Choosing a social intranet or internal social platform is not easy. More than a matter of good or bad, it is knowing what best suits the needs of your organization. To help you on your way, we occasionally put a platform in the spotlight. This time: Viadesk.
Viadesk started building intranets back in 1999. Over the years, their product has grown from static intranet, to social intranet/digital workplace. Their platform is used by the municipality of Amsterdam, GGD Zuid-Limburg and Veiligheidsregio Zeeland.
Worth an extra look
At first glance, Viadesk does not stand out, it follows the well-known conventions of a social intranet: users independently organize themselves into groups for knowledge sharing or collaboration and can easily post, comment on each other and share documents. From the beginning of May 2017, Viadesk offers a new news module. The decentrally published news can now be found in one central place. In this way, users can easily find the organizational news and communication consultants can easily collaborate on news articles. The platform connects well with various systems such as SharePoint and Topdesk. Absolutely a requirement for a modern platform; there is a lot of added value for organizations from the central unlocking of work processes.
If you look a little further, Viadesk has a number of advanced functionalities that make it stand out. For example, it is possible to set up document workflows. Another nice feature is that themes can be linked to a group. For example, this could work like this: community managers could link their own group to the dare questions theme. Every time someone asks a question about that theme, it automatically notifies all users who have added this theme as an expertise in their profile. In addition, questions can be marked as “answered”, which makes finding answers to questions already asked more efficient.
Notifications
Group members can be notified when they receive each message, so they can answer questions faster, no matter where they are posted. There are quite a few options available for receiving notifications, so users can also choose to receive a notification up to 1x per part of the day. This prevents users from being overloaded with notifications, a challenge we hear customers regularly about. Because an app is available, notifications can also be received on mobile.
Viadesk is a ready-made platform that can be adapted to your own wishes in terms of appearance, but has many options in terms of design. It is striking that pages and groups can be fully customized at the front of the pages. Moving modules is a simple matter of click and drag and adding a new module – for example A to – do list-is done with a few simple clicks. In principle, a Viadesk user or administrator never sees a CMS.
In short
Viadesk is a user-friendly, flexible and mature social intranet/digital workplace. It looks professional, good and well-groomed. Maybe not the flashiest platform to see, but that’s also a matter of taste. For many organizations looking for a new platform, Viadesk is definitely a platform to take a closer look at.
Earlier we took a look under the hood of Iris intranet and jive. To know more about available platforms and their capabilities? Or curious about which platform suits your organization best? Feel free to contact us up with us! We are happy to help you make the right choice of platform.
