Looking for an alternative to SharePoint? There are many modern intranets to consider as alternatives to SharePoint. One choice is LumApps ... but how do the two compare?

LumApps and SharePoint are both popular platforms designed to enhance internal communication and collaboration within organizations, but they have distinct differences in terms of focus, features, and user experience. This article breaks it down.

What is LumApps?

LumApps is an employee intranet known for its user-friendly interface and emphasis on employee engagement. It offers a visually appealing and customizable intranet experience that integrates seamlessly with various business tools. LumApps places a significant emphasis on social features, enabling employees to interact through comments, likes, and shared content. It promotes knowledge sharing, personalization, and news delivery, creating a dynamic and engaging environment. 

LumApps is often chosen for its intuitive design and strong focus on improving internal communication and employee experience. The LumApps intranet integrates with Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, but it helps improve productivity with built-in technology like the ability to self-serve common IT or HR tasks. 

Here’s what makes LumApps distinctive:

• Holistic Employee Experience (EX): We focus on the entire employee journey, ensuring every interaction, from onboarding to daily tasks and career growth, is positive and productive.
• AI-Powered Personalization: LumApps leverages AI to deliver highly relevant content, news, and tools, tailored to each employee's role, location, and interests. Our intelligent digital assistant provides instant support and insights, ensuring information is always contextual and engaging.
• Unified Digital Headquarters: We create a one-stop-shop by deeply integrating with your essential productivity suites like Microsoft 365 (including SharePoint and Teams) and Google Workspace. Plus, connect with over 100 other business applications (HRIS, CRM, ITSM, and more) to centralize access and eliminate context switching.
• Comprehensive Internal Communications: Foster a truly connected culture with robust tools for top-down news, vibrant communities, and easy peer-to-peer sharing. LumApps ensures your messages resonate and employees engaging meaningfully.
• Intelligent Knowledge Management: Our powerful Knowledge Base and microlearning platform facilitate continuous learning, easy access to information, and seamless collective knowledge sharing.
• Mobile-First Design for All: Reach every employee, including frontline and deskless workers, with a strong native mobile application. Access the full intranet experience from any device, anytime, anywhere.
• Scalable & Adaptable: Built for large enterprises, LumApps is highly scalable and offers extensive customization. Create distinct intranet sites for different departments, regions, or brands that grow with your business.
• Trusted Security & Compliance: We adhere to the highest security standards (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR) with robust features like granular access controls and strong encryption, safeguarding your valuable data.
• Industry-Recognized Leadership: LumApps is consistently recognized as a Leader in analyst reports, including the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions and The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms.

LumApps is your partner in building an intelligent, adaptable, and comprehensive intranet that truly empowers employees to understand company goals, act on their work, and grow with the organization.

Which companies use LumApps as an intranet solution ?

LumApps is trusted by a wide range of global enterprises across various industries, from manufacturing and healthcare to retail and technology. These companies choose LumApps to unify their digital workplaces, enhance internal communications, and cultivate a thriving employee experience that often extends beyond what traditional intranets or even core productivity suites like SharePoint can offer on their own.

While the full customer list is extensive, here are some prominent examples of companies that use LumApps as their intranet and employee experience solution:

Leading Organizations Powered by LumApps:

• Ascension: One of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., leveraging LumApps to unify communications and resources across numerous facilities and thousands of associates. They notably moved from a fragmented landscape that included legacy SharePoint sites.
• BMI Group: A leading manufacturer in roofing and waterproofing solutions, relying on LumApps for employee experience.
• Consumer Reports: A well-known independent, non-profit organization that works for consumer justice, utilizing LumApps to cultivate culture, collaboration, and innovation.
• DPG Media: A major media group that uses LumApps to create an authentic employee experience platform for their diverse workforce.
• EllisDon Construction Services Inc: A prominent construction and real estate firm, using LumApps for their employee experience.
• Galeries Lafayette: A historic and influential French retail group, using LumApps to enhance their employee experience.
• Genuine Parts Company: A global distributor of automotive and industrial parts, connecting over 60,000 global employees across 17,000+ locations in 17 countries with LumApps.
• Google: Demonstrating LumApps' strong relationship with Google Cloud, Google itself utilizes LumApps for certain internal purposes, highlighting its scalability and performance.
• Hubert Burda Media: A German media and tech company benefiting from LumApps for a diverse digital workplace.
• IDKIDS: A global children's products group that uses LumApps to centralize and personalize information access for its employees.
• Instructure: A leading educational technology company, using LumApps for streamlined onboarding and internal communications.
• IntouchCX: A global customer experience solutions provider, transforming employee engagement and communication with LumApps.
• John Lewis & Partners: A well-known UK retail group, indicating LumApps' presence in the retail sector.
• Just Eat: A global online food delivery service, showcasing LumApps' use in fast-paced tech environments.
• Kaufman & Broad: A leading real estate developer in France, using LumApps to foster community and collaboration among employees.
• Publicis Sapient: A digital transformation consultancy, utilizing LumApps to deliver a cutting-edge employee experience, including consolidating content from legacy SharePoint sites.
• Pipedrive: A global sales CRM company, connecting their global workforce with LumApps to boost productivity, culture, and engagement.
• Schnuck Markets: A prominent U.S. grocery retailer, relying on LumApps for their employee engagement needs.
• Servier: A global pharmaceutical group that chose LumApps to break through silos and unify communication, integrating with their Microsoft 365 environment including SharePoint.
• The Economist: A highly respected global news and analysis publication, demonstrating LumApps' appeal to media companies.
• Thoughtworks: A global technology consultancy that achieved a unified digital hub across 14 countries with LumApps, consolidating various platforms.
• Veolia: A global leader in optimized resource management, using LumApps to unify an ecosystem of internal websites across a large workforce.
• Vilavi: An expert insurance and credit broker based in France, who saw increased engagement and content contributions after implementing LumApps.
• Zapier: A leading automation platform, using LumApps to scale up internal communication operations for their fully distributed team.
• Zendesk: A global leader in customer service software, also leveraging LumApps for their internal needs.

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What is SharePoint?

Sharepoint is a collaboration platform created by Microsoft that offers features like document management, team sites, workflow automation, and content sharing. The name comes from the ability for employees to “Share a Point of view.” The key strength of SharePoint is the document management system and its ability to connect with Microsoft Teams. While it supports intranet capabilities, SharePoint caters more to business needs like managing documents and building custom applications. SharePoint is deeply integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem, which can be advantageous for organizations already using Microsoft tools.

Are companies satisfied with SharePoint as an intranet ? Benefits & Disadvantages

While SharePoint is widely used and offers significant capabilities, particularly within the Microsoft ecosystem, various reports and user reviews suggest a mixed picture regarding overall satisfaction, especially when it comes to delivering a comprehensive and engaging employee experience.

Here's an overview based on recent insights and statistics:

Evidence of Satisfaction and Strengths:

• Broad Adoption and Core Functionality: SharePoint is a foundational platform for many organizations, especially those heavily invested in Microsoft 365. Its strengths in document management, version control, and integration with other Microsoft tools (like Teams and OneDrive) are frequently cited as valuable.
  • Gartner Peer Insights (as of 2025): Microsoft SharePoint generally receives positive ratings from users. For instance, it has an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 249 ratings (all time), with 46% giving 5 stars and 48% giving 4 stars. Users often praise its robust document management, collaboration features, security, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications. (Source: Gartner Peer Insights - Microsoft SharePoint Reviews, Ratings & Features 2025)
  • Appy Pie Automate Review (May 2025): Reviews highlight SharePoint's effectiveness in centralizing collaboration, organizing documents with version control and metadata, customizable sites, workflows and automation (via Power Automate), and security/permissions management.
• Modernization Efforts: Microsoft has continually invested in modernizing SharePoint experiences, focusing on user-friendly interfaces, site templates, and improved performance, which has positively impacted user perception.
  • Content Formula (October 2024): This source emphasizes that modern SharePoint experiences, with their attractive designs and easier publishing interfaces, are central to its improvement. It also notes SharePoint's flexibility and scalability, being used by companies of various sizes (100 to 100,000 employees).
• AI Integration: The ongoing integration of AI (e.g., Microsoft Copilot) is seen as a promising development for enhancing search, content creation, and overall user experience within SharePoint intranets.

Challenges and Areas for Improvement (Leading to Mixed Satisfaction):

Despite its strengths, several reports and reviews point to common challenges that can limit overall satisfaction with SharePoint as a standalone intranet solution:

• "Platform vs. Ready-to-Run Intranet": A significant theme is that SharePoint is often viewed more as a platform for building an intranet rather than a complete, out-of-the-box intranet solution. This implies additional effort, cost, and expertise are required to configure it to meet specific organizational needs.
  • Forrester (February 2025, via LumApps Blog): "SharePoint is not a ready-to-run intranet, it is a platform on which an intranet can be configured and there will be costs involved." Forrester also suggests that SharePoint needs to "prioritize the development of features considered standard in the intranet platform market."
  • Reworked (March 2025): States that "SharePoint is not a content management system (CMS)" but rather a "page builder." It notes that building an intranet with SharePoint requires a fundamental shift in approach, often lacking a centralized "back-end" for content management like a traditional CMS.
• User Experience (UX) and Engagement Gaps: While functional, SharePoint can sometimes fall short in delivering a truly personalized, engaging, and intuitive employee experience compared to specialized intranet platforms.
  • SWOOP Analytics (February 2024 Intranet Benchmarking Report): While 86% of employees visit the intranet (primarily SharePoint), the median time spent reading news per day is only 18 seconds, and content pages receive a median of 7 minutes. This suggests a challenge in sustained engagement, prompting the need to tailor content for brief attention spans. The report also found that 98.37% of employees access the intranet via desktop, with very low mobile usage (1.45% phone, 0.15% tablet), indicating potential limitations in its mobile experience.
  • Forrester (February 2025, via LumApps Blog): Mentions that "SharePoint satisfaction is notoriously low. Studies show that upwards of 80% of users are disappointed with its capabilities." Specific issues cited include:
    • Lack of personalization (non-profiled, no capacity for unique tailored experiences).
    • Poor UX and content management.
    • Constraints on design and branding.
    • Subpar mobile experience, described in reviews as "uncomfortable," "virtually unreadable," and "horrific."
    • Limited integration with non-Microsoft apps and third-party tools.
• Complexity and Learning Curve: Organizations, especially those without dedicated SharePoint expertise, often face a steep learning curve and significant technical hurdles in managing and customizing the platform.
  • Cognit Consulting (September 2024): Highlights challenges such as a "steep learning curve," risks of "incorrect structure and architecture" without deep understanding, "frustration" among team members, and "time and resource overrun."
  • Intranet Connections (February 2024): Claims that SharePoint has "limited customization options," "high costs and resource requirements," "poor integration with non-Microsoft products," and "lack of mobile optimization." It also points out the complexity of managing permissions and the difficulty in finding new sites due to SharePoint's complex structure.
• Governance and Content Management: Without robust governance strategies and additional tools, SharePoint can become a "digital dumping ground," leading to fragmented information and discovery challenges.
  • Akumina (Source from Google Search, publication time not specified but recent): States that "SharePoint's architecture creates fundamental experience problems for users," including "fragmented content architecture," "siloed information," and "discovery challenges." It also points to "limited governance capabilities" and "insufficient analytics to understand user engagement."

