready-to-go intranet is good enough for most organizations

We are not claiming that a custom intranet has no advantages. In some cases it really is the way to go.
However, our experience has taught us that the functionalities and features a modern ready-to-go intranet offers are more than enough to satisfy the business needs of most organizations.

Try a free demo of Involv and experience it’s possibilities yourself.