While SharePoint is a powerful and highly capable platform for document management and collaboration, especially within a Microsoft-centric environment, achieving high satisfaction as a full-fledged intranet often requires significant investment in customization, governance, and potentially third-party solutions to address common pain points related to user experience, personalization, mobile access, and broader integration.

Organizations that leverage SharePoint often find success by understanding its core strengths as a platform and strategically supplementing it to create a truly connected and engaging employee hub.

Disadvantages of building, creating & using SharePoint as an intranet site

Here are the key disadvantages of using SharePoint as your primary intranet:

1. Complex Setup, Customization, and Maintenance:
   
   • High Complexity: Out-of-the-box SharePoint requires significant IT expertise and time to set up, configure permissions, design workflows, and manage system updates effectively. It's not a "plug-and-play" intranet solution.
   • Costly Customization: Achieving a truly branded, personalized, and user-friendly experience often demands extensive custom development, which can be very expensive. Sourcing skilled SharePoint developers can be challenging and costly.
   • Ongoing Maintenance Burden: SharePoint demands continuous maintenance, including regular updates, security patches, and performance tuning. Customizations often break with updates, leading to additional rework and IT workload.
2. Steep Learning Curve and Poor User Adoption:
   
   • Overwhelming Interface: SharePoint's vast array of features and settings can be overwhelming for end-users, especially non-technical employees. Its interface is often criticized for being less intuitive and user-friendly than modern communication platforms.
   • Extensive Training Required: To truly leverage its capabilities, employees require significant training, which adds to costs and can slow down adoption. Many users may revert to familiar but less efficient tools like email or local drives if they find it too difficult.
   • Low Engagement: If employees struggle to navigate or find the platform relevant, usage and engagement rates will naturally suffer, leading to a largely underutilized investment.
3. Limited Mobile Experience (for a Modern Workforce):
   
   • Not Mobile-First: While SharePoint has a mobile app and is responsive, its functionality and user experience on mobile devices are often clunky and limited compared to dedicated mobile-first intranet solutions.
   • Neglects Frontline/Deskless Workers: For a significant portion of the modern workforce (retail, manufacturing, healthcare, etc.) who don't have regular desktop access, SharePoint's mobile limitations create a massive communication and information gap, leading to disengagement and confusion.
4. Challenges with Internal Communications & Personalization:
   
   • Static and Generic Communication: SharePoint excels at document storage, but it isn't fundamentally designed for dynamic, multi-channel internal communications. It struggles to deliver personalized news feeds and targeted content based on an employee's role, location, or interests. All employees often see the same information, leading to information overload and a lack of relevance.
   • Poor Engagement Tracking: SharePoint's native analytics are often basic, providing page views and popular content but lacking deep insights into employee engagement, content effectiveness, or communication reach. This makes it hard for internal communicators to measure impact and refine strategies.
   • Limited Two-Way Communication: While it has discussion boards, SharePoint lacks the intuitive social features (e.g., commenting, reactions, direct messaging within a feed) that foster genuine two-way dialogue and community building across the organization.
5. Ineffective Knowledge Discovery and Information Silos:
   
   • Subpar Search Functionality: SharePoint's search capabilities can be notoriously limited and highly dependent on how it's set up. Users often struggle to find specific documents amidst hundreds of irrelevant files or outdated versions, leading to wasted time and frustration.
   • Fragmented Information: While it manages documents, SharePoint's site-based structure can sometimes create information silos if not meticulously governed, making it difficult to find information across different teams or departments. This hinders holistic knowledge management and transfer.
6. Dependency on IT & Slower Processes:
   
   • IT Bottleneck: Due to its complexity, any significant changes, updates, or even minor content management tasks often require IT intervention, creating bottlenecks and delaying communication or content updates.
   • Slower Adoption of New Features: Decisions on future features and platform direction are made by Microsoft, not by the organization using it. This can lead to a lack of agility in adapting to evolving business needs or employee expectations.
7. Hidden Costs:
   
   • While included in Microsoft 365 plans, the true cost of using SharePoint as a comprehensive intranet often escalates quickly due to extensive customization, third-party add-ons, ongoing maintenance, IT support, and extensive employee training.

In summary, while SharePoint remains an indispensable tool for document management and collaboration within the Microsoft ecosystem, its inherent design often makes it challenging to deploy as a truly engaging, user-friendly, and comprehensive intranet for the modern, diverse workforce without significant additional investment and effort. This is precisely why many organizations seek out dedicated intranet and employee experience platforms to augment SharePoint's capabilities.

What is the difference between LumApps & SharePoint?

LumApps and SharePoint are quite different. LumApps is an employee intranet at its core, and SharePoint is more of a document management system at its core. SharePoint is best known as a document sharing platform, and has to be configured and developed to provide intranet functionality.

LumApps is an employee intranet that allows for both top-down communication and bottom-up communication where employees can create posts, comment, share, and engage with posts from coworkers.

LumApps intranet integrates with Microsoft Teams you can use your existing Microsoft Teams logins and share updates across both platforms - your LumApps intranet or send a blast through Microsoft Teams channels. This is helpful because you can broadcast news onto Teams channels, quickly notifying users of important content and meeting them where they are working.

LumApps excels in user-friendly design and engagement-focused intranet capabilities, while SharePoint offers strong document management, workflow automation, and application development.

The choice between LumApps and SharePoint depends on an organization's specific requirements, preferences, and existing technology landscape. Here’s a complete overview to compare the features offered by LumApps and SharePoint. See how they compare to choose the best solution for your company.

Which companies use SharePoint as an intranet web portal? Company & Corporate intranet Examples

SharePoint, being a core part of Microsoft 365, is one of the most widely used platforms for building intranets, particularly within organizations that are heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many companies leverage SharePoint for its robust document management, collaboration features, and integration with other Microsoft applications. 

It's important to note that "using SharePoint as an intranet web portal" can mean different things:

1. "Out-of-the-Box" SharePoint Intranet: Companies use SharePoint Online (or sometimes on-premises SharePoint Server) with minimal customization, relying on its standard communication sites, team sites, and hub sites to create their intranet. This is common for smaller to mid-sized organizations or those seeking a quick, cost-effective solution.
2. Highly Customized SharePoint Intranet: Larger enterprises often undertake significant customization, branding, and development on top of SharePoint to create a more tailored and comprehensive intranet experience. This can involve extensive coding, custom web parts, and integrations.
3. SharePoint as a Backend for a "Packaged" Intranet Solution: Many intranet-in-a-box providers (like LiveTiles, Powell Software, Omnia, and even LumApps, as we discussed) use SharePoint as their underlying platform for document storage, security, and integration with Microsoft 365, while providing a more engaging, user-friendly, and feature-rich front-end.

Given its widespread adoption with Microsoft 365, countless companies of all sizes utilize SharePoint in one of these capacities for their intranet. It's less about specific "brands" exclusively using SharePoint as a standalone out-of-the-box intranet, and more about the vast number of organizations whose digital workplace strategy includes SharePoint as a foundational component.

However, based on public mentions and common knowledge, here are examples of company types or widely cited examples where SharePoint plays a significant role in their intranet:

• Large Enterprises already heavily invested in Microsoft 365:
  
  • Many Fortune 500 companies leverage Microsoft 365 extensively, and naturally, SharePoint becomes a core part of their internal communication and collaboration infrastructure.
  • Government Agencies & Public Sector organizations: Often choose Microsoft solutions for security, compliance, and existing infrastructure.
  • Healthcare providers: Utilize SharePoint for document control, policy management, and internal communication (e.g., HCA has used SharePoint for intranets).
  • Financial Services firms: Rely on SharePoint for its robust security, compliance features, and document management for sensitive data.
  • Manufacturing and Engineering companies: Use it for project documentation, quality management systems, and internal communication across distributed sites.
• Specific Examples (often cited in case studies by Microsoft partners):
  
  • NASA: Has used SharePoint for various internal collaboration and content management needs.
  • Nestlé: Reportedly uses SharePoint as part of their internal digital workplace.
  • IKEA: Has leveraged SharePoint for internal communications and collaboration.
  • Janssen Pharmaceuticals: A company that revamped its SharePoint intranet to boost adoption and knowledge sharing (as per Content Formula case study).
  • Jaguar Land Rover: Used SharePoint for a global internal news site for 30,000 employees.
  • Johnson & Johnson: Undertook a SharePoint intranet consolidation project to harmonize their business.

It's important to remember that these larger companies often have complex digital ecosystems, and while SharePoint is a core component, they might also integrate it with other specialized tools (like LumApps or other intranet-in-a-box solutions) to enhance the overall employee experience. Smaller and mid-sized businesses might opt for a more "out-of-the-box" or lightly customized SharePoint intranet due to budget and resource constraints.

LumApps vs Microsoft SharePoint : Intranet Features Overview

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Content Management

Choosing the ideal intranet for content management is about finding the right balance of capabilities that align with an organization's specific needs. Both LumApps and SharePoint offer robust features, but they approach content management from different core strengths.

LumApps: The Connected Employee Hub

LumApps is built as a complete employee experience platform, prioritizing communication, engagement, and a personalized user experience. Its content management capabilities are deeply integrated with this focus, aiming to deliver relevant information efficiently to employees.

Key Content Management Capabilities of LumApps:

• Intuitive Content Creation & Publishing: LumApps offers an intuitive editor and pre-built widgets, making it easy for content creators—including non-technical users—to create and publish news updates, policies, and knowledge articles.
• Personalized Content Delivery: Leveraging AI and user profiling, LumApps excels at delivering highly relevant content. It tailors news feeds and notifications based on an individual's role, location, department, interests, and past interactions.⁷ This helps cut through information overload, ensuring content resonates with the right audience.⁸
• Rich Media Management: LumApps features "LumApps Play" for secure and smart enterprise video management. This allows for easy video upload, secure sharing, adaptive streaming, and integration of videos into news feeds and communities, complete with analytics.
• Community-Driven Content: The platform fosters social communities where employees can share knowledge, create user-generated content, and engage with posts through comments and likes. This bottom-up communication enhances content diversity and relevance.
• Streamlined Workflows: LumApps offers workflow capabilities to manage content lifecycle, including multi-step workflows, task assignments, and validation processes for individuals and groups.This supports governance and traceability for critical information.
• Enterprise Search: An AI-powered search function helps employees quickly find information across various content types within the platform.
• Multi-Language Support: LumApps supports multi-language content, crucial for global organizations to ensure all employees receive information in their preferred language.

SharePoint: The Document Management Powerhouse

SharePoint, at its core, is a document management system that can be configured to function as an intranet. Its strengths lie in its deep integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, robust document control, and powerful automation capabilities.

Key Content Management Capabilities of SharePoint:

• Comprehensive Document Management: SharePoint provides extensive features for document storage, organization, and version control. This includes tracking changes, check-in/check-out functionality, and robust security settings to control who can access and edit files at various levels (site, folder, document).
• Metadata and Content Types: SharePoint excels in classifying documents using metadata and content types. This allows for detailed tagging and categorization, improving search accuracy and compliance.
• Workflow Automation (via Power Automate): SharePoint integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Power Automate, enabling organizations to build complex content approval workflows, automate routine tasks, and streamline document-centric processes.²⁰ This includes conditional routing, multi-stage approvals, and automated notifications.
• Collaboration Features: SharePoint supports real-time co-authoring of documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), making collaborative content creation efficient. Its integration with Microsoft Teams further enhances team collaboration.
• Records Management: SharePoint offers robust features for managing record retention and compliance, including a Records Center to ensure adherence to internal policies and external regulations.
• Enterprise Search: SharePoint provides powerful search capabilities to locate documents, conversations, and information across sites and libraries, with options for custom configurations.
• Web Content Management (WCM): SharePoint's WCM capabilities allow for creating, managing, and publishing web content, suitable for internal intranets and communication sites. This includes templates and page layouts for consistent branding.

Winner : NC

Determining an "objective winner" depends heavily on the primary use case and organizational priorities.

• For organizations prioritizing a highly engaging, personalized, and employee-centric digital experience with strong internal communications and social features, LumApps is the objective winner. It's designed from the ground up as an employee experience platform, offering out-of-the-box solutions for personalized content delivery, rich media management, and community building, requiring less custom development to achieve these goals. Its intuitive user interface and focus on employee adoption make it a powerful tool for fostering connection and culture.
• For organizations whose core need is robust, granular document management, sophisticated workflow automation, and deep integration within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, SharePoint remains the objective winner. SharePoint excels as a content repository, offering unparalleled control over documents, versions, and permissions. While it can be configured to serve as an intranet, it often requires significant customization and IT resources to build a truly engaging and personalized employee experience comparable to LumApps.

In essence:

• Choose LumApps if: Your priority is to create a dynamic, personalized, and engaging digital workplace that boosts internal communication and fosters a strong company culture, with intuitive content creation for all employees.
• Choose SharePoint if: Your primary need is advanced document management, compliance, and highly customizable workflow automation, especially if you are heavily invested in the Microsoft 365 suite and have the technical resources for customization.

Many organizations find success in a hybrid approach, using SharePoint for its document management strengths and integrating LumApps as the engaging front-end for their personalized employee experience. This leverages the best of both platforms to create a truly connected and efficient digital workplace.

Employee Advocacy / Social Advocacy

In the evolving digital workplace, employee advocacy, or social advocacy, has become a powerful strategy for amplifying brand reach and attracting talent. It's about empowering employees to share company-approved content on their personal social networks, turning them into authentic brand ambassadors. Let's compare LumApps and SharePoint on their capabilities in this area.

LumApps: Built for Social Advocacy

LumApps, as an employee experience platform, places a strong emphasis on communication, engagement, and fostering a sense of community. Its approach to employee advocacy is deeply integrated into its core functionality, making it a natural fit for programs designed to turn employees into brand champions.

Key Employee Advocacy Capabilities of LumApps:

• Dedicated Social Advocacy Module: LumApps offers a specific module designed for employee advocacy. This module allows companies to curate and distribute company-approved content directly to employees within their daily news feed.
• One-Click Sharing: Employees can easily share content to their personal social media networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) with a single click from within the LumApps platform.
• Guided Sharing and Brand Control: To ensure brand consistency, LumApps allows organizations to provide suggested text, guidelines, and even pre-set captions and hashtags for shared content. This balances employee authenticity with brand messaging.
• Analytics and Measurement: The platform provides dashboards and analytics to track the performance of advocacy programs. This includes insights into brand amplification, content that resonates, and employee engagement, allowing organizations to measure ROI and optimize their strategy.
• Incentivization and Gamification: LumApps supports incentivizing employee participation through rewards, leaderboards, and gamification features, encouraging active sharing and engagement.
• Mobile-First Experience: With a robust native mobile app, LumApps ensures that all employees, including deskless and frontline workers, can easily access and amplify corporate messages from any device.
• Seamless Integration with Internal Content: LumApps leverages the rich content already present on the intranet (news, articles, videos) and makes it easily shareable, reducing the effort for content creators.

SharePoint: Foundation, but Needs Augmentation

SharePoint, while a powerful platform for document management and internal collaboration, is not inherently designed as a dedicated employee advocacy tool. Its social features are primarily focused on internal collaboration (e.g., Yammer, now Viva Engage) rather than external brand amplification.

Key Considerations for Employee Advocacy with SharePoint:

• Internal Social Features (Viva Engage/Yammer): SharePoint integrates with Viva Engage (formerly Yammer), which offers internal social networking capabilities. Employees can share updates, join communities, and discuss topics within the company. While this fosters internal communication, it does not directly facilitate external social sharing for advocacy purposes.
• Content Creation and Distribution: SharePoint can host and manage content that could be shared externally. However, it lacks the specialized tools for easy, one-click external sharing, brand-controlled messaging, and analytics specifically for employee advocacy campaigns.
• Manual Sharing and External Tools: To enable employee advocacy with SharePoint, organizations typically need to rely on manual processes (e.g., employees copying links from SharePoint to paste on social media) or integrate with third-party employee advocacy platforms (e.g., Sprinklr, EveryoneSocial, Sociabble). These external tools provide the missing functionalities like curated content feeds, social network integrations, and advocacy analytics.
• Permissions and Governance: While SharePoint has robust permissions, configuring them for widespread external sharing in a controlled manner for advocacy can be more complex than with a dedicated advocacy platform.

Objective Winner

LumApps is the objective winner for Employee Advocacy/Social Advocacy capabilities.

LumApps is purpose-built with features that directly address the needs of an employee advocacy program. It provides a seamless, integrated experience for curating content, empowering employees to share it easily with brand control, and measuring the impact of their efforts. Its focus on the employee experience naturally extends to turning employees into passionate brand ambassadors.

SharePoint, on the other hand, provides the content that could be advocated, but it lacks the out-of-the-box functionality to effectively manage and enable a comprehensive employee advocacy program for external social networks. Achieving robust social advocacy with SharePoint typically requires significant custom development or, more commonly, the integration of a specialized third-party employee advocacy platform. While SharePoint can be a foundational piece of the content infrastructure, it doesn't offer the specialized toolkit that LumApps provides for social advocacy.

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User interface and User Experience

LumApps: The Modern, Employee-Centric Experience

LumApps is purpose-built as an employee experience platform, and its UI/UX reflects this core mission. It's designed to be intuitive, engaging, and highly personalized, prioritizing the end-user's daily interactions.

Key UI/UX Capabilities of LumApps:

• Intuitive and Modern Design: LumApps boasts a clean, contemporary interface that often mirrors popular social media platforms and consumer-grade applications. This familiarity makes it easier for employees to adapt and encourages natural interaction. It's built to be visually appealing and easy to navigate from the first login.
• Personalization as a Core Feature: A standout feature of LumApps is its ability to deliver a highly personalized experience. Content, news feeds, and relevant applications are tailored to individual roles, departments, locations, and interests. This reduces information overload and ensures employees see what's most relevant to them, enhancing usability and engagement.
• Mobile-First Approach: LumApps is designed with a strong mobile-first philosophy, offering robust native mobile applications. This ensures a seamless and optimized experience across various devices (smartphones, tablets), catering to deskless workers and those on the go. The responsiveness and functionality on mobile devices are a significant UX advantage.
• Drag-and-Drop Content Creation: Content creation is made simple with intuitive drag-and-drop editors and pre-built widgets. This empowers non-technical users to create engaging content without needing IT support, fostering more dynamic and fresh content on the intranet.
• Consistent Branding and Customization: LumApps allows for extensive branding and customization to align the intranet's look and feel with the company's unique identity. This creates a cohesive and immersive brand experience for employees.
• Integrated Employee Journeys: The platform can guide employees through various stages (onboarding, career development) with personalized content and timely notifications, creating a structured and supportive user journey.
• AI-Powered Search and Discovery: LumApps often incorporates AI-powered search capabilities, making it easier for employees to find information quickly across the platform. This reduces frustration and improves efficiency.

SharePoint: The Foundation for Customization

SharePoint, while a robust platform, is primarily a document management and collaboration tool. Its UI/UX, especially in its out-of-the-box form, often reflects its functional origins, requiring more configuration and customization to achieve a highly engaging and intuitive intranet experience.

Key UI/UX Considerations for SharePoint:

• Functional but Less "Out-of-the-Box" Engaging: SharePoint's modern sites offer a more visually appealing experience than older versions. However, it typically starts as a collection of sites and libraries, and building a truly cohesive and engaging intranet requires significant design effort, information architecture planning, and customization using web parts.
• Deep Integration with Microsoft 365: A key UX advantage of SharePoint is its deep integration with other Microsoft 365 applications (Teams, OneDrive, Outlook). This creates a familiar environment for users already working within the Microsoft ecosystem, allowing for seamless transitions between applications.
• Customization Requires Technical Expertise: While SharePoint is highly customizable, achieving a tailored and polished UI/UX often requires IT resources, developers, or skilled power users. Customizing layouts, themes, and complex functionalities can involve coding (e.g., CSS, SharePoint Framework - SPFx), which can be a barrier for non-technical administrators.
• Document-Centric Navigation: SharePoint's navigation is often structured around documents, libraries, and sites. While excellent for document management, it can sometimes feel less intuitive for a broader "employee hub" experience focused on news, communication, and personalized content.
• Mobile Experience Requires Optimization: While SharePoint offers mobile access, the out-of-the-box mobile experience might not be as optimized or as feature-rich as dedicated employee experience platforms like LumApps. Customization is often needed to ensure a truly seamless mobile UI/UX.
• Varied User Experience (Depending on Implementation): The UI/UX of a SharePoint intranet can vary widely from one organization to another, depending on the level of investment in design, customization, and ongoing governance. This can lead to inconsistent experiences for employees if not meticulously managed.

Objective Winner : LumApps

LumApps is the objective winner for out-of-the-box intranet UI/UX capabilities.

LumApps is explicitly designed to be an intuitive, engaging, and personalized employee experience platform. Its modern design, mobile-first approach, and emphasis on delivering relevant content seamlessly to each employee make for a superior user experience from day one. It requires less effort and technical expertise to create a visually appealing and highly usable intranet that employees will genuinely want to use. 

SharePoint, while incredibly powerful for document management and collaboration within the Microsoft ecosystem, serves more as a robust platform upon which a great intranet can be built. Achieving a compelling UI/UX with SharePoint typically demands significant upfront design, development, and ongoing maintenance. Without this investment, the out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet can feel more functional and less engaging compared to LumApps.

Therefore, if the primary goal is to provide an immediately appealing, intuitive, and highly personalized user experience for all employees with minimal setup complexity, LumApps stands out. If the organization's core need is a flexible foundation for deep document management and highly customized solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, and it has the resources to invest in significant UI/UX customization, SharePoint can certainly be leveraged, but it won't offer the same "out-of-the-box" user-centric appeal.

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Social intranet features

LumApps places a strong emphasis on creating a vibrant social intranet environment. It offers features like news feeds, commenting, liking, and sharing capabilities. These social features encourage real-time interactions among employees, facilitating knowledge sharing, discussions, and feedback. LumApps has community spaces to create collaborative groups or even affinity groups to increase camaraderie around topics outside of work.

LumApps’ native social functionalities create a dynamic space for idea exchange, team updates, and informal communication, enhancing overall engagement and collaboration.

While versatile in many collaboration aspects, SharePoint offers social features as a part of its broader collaboration ecosystem rather than a primary focus. It includes features like news articles and comments, but these are integrated within its larger framework of document management, team sites, and workflow automation.

LumApps: The Social-First Employee Experience Platform

LumApps is designed from its foundation as an employee experience platform, with social interaction and community building as core pillars. It aims to foster a vibrant, connected digital culture.

Key Social Intranet Capabilities of LumApps:

• Vibrant Community Spaces: LumApps excels at creating diverse social and interest-based communities. Employees can easily create, join, and participate in groups focused on projects, departments, hobbies, or shared interests. These spaces support discussions, document sharing, and media exchange.
• Interactive News Feeds: The platform features highly interactive and personalized news feeds where employees can post updates, articles, videos, and images. Users can comment, like, share, and mention colleagues, fostering a dynamic two-way communication flow.
• Employee-Generated Content: LumApps empowers employees to become content creators. They can easily publish their own posts, articles, and even videos, contributing to a richer, more diverse content landscape and promoting knowledge sharing from the ground up.
• Rich Media Sharing: LumApps supports easy sharing of various media types, including images and videos (via LumApps Play). This makes communication more engaging and allows for diverse forms of expression within the platform.
• Employee Recognition & Gamification: The platform includes features for employee recognition, such as "shout-outs," badges, and leaderboards, to celebrate achievements and foster a culture of appreciation. This gamification encourages participation and positive social interactions.
• User Profiles and Directory: Detailed employee profiles with information about skills, expertise, and interests encourage connections and make it easier for colleagues to find and collaborate with each other. A comprehensive employee directory supports this.
• Native Mobile Experience: With a strong mobile application, LumApps ensures that social interactions are accessible to all employees, including frontline and deskless workers, wherever they are, fostering consistent engagement.
• Targeted Communication & Personalization: While social, LumApps also supports targeted communication, ensuring that relevant content and discussions reach specific groups or individuals, enhancing the social experience by reducing noise.
• Idea Management and Feedback: LumApps can incorporate features for collecting feedback, running surveys, and managing ideas, turning the social intranet into a hub for innovation and continuous improvement.

SharePoint: Foundation for Collaboration, Requires Augmentation for "Social"

SharePoint is a powerful platform for document management, team collaboration, and building structured communication sites. While it has evolved to include social elements, its core strength isn't out-of-the-box, free-flowing social interaction in the same way LumApps is designed. SharePoint often relies on integration with other Microsoft 365 tools, primarily Viva Engage (formerly Yammer), to provide robust social capabilities.

Key Social Intranet Considerations for SharePoint:

• Microsoft Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) Integration: This is SharePoint's primary engine for enterprise social networking. Viva Engage provides a Facebook-like experience with public and private communities, news feeds, polls, Q&A, and discussions. When integrated with SharePoint, it can provide the social layer. However, it's a separate application that needs to be actively used and governed.
• Team Sites and Communication Sites: SharePoint's "Team Sites" facilitate collaboration on documents and tasks within specific teams, often including shared news feeds and discussion boards. "Communication Sites" are designed for top-down information dissemination with commenting features. While these support interaction, they are more structured than the free-form social feeds found in dedicated social platforms.
• News and Announcements: SharePoint allows for publishing news articles and announcements on intranet pages, with options for comments and likes. This provides a basic level of interaction around corporate communications.
• User Profiles (Delve/Profile Cards): SharePoint integrates with Microsoft 365 user profiles (often surfaced through Delve), allowing employees to find information about colleagues, their skills, and recent activities. This supports discovery and connection.
• Content Liking, Commenting, Sharing: Basic social interactions like liking pages, news posts, and documents, as well as commenting, are available within SharePoint sites.
• Wikis and Blogs: SharePoint supports the creation of wikis for collaborative knowledge bases and blogs for individual or team insights, encouraging content contributions.
• Customization for Social: While SharePoint can be customized to enhance social elements (e.g., custom web parts for activity feeds), achieving a truly rich and integrated social experience often requires significant development effort and expertise.

Objective Winner : LumApps

LumApps is the objective winner for out-of-the-box, comprehensive social intranet capabilities.

LumApps is specifically engineered to foster a highly engaging, personalized, and truly social employee experience. Its intuitive interface, focus on community building, easy content sharing, and built-in recognition features make it naturally conducive to creating a vibrant and active social intranet. It empowers employees to connect, share knowledge, and build relationships with minimal friction.

SharePoint, while an essential platform within the Microsoft ecosystem for document management and structured collaboration, relies heavily on its integration with Viva Engage (Yammer) to deliver a full-fledged social intranet experience. Without this integration, SharePoint's native social features are more basic and geared towards structured team collaboration rather than broad, spontaneous social interaction and community building across the entire organization. Achieving a truly dynamic social intranet with SharePoint often means managing two distinct platforms (SharePoint for content/sites, Viva Engage for social) and potentially requiring significant customization to create a unified user experience.

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While versatile in many collaboration aspects, SharePoint offers social features as a part of its broader collaboration ecosystem rather than a primary focus. It includes features like news articles and comments, but these are integrated within its larger framework of document management, team sites, and workflow automation. 

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Customization and Branding

Customization and branding are critical for an intranet to truly reflect an organization's identity, reinforce its culture, and provide a familiar and intuitive experience for employees. Both LumApps and SharePoint offer capabilities in this area, but they approach it with different philosophies and levels of complexity.

LumApps: Branding at its Core, User-Friendly Customization

LumApps is built as an employee experience platform, meaning a strong emphasis is placed on delivering a visually appealing, branded, and personalized interface from the outset. Its customization options are designed to be accessible to business users, not just IT professionals.

Key Customization & Branding Capabilities of LumApps:

• Extensive Branding Options: LumApps allows for comprehensive branding of the entire intranet. This includes applying corporate logos, brand colors, fonts, background images, and custom layouts to create a visually cohesive experience that aligns perfectly with the company's brand guidelines.
• Theme Management & Templates: The platform offers robust theme management capabilities and a library of customizable templates for pages, news articles, and community spaces. This ensures consistency while allowing for quick content creation and deployment.
• Personalized User Interface: Beyond global branding, LumApps excels in personalization. It allows for different experiences (e.g., specific news feeds, relevant applications, unique layouts) to be delivered to different employee groups based on their role, location, department, or preferences. This means the branding can subtly adapt to resonate more deeply with diverse audiences within the company.
• Low-Code/No-Code Customization: Many of LumApps' customization features are accessible through intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces and configuration settings, empowering internal communications, HR, and marketing teams to manage the look and feel without heavy reliance on IT or developers.
• Widget-Based Design: LumApps utilizes a modular, widget-based design. Administrators can easily add, remove, and configure various widgets (e.g., news feeds, quick links, events calendars, social feeds) to build custom page layouts and tailor the functionality of different sections of the intranet.
• Multi-Brand / Multi-Tenant Support: For larger enterprises or those with multiple distinct brands, LumApps can be configured to support different branded instances or portals within a single platform, ensuring each segment of the workforce experiences a relevant and branded environment.
• Seamless Integration Branding: When integrating with other business applications (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), LumApps aims to provide a seamless visual experience, making external tools feel like a natural part of the branded intranet.

SharePoint: Powerful, but Development-Intensive Customization

SharePoint, especially its modern experience, has made significant strides in improving out-of-the-box branding compared to its classic versions. However, its true power in customization often lies in its extensibility through development, making it more suited for organizations with strong IT capabilities.

Key Customization & Branding Capabilities of SharePoint:

• Theming and Site Designs: Modern SharePoint allows for changing themes (colors, fonts) and applying site designs to create a consistent look across sites. Organizations can create custom themes using JSON and make them available for site owners to apply.
• Custom Page Layouts and Web Parts (SharePoint Framework - SPFx): For deeper customization beyond basic theming, SharePoint supports the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). This allows developers to build custom web parts, extensions, and application pages that can integrate with SharePoint data and offer tailored functionality and branding. This offers immense flexibility, but requires coding skills.
• Hub Sites for Consistent Branding: SharePoint Hub Sites allow organizations to connect multiple sites and apply a consistent theme, navigation, and search across them. This helps in creating a more unified intranet experience across different departments or projects.
• Site Templates: Organizations can create custom site templates that pre-define layouts, web parts, and content, ensuring consistency when new sites are created.
• Integration with Microsoft 365 Branding: SharePoint automatically inherits some branding elements from the broader Microsoft 365 tenant settings (e.g., company logo in the suite bar), contributing to a unified experience across Microsoft applications.
• CSS and JavaScript for Visual Tweaks: While not recommended for major structural changes, custom CSS and JavaScript can be injected (with caution and often through SPFx extensions) to fine-tune the visual appearance and add custom interactive elements.
• Metadata and Content Types for Structure: While not strictly visual branding, SharePoint's strong metadata and content type capabilities allow for a highly structured information architecture, which indirectly contributes to a more organized and predictable user experience, albeit on the back-end.

Objective Winner

LumApps is the objective winner for out-of-the-box, user-friendly customization and branding, especially for building a highly personalized and visually cohesive employee experience.

LumApps is designed to put powerful branding and personalization capabilities directly into the hands of business users (e.g., HR, Internal Comms, Marketing) through intuitive interfaces. It prioritizes creating an immediate, engaging, and branded digital home for employees with less reliance on technical development. Its ability to personalize the experience for different user segments while maintaining overall brand consistency is a significant advantage.

SharePoint offers incredible flexibility for customization, but unlocking its full potential for advanced branding and tailored UI/UX generally requires significant investment in IT resources, development (using SPFx), and ongoing maintenance. While modern SharePoint has improved, achieving a polished, highly branded, and personalized employee experience similar to LumApps often means going beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities and embarking on a development project.

Therefore, if the goal is to quickly deploy a visually stunning, highly branded, and personalized intranet that's easy for non-technical teams to manage and update, LumApps is the clear choice. If an organization has a strong existing Microsoft ecosystem, in-house SharePoint developers, and unique, complex customization requirements that can justify the development effort, SharePoint provides a robust platform for such bespoke solutions.

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Intranet Integration Capabilities (with Google Workspace or Microsoft)

Seamless integration with other business applications is a cornerstone of a modern intranet, transforming it from a static information repository into a dynamic digital workplace.¹ The ability to connect with productivity suites (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace), HR systems, CRM, and other essential tools determines how efficiently employees can access information and complete tasks. Let's compare LumApps and SharePoint on their integration capabilities.

LumApps: The Hub for a Connected Digital Ecosystem

LumApps is designed to be the central "home" for employees, pulling information and functionalities from various business applications into a unified, personalized experience. It prioritizes creating a cohesive digital workplace, regardless of the underlying systems.

Key Integration Capabilities of LumApps:

• Deep Integration with Microsoft 365 AND Google Workspace: This is a major differentiator. LumApps offers strong, native integrations with both major productivity suites.
  
  • Microsoft 365: It seamlessly connects with SharePoint Online (for document management, surfacing libraries and sites within LumApps), Microsoft Teams (for chat and collaboration, bringing Teams conversations and features into the intranet), Outlook (for calendars and mail), OneDrive, Planner, and other M365 applications. This allows users to access documents, manage projects, and communicate without leaving the LumApps interface.
  • Google Workspace: LumApps also boasts deep integration with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), including Google Drive (for file sharing and data accessibility), Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Chat. This makes it an ideal choice for organizations committed to the Google ecosystem.
    
• Extensive Third-Party Business App Connectors: LumApps provides a rich ecosystem of out-of-the-box connectors and "micro-apps" for a wide range of business applications across various domains:
  
  • HRIS/HCM: Integrations with systems like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and others allow employees to access HR self-service functionalities (e.g., PTO requests, payslips, benefits information), view employee directories, and get personalized HR announcements directly within the intranet.
  • ITSM: Connections with tools like ServiceNow and Zendesk can surface IT helpdesk tickets, knowledge base articles, and service request forms.
  • CRM: Integrations with platforms like Salesforce can provide sales teams with quick access to customer data, leads, and opportunities relevant to their work.
  • Project Management: Connectivity with tools like Jira, Trello, and Asana can display project updates, tasks, and team progress.
  • Collaboration & Communication: Integrates with Slack, Zoom, Webex, and other communication tools to embed real-time chat, video conferencing, and file sharing.
    
• Flexible SDK and APIs for Custom Integrations: For unique business needs, LumApps offers a robust Software Development Kit (SDK) and APIs. This empowers IT teams and developers to build custom widgets, micro-apps, and extensions that integrate with proprietary systems or specialized third-party applications, pulling critical data and enabling transactions within the LumApps platform.
• Unified Search: LumApps aims to provide a unified search experience that can crawl and retrieve information from integrated external systems, allowing employees to find relevant data regardless of where it resides.
  

SharePoint: Deep within the Microsoft Ecosystem, Extensibility for Others

SharePoint is an integral part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Its integration strength lies inherently within this environment, providing seamless connections to other Microsoft applications. While it can connect to external apps, it often relies on Microsoft's broader integration tools.

Key Integration Capabilities of SharePoint:

• Native & Deep Microsoft 365 Integration: This is SharePoint's undisputed strength.
  
  • OneDrive: Tightly integrated for personal file storage and sharing.
  • Microsoft Teams: SharePoint is the backend for Teams file storage, and Teams channels can directly display SharePoint libraries and pages. This creates a highly synergistic experience for collaboration.
  • Outlook: Calendars, tasks, and contacts can be seamlessly synchronized.
  • Power Platform (Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI): This is where SharePoint's integration with the broader Microsoft ecosystem truly shines.
    
    • Power Automate: Enables powerful workflow automation across SharePoint lists, libraries, and hundreds of other applications (both Microsoft and third-party) through its extensive connector library.
    • Power Apps: Allows users to build custom business applications on top of SharePoint data, embedding them directly into SharePoint pages.
    • Power BI: Connects directly to SharePoint lists and libraries to create rich dashboards and reports for data visualization and analysis.
• SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for Custom Integrations: Similar to LumApps' SDK, SPFx allows developers to build highly customized web parts, extensions, and solutions that can pull data from virtually any system with an API. This requires coding and development expertise but provides immense flexibility.
• Microsoft Graph API: SharePoint leverages the Microsoft Graph API, which is a unified API for accessing data across Microsoft 365. This provides a powerful way for developers to build custom integrations and experiences.
• App Source Connectors: The Microsoft AppSource provides a marketplace of third-party applications and connectors that can integrate with SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 services.
• Limited Native Google Workspace Integration: SharePoint's native integration with Google Workspace is not as robust or seamless as its Microsoft 365 integration. While documents from Google Drive can be linked or embedded, it typically lacks the deep, two-way synchronization and unified experience that LumApps offers for both ecosystems. Solutions often involve third-party connectors or manual processes.

Objective Winner : LumApps

For organizations heavily invested in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, SharePoint is the objective winner due to its native, deeply integrated capabilities with Microsoft's own suite and the Power Platform. It provides a highly cohesive and powerful environment for those already committed to Microsoft's tools.

However, for organizations seeking an intranet that acts as a truly universal hub, seamlessly integrating with both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, as well as a broad range of other best-of-breed business applications, LumApps is the objective winner. LumApps' strength lies in its "agnostic" approach to productivity suites and its extensive out-of-the-box connectors for HR, CRM, ITSM, and more, all presented within a single, personalized employee experience. It excels at pulling disparate information into one central, user-friendly location.

Therefore:

• Choose SharePoint if: You are a Microsoft-centric organization where deep integration with Teams, OneDrive, and the Power Platform is paramount, and you have the IT resources to leverage SPFx for any bespoke non-Microsoft integrations.
• Choose LumApps if: You need an intranet that bridges both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, or if you rely heavily on a diverse range of third-party business applications (HRIS, CRM, ITSM, etc.) and want them seamlessly integrated into a single, personalized employee experience without extensive custom development.

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Security Features

Security is paramount for any enterprise platform, especially an intranet that handles sensitive company information and employee data. Both LumApps and SharePoint prioritize security, but they approach it with slightly different architectures and focuses.

LumApps: Enterprise-Grade Security as a Cloud-Native SaaS

LumApps, as a cloud-native SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform, builds security into its core offering and infrastructure. It manages the underlying security for its customers, adhering to stringent international standards and focusing on data protection within its service.

Key Security Features of LumApps:

• Data Encryption: LumApps encrypts all data both at rest (when stored on servers) and in transit (when being transmitted between users and the platform). This is a fundamental security measure to protect sensitive information.

• Compliance and Certifications: LumApps is committed to various international security and privacy compliance standards. This includes:
  • GDPR Compliance: Ensuring adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation for handling personal data.
  • ISO/IEC 27001:2013: This certification confirms that LumApps has established, implemented, maintained, and continually improved an information security management system (ISMS).
  • SOC 2 Type II: This report describes how a service organization's systems and controls meet specific trust service criteria related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy over an observation period.
  • Ability to manage specialized situations like PCIDSS and HIPAA (though direct certification may vary by use case).
• Secure Infrastructure (Google Cloud Platform & Microsoft Azure): LumApps leverages the robust security infrastructure of leading cloud providers (Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure). This means benefiting from their physical security, network security, and global data center resilience, including continuous replication across multiple data centers to prevent data loss.‍
• Single Sign-On (SSO) Integration: Supports industry-standard SSO protocols (Microsoft, Google, SAML V2.0, OpenID Connect). This enhances security by allowing users to authenticate once with their existing identity provider, reducing password fatigue and centralizing user management.‍
• Access Control and Permissions: LumApps provides granular access control mechanisms, allowing administrators to define roles and permissions to ensure that only authorized users can view, create, or edit specific content and access certain features. This adheres to the principle of least privilege.‍
• Regular Security Audits & Testing: LumApps employs cybersecurity experts for Web Application & API Penetration Testing and runs a bug bounty program to proactively identify and address potential vulnerabilities.‍
• Incident Management & Business Continuity: LumApps has detailed security policies, incident management plans, and performs continual backups to ensure data recovery and business continuity in the event of an incident.‍
• Transparent Security Communications: LumApps maintains transparent communication with customers regarding security updates and practices.

SharePoint: Deeply Integrated into Microsoft 365 Security Ecosystem

SharePoint's security is intrinsically tied to the overarching security framework of Microsoft 365. This means it benefits from Microsoft's massive investments in cybersecurity infrastructure, threat intelligence, and compliance tools across its entire cloud suite.

Key Security Features of SharePoint:

• Microsoft 365 Security Foundation: SharePoint Online inherits core security features from Microsoft 365, including:
  • Data Encryption: Data is encrypted both in transit (using TLS) and at rest (using BitLocker and file-level encryption with customer keys, optionally via Microsoft Purview Customer Key).
  • Threat Protection: Integrated malware and virus detection (e.g., Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft 365 Defender) scans uploaded files and continuously monitors for threats.
  • Identity and Access Management (Microsoft Entra ID/Azure AD): Leverages Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) for robust authentication (including MFA, Conditional Access policies based on device, location, and user risk), authorization, and user provisioning. This provides extremely granular control over who can access what.
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Microsoft Purview DLP policies can be applied to SharePoint content to automatically identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information (e.g., PII, financial data) from being shared inappropriately.
  • Information Protection (Sensitivity Labels): Microsoft Purview Information Protection allows for classifying and labeling sensitive documents and emails within SharePoint, applying encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings.
• Granular Permissions Management: SharePoint offers highly detailed permission levels (site, library, folder, and even item level). This allows administrators to precisely control user access to content. However, managing this complexity can be challenging in large, dynamic environments.

• Auditing and Reporting: Comprehensive audit logs track user activities (who accessed, modified, deleted what and when), providing critical data for security investigations and compliance.

• External Sharing Controls: SharePoint provides robust controls for external sharing, allowing administrators to limit or block sharing, require authentication, set expiration dates for links, and restrict sharing to specific domains.

• Compliance and Governance: SharePoint supports a wide range of industry and regional compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, ISO 27001, SOC). Microsoft's Compliance Manager helps organizations assess and manage their compliance posture.

• Mobile Device Management (Intune): Integration with Microsoft Intune allows for securing mobile access to SharePoint content, enforcing device compliance policies, and even remotely wiping corporate data from lost or stolen devices.

Winner : SharePoint

Determining an "objective winner" in security is complex, as both platforms invest heavily and offer robust features. However, based on their fundamental architecture and the scope of their security offerings: SharePoint is the objective winner for organizations deeply integrated into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, due to its unparalleled, native integration with Microsoft's comprehensive, end-to-end security and compliance suite.

SharePoint benefits from the sheer scale of Microsoft's global security operations, its unified identity management (Microsoft Entra ID), advanced threat protection, extensive data loss prevention capabilities, and a broad range of compliance tools that span across all Microsoft 365 services. For organizations already using Microsoft 365, this provides a highly cohesive and powerful security posture. The ability to manage security from a single pane of glass within Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Centers is a significant advantage.

LumApps, as a SaaS platform, provides robust enterprise-grade security, adhering to industry certifications and leveraging secure cloud infrastructures. It handles much of the underlying security burden for its customers. However, its security features are primarily focused on its own platform and data, whereas SharePoint's security is part of a much larger, interconnected ecosystem designed to secure the entire digital workplace from Microsoft.

In summary:

• Choose SharePoint if: You are a Microsoft-centric organization seeking the deepest, most integrated security within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, with advanced threat protection, data governance, and compliance tools managed centrally.
• Choose LumApps if: You need a highly secure, compliant, cloud-native intranet that handles its own platform security to industry-leading standards, especially if you operate in a hybrid IT environment (e.g., mixing Microsoft and Google Workspace) or prefer a SaaS vendor to manage infrastructure security for you.

Both are highly secure, but SharePoint's inherent position within the vast and deeply integrated Microsoft 365 security architecture gives it an edge for organizations fully committed to that environment.

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Collaboration Tools

Collaboration tools are fundamental to a modern digital workplace, enabling teams to work together effectively, share knowledge, and achieve common goals. Both LumApps and SharePoint offer collaboration capabilities, but they do so with different focal points and strengths.

LumApps: The Integrated Collaboration Hub

LumApps functions as a central "digital headquarters" that brings together various collaboration tools and content, creating a seamless and integrated experience for employees.³ While it doesn't aim to replace dedicated collaboration suites, it provides the connective tissue that makes collaboration more accessible and efficient.

Key Collaboration Capabilities of LumApps:

• Unified Access to Collaboration Tools: LumApps' strength lies in its ability to integrate and surface popular collaboration tools from both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.⁴ This means users can access and interact with:
  • Microsoft Teams: LumApps can embed Teams chats, channels, and even specific team functionalities, allowing employees to stay within their intranet while engaging in real-time communication.
  • SharePoint Online: It can pull in SharePoint document libraries and sites, making it easy to access and work on documents that reside in SharePoint, leveraging SharePoint's robust document management.
  • Google Workspace: For Google-centric organizations, LumApps provides deep integration with Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, facilitating co-authoring and file sharing directly within the LumApps environment.
  • Other Tools: It can integrate with a wide array of other collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, Asana, Jira, and more, providing a single point of access to all essential applications.
• Community-Driven Collaboration: LumApps fosters collaboration through its robust social features and communities. Employees can:
  • Create and join communities: These act as dedicated spaces for teams or interest groups to discuss projects, share ideas, and exchange files.
  • Interactive news feeds: Encourage comments, likes, and shares on internal communications, turning top-down messages into two-way conversations.
  • Knowledge sharing: Facilitates informal knowledge exchange through posts, Q&A sections, and discussions within communities.
• Streamlined Project Management (via Integrations): While not a full-fledged project management suite itself, LumApps integrates with tools like Microsoft Planner or other PM systems. It can surface relevant tasks, deadlines, and project updates on personalized dashboards, ensuring employees stay organized and informed.‍
• User Profiles and Directory: Detailed employee profiles and an easy-to-use directory help employees find colleagues with specific expertise, fostering cross-functional collaboration and knowledge discovery.‍
• Content Creation and Co-creation: LumApps simplifies content creation for internal communications. While actual real-time co-authoring of documents happens within integrated suites (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), LumApps provides the platform to easily publish and share this collaborative content.

SharePoint: The Core of Microsoft 365 Collaboration

SharePoint is a foundational element of Microsoft 365 and is inherently designed for deep document collaboration, content management, and structured teamwork within the Microsoft ecosystem. Its collaboration capabilities are robust and deeply integrated with other Microsoft applications.

Key Collaboration Capabilities of SharePoint:

• Document Co-authoring: This is a major strength. SharePoint, in conjunction with Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), enables real-time co-authoring. Multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously, seeing each other's changes live. This is fundamental for collaborative document creation.
• Version Control and Document Management: SharePoint provides sophisticated versioning, allowing users to track changes, restore previous versions, and maintain a clear history of document evolution. This is crucial for managing complex collaborative projects.
• Microsoft Teams Integration: SharePoint is the backbone for file storage in Microsoft Teams. Every Team in Teams has a corresponding SharePoint site, and every channel has a document library. This tight integration means files shared in Teams are stored in SharePoint, benefiting from SharePoint's robust document management features, including permissions, versioning, and metadata.
• Team Sites and Communication Sites: SharePoint offers various site templates. "Team Sites" are designed for collaborative work within a group, providing shared document libraries, lists, news feeds, and notebooks (OneNote). "Communication Sites" are more for broader information dissemination but can include interactive elements like comments and likes.
• Lists and Libraries: SharePoint Lists are highly customizable for managing structured data (e.g., tasks, issues, contacts), facilitating team coordination. Document Libraries provide powerful tools for organizing, sharing, and collaborating on files.
• Workflows and Automation (Power Automate): SharePoint integrates seamlessly with Power Automate (part of the Microsoft Power Platform), enabling sophisticated automated workflows for document approvals, task assignments, and content routing. This streamlines collaborative processes.
• Internal Social Features (Viva Engage/Yammer): While not native to core SharePoint, Microsoft 365 includes Viva Engage (formerly Yammer), which provides enterprise social networking capabilities for broader, more informal communication and community building. This can be integrated into SharePoint.
• Project Management Integration (Planner, Project): SharePoint integrates with Microsoft Planner and Project, allowing teams to manage tasks, schedules, and project plans directly within their SharePoint sites.

Winner : SharePoint

SharePoint is the objective winner for core, in-depth document collaboration and structured teamwork, especially for organizations deeply embedded in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Its native capabilities for real-time co-authoring, robust document management (version control, metadata, permissions), and its fundamental integration with Microsoft Teams make it unparalleled for collaborative content creation and team project work within that environment.

LumApps, on the other hand, is the winner for creating a unified and personalized collaboration hub that brings together various tools, regardless of their underlying provider (Microsoft, Google, or third-party). It excels at simplifying access to collaboration tools, fostering community-driven knowledge sharing, and presenting a cohesive digital workplace experience.

In summary:

• Choose SharePoint if: Your primary need is deep, real-time co-authoring, advanced document management, and structured team collaboration within the Microsoft 365 suite, particularly for content-heavy or project-driven teams.
• Choose LumApps if: You need an overarching employee experience platform that centralizes access to all your diverse collaboration tools (Microsoft, Google, and others), streamlines communication, fosters community engagement, and provides a personalized hub for all employee interactions, enhancing overall productivity by simplifying access to various tools.

Many organizations find the most effective solution by leveraging SharePoint's robust backend for document management and utilizing LumApps as the engaging, personalized front-end that provides intuitive access to all collaborative functionalities.

LumApps + SharePoint : creating, setting up and building the best intranet experience

Organizations globally have long relied on Microsoft SharePoint for its robust capabilities in document management and team site creation. It's a powerful tool for file storage, version control, and collaborative document editing. However, in today's dynamic work environment, the expectations for an internal hub extend far beyond traditional document management. Many companies find that while SharePoint excels in specific areas, it often falls short in delivering the dynamic, personalized, and truly engaging employee experience that drives modern growth.

This isn't about replacing SharePoint; it's about optimizing your investment and augmenting its strengths with a dedicated employee experience platform. LumApps is designed to bridge this gap, transforming a functional document repository into a vibrant, connected digital headquarters where every employee feels seen, heard, and empowered.

Where SharePoint Excels (and Why It's Still Essential for Many):

SharePoint remains a cornerstone for many organizations dueably to its:

• Robust Document Management: Unmatched for file storage, version control, document libraries, and content lifecycle management. It's built for deep collaboration on documents.
• Deep Microsoft 365 Integration (Backend): As part of the Microsoft ecosystem, it offers strong integration with other Microsoft apps for data storage and team sites.
• Compliance & Security: Provides powerful tools for managing permissions, ensuring data governance, and meeting compliance requirements.

The Modern Intranet Challenge: Where SharePoint Alone Often Falls Short:

While powerful for managing content, organizations often encounter limitations when relying solely on SharePoint to deliver a comprehensive employee experience:

• Limited Personalization: SharePoint, by nature, struggles to provide a truly unique experience tailored to each employee's role, location, or interests. Generic communication can lead to information overload and disengagement.
• Subpar Mobile Experience: For the growing number of frontline and deskless workers, or those simply on the go, SharePoint's mobile experience can be clunky, often requiring specific licenses or complex workarounds that limit accessibility to critical information.
• Engagement & Internal Communication Gaps: SharePoint isn't inherently designed as a communication-first platform. It lacks intuitive social features, robust news delivery, and two-way communication channels necessary to foster a vibrant company culture and drive active employee engagement.
• User Experience (UX) & Design Constraints: Creating a visually appealing, intuitive, and branded "digital home" in SharePoint often requires significant customization, development resources, and ongoing maintenance, leading to higher costs and less flexibility.
• Knowledge Discovery Challenges: While content is stored, finding relevant information can be difficult. Its search capabilities, without significant customization, can be limited, leading to frustration and wasted time searching for answers.
• Digital Friction: Relying on multiple disparate Microsoft apps (SharePoint for documents, Teams for chat, Outlook for email) can create a disjointed experience, leading to "digital friction" where employees spend too much time navigating tools rather than focusing on their work.

LumApps: Elevating Your SharePoint Investment for a Superior Employee Experience

LumApps is purpose-built to address these modern intranet challenges, not by discarding your SharePoint investment, but by amplifying its capabilities and transforming it into a truly connected employee hub. Our platform acts as an intelligent, personalized layer on top of your existing Microsoft 365 environment, including SharePoint.

Here’s how LumApps unlocks a brighter future for your intranet:

• Unified, Personalized Experience: LumApps pulls together all your essential information, apps, and content – including what's stored in SharePoint – into a single, intuitive, and personalized digital workspace. This ensures every employee sees the news, updates, and tools most relevant to them, reducing clutter and boosting engagement from day one.
• Flawless Mobile Access for All: Designed with a mobile-first approach, LumApps keeps every employee connected, whether they're at a desk, remote, or in the field. Our user-friendly app works seamlessly on any device, ensuring your entire workforce has instant access to company knowledge and communications, bridging the gap to deskless workers.
• AI-Powered Knowledge & Search: LumApps integrates deeply with SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 tools, allowing our intelligent search feature to cut through data chaos. Employees can find everything they need in seconds, with AI-driven recommendations that surface the most relevant explicit knowledge from across your connected systems, enhancing knowledge transfer.
• Enhanced Internal Communications & Community: LumApps provides the robust communication engine that complements SharePoint's document strength. Deliver targeted news, create dynamic social communities, and facilitate vibrant two-way dialogue that truly fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and belonging. This encourages employees engaging in helpful knowledge sharing activities.
• Effortless Integration & Future-Ready Design: LumApps doesn't just integrate; it amplifies. We embrace your existing tools, providing over 100 connectors to streamline workflows and ensure seamless access to all your business applications. Our flexible design capabilities allow for pixel-perfect branding and customization, creating an inspiring digital headquarters that adapts and grows with you.

By partnering LumApps with your SharePoint environment, you're not just getting a better intranet; you're investing in a holistic employee experience that drives efficiency, collaboration, and unlocks the full potential of your workforce. The perfect intranet doesn't just meet your needs—it anticipates them.

Best Examples of SharePoint + LumApps users

Here are some examples of LumApps customers that have either migrated from or significantly enhanced their SharePoint environment with LumApps, based on LumApps' own case studies and public information:

1. Ascension:
   
   • Challenge: Ascension, a leading healthcare system, was dealing with multiple legacy intranet platforms, including SharePoint, Sitecore, Lotus Notes, and ColdFusion. This created fragmentation and made it difficult to unify their brand voice and reach employees effectively.
   • LumApps Solution: LumApps helped Ascension consolidate these disparate platforms into a single, comprehensive employee experience platform ("Good Day Ascension"). This enabled them to deliver timely and critical messages, ensure consistent content, and improve overall associate engagement.
   • Key Takeaway (from LumApps' perspective): LumApps' ability to migrate SharePoint sites and integrate seamlessly with Google Workspace (which Ascension also uses) was a key differentiator in their decision.
2. Servier:
   
   • Challenge: Servier, a global pharmaceutical group, faced issues maintaining their SharePoint intranet and experienced confusion due to tool cannibalization, especially after integrating with Jive. They needed a more modern, integrated solution.
   • LumApps Solution: Servier chose LumApps as a Jive alternative that offered strong integration with Microsoft 365, including SharePoint. They managed a rapid migration, and while data storage often remained in Microsoft (with SharePoint sites per community), LumApps provided the engaging front-end experience.
   • Key Takeaway: LumApps integrated seamlessly with Microsoft 365 tools (including SharePoint data storage), enabling Servier to enhance communication and provide a more user-friendly experience than their previous complex setup.
3. Publicis Sapient:
   
   • Challenge: While their primary migration was from Jive (a social intranet platform), Publicis Sapient also aimed to consolidate other resource hubs, including migrating policy content from a legacy SharePoint site.
   • LumApps Solution: LumApps became their "Vox" platform, streamlining communications and providing stronger storytelling capabilities. The integration roadmap included bringing over content from SharePoint.
   • Key Takeaway: Demonstrates LumApps' capability to consolidate content from various legacy systems, including SharePoint, into a unified platform.

So rather than replacing SharePoint entirely, think about enhancing and leveraging it, by integrating it in LumApps :

• SharePoint as a strong document management tool: LumApps acknowledges SharePoint's strengths in document storage, version control, and compliance.
• LumApps as the Employee Experience Layer: LumApps provides the personalized, engaging, communication-focused front-end that SharePoint often lacks out-of-the-box.
• Seamless Integration: LumApps prides itself on its deep and flexible integrations with Microsoft 365 (including SharePoint, Teams, and Azure AD), allowing organizations to retain their investment in Microsoft while getting a superior employee experience.

So, while these customers might still use SharePoint for backend document storage, LumApps serves as the primary, user-facing "intranet" that drives engagement, communication, and overall employee experience.

To truly make the best out of your SharePoint + LumApps intranet integration, it's essential to move beyond simply connecting the two platforms. The goal is to create a seamless, powerful digital workplace that leverages each system's strengths to enhance the overall employee experience (EX). Think of it as crafting a highly efficient and inspiring environment where collective knowledge flows freely, and every employee feels connected and empowered.

How to create, build and make the best out of this SharePoint + LumApps intranet integration ?

Here’s how to maximize the value of this integration:

1. Define Clear Roles for Each Platform

Don't let them simply coexist; define their purpose.

• LumApps as the Employee Experience (EX) Front-End: Position LumApps as the central hub and the primary daily destination for employees.¹ This is where they go for internal communications, personalized news feeds, community engagement, quick access to key applications, and their overall digital employee experience.² It's the inviting "digital home."
• SharePoint as the Backend Document & Collaboration Engine: Leverage SharePoint for what it does best: robust document management, secure file storage, version control, granular permissions, and detailed project team sites where document-centric collaboration occurs.³ It's the secure, organized "filing cabinet" and "project workspace."
  
  • Tip: Clearly communicate these roles to employees. Less confusion equals higher adoption.

2. Implement Intelligent Content Synchronization & Search

Break down silos and ensure knowledge transfer is effortless.

• Unified Search Experience: LumApps' AI-powered search should index content from SharePoint. This means employees can search once in LumApps and retrieve relevant documents, policies, and files from SharePoint, alongside news, people, and communities within LumApps.⁴ This promotes knowledge sharing by making it findable, regardless of where it lives.
• Contextual Content Display: Use LumApps' personalization capabilities to surface relevant SharePoint documents or library links directly within a user's personalized dashboard, department page, or specific community.⁵ If a user is in the "Marketing Team" community in LumApps, relevant marketing campaign documents from SharePoint should be easily accessible.
• Automated Updates: Ensure that updates made in SharePoint are automatically reflected or easily pulled into LumApps' display, preventing outdated information and reducing manual effort.

3. Leverage LumApps for Personalized Communications & Engagement

Capitalize on LumApps' strength in connection and culture.

• Targeted Communications: Use LumApps' segmentation capabilities to deliver news and updates based on an employee's role, location, department, or interests.⁶ While a document may reside in SharePoint, its announcement or relevant context can be pushed to specific audiences via LumApps.
• Foster Vibrant Communities: Create social communities in LumApps for teams, projects, or interests. These communities can link directly to associated SharePoint sites for document collaboration, while the LumApps side handles discussions, informal knowledge sharing activities, and peer-to-peer connections (tacit knowledge sharing).
• Empower Knowledge Sharing Culture: Encourage employees to discuss and contextualize SharePoint content within LumApps communities. This transforms static documents into dynamic conversations, encouraging employees to share their knowledge and insights. LumApps becomes the "living room" for discussions around SharePoint's "filing cabinet."
• Streamline Workflows: Embed SharePoint libraries or specific documents directly into LumApps pages or communities where they are most relevant, reducing context switching and improving daily productivity.

4. Prioritize the Employee Journey & Experience

Focus on the human element behind the technology.

• Seamless Onboarding: Use LumApps to create personalized onboarding journeys that guide new hires through essential steps, integrating direct links to necessary policies and forms stored in SharePoint, alongside engaging welcome content and team introductions.⁷
• Simplified Access to Business Apps: LumApps can serve as the central launchpad for all business applications, including direct links to specific SharePoint sites, Teams channels, or even other SaaS tools.⁸ This reduces digital friction and streamlines the work environment.
• Feedback Loops: Use LumApps' survey and feedback features to gather insights on how employees interact with the integrated system. This helps identify pain points in both platforms and ensures continuous improvement.

5. Establish Clear Governance & Training

Ensure long-term success and adoption.

• Define Content Ownership: Clearly delineate who is responsible for content within SharePoint (e.g., department leads for functional documents) and who manages the overall experience and communication in LumApps (e.g., Internal Comms, HR).
• Training & Adoption Campaigns: Provide comprehensive training that explains how the two platforms work together and why this integration benefits employees. Highlight use cases and demonstrate efficiency gains. Showcase "how to find X" or "how to share Y."
• Leadership Advocacy: Ensure leaders actively use and champion the integrated platform, modeling the desired behaviors for effective knowledge sharing and engagement.

By strategically integrating LumApps and SharePoint, you create a powerful synergy. You harness SharePoint's strength as a backend document powerhouse while leveraging LumApps' ability to deliver a personalized, engaging, and highly communicative employee experience, ultimately driving growth through a truly connected workforce.

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So which intranet portal should you choose? What is the best intranet platform between LumApps and SharePoint?

In conclusion, LumApps and SharePoint offer different strengths and weaknesses that align with specific organizational requirements. LumApps excels in creating an engaging, user-friendly intranet experience with a strong focus on internal communication and social interaction. With LumApps, you don’t need to rely on IT for updates, maintenance, or building out new sites.

SharePoint, on the other hand, provides a versatile and comprehensive collaboration platform that encompasses document management, workflow automation, and integration capabilities. Choosing between the two depends on factors such as the organization's size, collaboration needs, technical expertise, and existing technology ecosystem.

Book a demo to see if LumApps will work for you. 

LumApps + SharePoint : creating, setting up and building the best intranet experience

Organizations globally have long relied on Microsoft SharePoint for its robust capabilities in document management and team site creation. It's a powerful tool for file storage, version control, and collaborative document editing. However, in today's dynamic work environment, the expectations for an internal hub extend far beyond traditional document management. Many companies find that while SharePoint excels in specific areas, it often falls short in delivering the dynamic, personalized, and truly engaging employee experience that drives modern growth.

This isn't about replacing SharePoint; it's about optimizing your investment and augmenting its strengths with a dedicated employee experience platform. LumApps is designed to bridge this gap, transforming a functional document repository into a vibrant, connected digital headquarters where every employee feels seen, heard, and empowered.

Where SharePoint Excels (and Why It's Still Essential for Many):

SharePoint remains a cornerstone for many organizations dueably to its:

• Robust Document Management: Unmatched for file storage, version control, document libraries, and content lifecycle management. It's built for deep collaboration on documents.
• Deep Microsoft 365 Integration (Backend): As part of the Microsoft ecosystem, it offers strong integration with other Microsoft apps for data storage and team sites.
• Compliance & Security: Provides powerful tools for managing permissions, ensuring data governance, and meeting compliance requirements.

The Modern Intranet Challenge: Where SharePoint Alone Often Falls Short:

While powerful for managing content, organizations often encounter limitations when relying solely on SharePoint to deliver a comprehensive employee experience:

• Limited Personalization: SharePoint, by nature, struggles to provide a truly unique experience tailored to each employee's role, location, or interests. Generic communication can lead to information overload and disengagement.
• Subpar Mobile Experience: For the growing number of frontline and deskless workers, or those simply on the go, SharePoint's mobile experience can be clunky, often requiring specific licenses or complex workarounds that limit accessibility to critical information.
• Engagement & Internal Communication Gaps: SharePoint isn't inherently designed as a communication-first platform. It lacks intuitive social features, robust news delivery, and two-way communication channels necessary to foster a vibrant company culture and drive active employee engagement.
• User Experience (UX) & Design Constraints: Creating a visually appealing, intuitive, and branded "digital home" in SharePoint often requires significant customization, development resources, and ongoing maintenance, leading to higher costs and less flexibility.
• Knowledge Discovery Challenges: While content is stored, finding relevant information can be difficult. Its search capabilities, without significant customization, can be limited, leading to frustration and wasted time searching for answers.
• Digital Friction: Relying on multiple disparate Microsoft apps (SharePoint for documents, Teams for chat, Outlook for email) can create a disjointed experience, leading to "digital friction" where employees spend too much time navigating tools rather than focusing on their work.

LumApps: Elevating Your SharePoint Investment for a Superior Employee Experience

LumApps is purpose-built to address these modern intranet challenges, not by discarding your SharePoint investment, but by amplifying its capabilities and transforming it into a truly connected employee hub. Our platform acts as an intelligent, personalized layer on top of your existing Microsoft 365 environment, including SharePoint.

Here’s how LumApps unlocks a brighter future for your intranet:

• Unified, Personalized Experience: LumApps pulls together all your essential information, apps, and content – including what's stored in SharePoint – into a single, intuitive, and personalized digital workspace. This ensures every employee sees the news, updates, and tools most relevant to them, reducing clutter and boosting engagement from day one.
• Flawless Mobile Access for All: Designed with a mobile-first approach, LumApps keeps every employee connected, whether they're at a desk, remote, or in the field. Our user-friendly app works seamlessly on any device, ensuring your entire workforce has instant access to company knowledge and communications, bridging the gap to deskless workers.
• AI-Powered Knowledge & Search: LumApps integrates deeply with SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 tools, allowing our intelligent search feature to cut through data chaos. Employees can find everything they need in seconds, with AI-driven recommendations that surface the most relevant explicit knowledge from across your connected systems, enhancing knowledge transfer.
• Enhanced Internal Communications & Community: LumApps provides the robust communication engine that complements SharePoint's document strength. Deliver targeted news, create dynamic social communities, and facilitate vibrant two-way dialogue that truly fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and belonging. This encourages employees engaging in helpful knowledge sharing activities.
• Effortless Integration & Future-Ready Design: LumApps doesn't just integrate; it amplifies. We embrace your existing tools, providing over 100 connectors to streamline workflows and ensure seamless access to all your business applications. Our flexible design capabilities allow for pixel-perfect branding and customization, creating an inspiring digital headquarters that adapts and grows with you.

By partnering LumApps with your SharePoint environment, you're not just getting a better intranet; you're investing in a holistic employee experience that drives efficiency, collaboration, and unlocks the full potential of your workforce. The perfect intranet doesn't just meet your needs—it anticipates them.

Best Examples of SharePoint + LumApps users

Here are some examples of LumApps customers that have either migrated from or significantly enhanced their SharePoint environment with LumApps, based on LumApps' own case studies and public information:

1. Ascension:
   
   • Challenge: Ascension, a leading healthcare system, was dealing with multiple legacy intranet platforms, including SharePoint, Sitecore, Lotus Notes, and ColdFusion. This created fragmentation and made it difficult to unify their brand voice and reach employees effectively.
   • LumApps Solution: LumApps helped Ascension consolidate these disparate platforms into a single, comprehensive employee experience platform ("Good Day Ascension"). This enabled them to deliver timely and critical messages, ensure consistent content, and improve overall associate engagement.
   • Key Takeaway (from LumApps' perspective): LumApps' ability to migrate SharePoint sites and integrate seamlessly with Google Workspace (which Ascension also uses) was a key differentiator in their decision.
2. Servier:
   
   • Challenge: Servier, a global pharmaceutical group, faced issues maintaining their SharePoint intranet and experienced confusion due to tool cannibalization, especially after integrating with Jive. They needed a more modern, integrated solution.
   • LumApps Solution: Servier chose LumApps as a Jive alternative that offered strong integration with Microsoft 365, including SharePoint. They managed a rapid migration, and while data storage often remained in Microsoft (with SharePoint sites per community), LumApps provided the engaging front-end experience.
   • Key Takeaway: LumApps integrated seamlessly with Microsoft 365 tools (including SharePoint data storage), enabling Servier to enhance communication and provide a more user-friendly experience than their previous complex setup.
3. Publicis Sapient:
   
   • Challenge: While their primary migration was from Jive (a social intranet platform), Publicis Sapient also aimed to consolidate other resource hubs, including migrating policy content from a legacy SharePoint site.
   • LumApps Solution: LumApps became their "Vox" platform, streamlining communications and providing stronger storytelling capabilities. The integration roadmap included bringing over content from SharePoint.
   • Key Takeaway: Demonstrates LumApps' capability to consolidate content from various legacy systems, including SharePoint, into a unified platform.

So rather than replacing SharePoint entirely, think about enhancing and leveraging it, by integrating it in LumApps :

• SharePoint as a strong document management tool: LumApps acknowledges SharePoint's strengths in document storage, version control, and compliance.
• LumApps as the Employee Experience Layer: LumApps provides the personalized, engaging, communication-focused front-end that SharePoint often lacks out-of-the-box.
• Seamless Integration: LumApps prides itself on its deep and flexible integrations with Microsoft 365 (including SharePoint, Teams, and Azure AD), allowing organizations to retain their investment in Microsoft while getting a superior employee experience.

So, while these customers might still use SharePoint for backend document storage, LumApps serves as the primary, user-facing "intranet" that drives engagement, communication, and overall employee experience.

To truly make the best out of your SharePoint + LumApps intranet integration, it's essential to move beyond simply connecting the two platforms. The goal is to create a seamless, powerful digital workplace that leverages each system's strengths to enhance the overall employee experience (EX). Think of it as crafting a highly efficient and inspiring environment where collective knowledge flows freely, and every employee feels connected and empowered.

How to create, build and make the best out of this SharePoint + LumApps intranet integration ?

Here’s how to maximize the value of this integration:

1. Define Clear Roles for Each Platform

Don't let them simply coexist; define their purpose.

• LumApps as the Employee Experience (EX) Front-End: Position LumApps as the central hub and the primary daily destination for employees.¹ This is where they go for internal communications, personalized news feeds, community engagement, quick access to key applications, and their overall digital employee experience.² It's the inviting "digital home."
• SharePoint as the Backend Document & Collaboration Engine: Leverage SharePoint for what it does best: robust document management, secure file storage, version control, granular permissions, and detailed project team sites where document-centric collaboration occurs.³ It's the secure, organized "filing cabinet" and "project workspace."
  
  • Tip: Clearly communicate these roles to employees. Less confusion equals higher adoption.

2. Implement Intelligent Content Synchronization & Search

Break down silos and ensure knowledge transfer is effortless.

• Unified Search Experience: LumApps' AI-powered search should index content from SharePoint. This means employees can search once in LumApps and retrieve relevant documents, policies, and files from SharePoint, alongside news, people, and communities within LumApps.⁴ This promotes knowledge sharing by making it findable, regardless of where it lives.
• Contextual Content Display: Use LumApps' personalization capabilities to surface relevant SharePoint documents or library links directly within a user's personalized dashboard, department page, or specific community.⁵ If a user is in the "Marketing Team" community in LumApps, relevant marketing campaign documents from SharePoint should be easily accessible.
• Automated Updates: Ensure that updates made in SharePoint are automatically reflected or easily pulled into LumApps' display, preventing outdated information and reducing manual effort.

3. Leverage LumApps for Personalized Communications & Engagement

Capitalize on LumApps' strength in connection and culture.

• Targeted Communications: Use LumApps' segmentation capabilities to deliver news and updates based on an employee's role, location, department, or interests.⁶ While a document may reside in SharePoint, its announcement or relevant context can be pushed to specific audiences via LumApps.
• Foster Vibrant Communities: Create social communities in LumApps for teams, projects, or interests. These communities can link directly to associated SharePoint sites for document collaboration, while the LumApps side handles discussions, informal knowledge sharing activities, and peer-to-peer connections (tacit knowledge sharing).
• Empower Knowledge Sharing Culture: Encourage employees to discuss and contextualize SharePoint content within LumApps communities. This transforms static documents into dynamic conversations, encouraging employees to share their knowledge and insights. LumApps becomes the "living room" for discussions around SharePoint's "filing cabinet."
• Streamline Workflows: Embed SharePoint libraries or specific documents directly into LumApps pages or communities where they are most relevant, reducing context switching and improving daily productivity.

4. Prioritize the Employee Journey & Experience

Focus on the human element behind the technology.

• Seamless Onboarding: Use LumApps to create personalized onboarding journeys that guide new hires through essential steps, integrating direct links to necessary policies and forms stored in SharePoint, alongside engaging welcome content and team introductions.⁷
• Simplified Access to Business Apps: LumApps can serve as the central launchpad for all business applications, including direct links to specific SharePoint sites, Teams channels, or even other SaaS tools.⁸ This reduces digital friction and streamlines the work environment.
• Feedback Loops: Use LumApps' survey and feedback features to gather insights on how employees interact with the integrated system. This helps identify pain points in both platforms and ensures continuous improvement.

5. Establish Clear Governance & Training

Ensure long-term success and adoption.

• Define Content Ownership: Clearly delineate who is responsible for content within SharePoint (e.g., department leads for functional documents) and who manages the overall experience and communication in LumApps (e.g., Internal Comms, HR).
• Training & Adoption Campaigns: Provide comprehensive training that explains how the two platforms work together and why this integration benefits employees. Highlight use cases and demonstrate efficiency gains. Showcase "how to find X" or "how to share Y."
• Leadership Advocacy: Ensure leaders actively use and champion the integrated platform, modeling the desired behaviors for effective knowledge sharing and engagement.

By strategically integrating LumApps and SharePoint, you create a powerful synergy. You harness SharePoint's strength as a backend document powerhouse while leveraging LumApps' ability to deliver a personalized, engaging, and highly communicative employee experience, ultimately driving growth through a truly connected workforce.

‍

Intranet comparison : LumApps vs...

Find out why LumApps is the top intranet platform on the market and the best intranet alternative for:

• LumApps, best intranet on the market
• Workplace from Meta (in-depth analysis & landing page)
• Happeo
• Staffbase
• FirstUp
• SharePoint
• Interact
• Igloo Software
• Simpplr
• Unily
• Workvivo
• Jive
• Google Sites
• Google Drive
• Haiilo
• Axero
• Guru

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