Which platform best suits your organization? Are you opting for a new social intranet, an extension of your current intranet with social functionalities or are you moving towards a digital workplace? The offer is large, so we regularly take a close look at a platform. This time: Valo Intranet.
Add-on to Office 365
The Finnish Valo Intranet is a shell for Office 365 and SharePoint on-premise (2013 and 2016), which brings together content and information from the various Office apps as the basis for your intranet. In other words, Valo is an add-on these applications provide a user-friendly intranet or dashboard.
Wondering when to opt for an add-on and when to opt for a social intranet (linked or not)? You can read this in Office 365 USA. the social intranet: what are the possibilities?
As Valo themselves put it: “nobody wants to use an intranet that looks like SharePoint.”The attractive design is therefore an important selling point of Valo Intranet. Organizations choose from three themes for the layout of the homepage, ranging from a clear intranet look and feel from the menu at the top to a modern version that looks more like a website, with many images and buttons for navigation. Each theme can be configured to the corporate identity of the organization, without having to dive into the code of the platform.
Where most SaaS intranets have employees set up their own homepage with the help of widgets, Valo Intranet leaves this to the administrator. Users can create their own list on the intranet with links to frequently used applications and sites. The timeline on the homepage shows messages from Yammer.
News
Valo Intranet, unlike SharePoint (Online), makes it easy to share news. Images can be dragged into a message and tags can be used to personalize news for specific locations, Business Units or areas of interest. News alerts make it possible to actively alert employees to important messages, whether on laptop or desktop or mobile. The intranet is available on mobile via the Valo app, which is particularly suitable for reading news.
Additional modules
In addition to this basis, Valo offers various additional modules to expand the intranet and to offer certain functionalities from Office 365 more user-friendly. Think of multilingualism, a video portal and expanding the search options (search by skills, department or location).
The work of intranet administrators is made a lot more pleasant thanks to insight into the use of all pages, sites and groups. Parameters for inactivity can be set by yourself, with color it is then indicated where there is talk. This makes cleaning up the intranet a lot easier, but it also exposes possible navigation bottlenecks.
From intranet to digital workplace
Valo developed two tools with which the intranet can be expanded into a digital workplace. Valo Teamwork is designed to make Groups, team sites and collaboration tools clearer as a Planner. Also, the layout of your team can be saved as a template for new teams and groups and the tool makes it possible to search for documents and conversations in all groups you have access to.
for the collection, assessment and (together) elaboration of ideas using gamification offers Valo Idea Management. Both tools are also available as stand-alone products.
Cost
An Office 365 add-on usually comes at a hefty price. In addition to the licenses for Office 365, there are additional (license)costs for the Shell and possibly also for a service contract for maintenance. Especially for organizations with many users, that can be quite in the papers.
Valo works with a basic amount based on the number of users, plus the cost of any additional functionalities. For a subscription to quarterly updates with bug fixes and new functionalities, 25% of the license fee is charged annually.
Valo is only the provider of the tool and works with partners for implementation and service. Valo partners themselves calculate costs for the implementation (one-time) and/or a service contract. These costs are therefore in addition to the previously mentioned costs from Valo for licenses and updates.
Our view
Intranets based on Office 365 and SharePoint often leave something to be desired in terms of design and user-friendliness. Valo Intranet proves that this does not necessarily have to be the case. Although Valo Intranet is not suitable for extensive personalization at the end user level, the additional modules clearly show that these same end users and their work are at the heart of the design of the add-on.
In our opinion, Valo Intranet is therefore worth an introduction for parties who like to use the possibilities of Office 365 or SharePoint for their intranet, but are looking for better possibilities than those packages offer out of the box in terms of news provision and user-friendliness.
Valo Intranet in the Netherlands
Valo Intranet is operated by various Dutch suppliers offered, including C) solutions, Portiva, I4-you and Advantive. They install Valo Intranet and provide periodic updates of the platform, so that it continues to work well during the continuous updates of Microsoft.
We talked to c) solutions for the creation of this blog. c)solutions is naast Valo Premium Partner ook SharePoint-ontwikkelaar. Solutions in the field of document management systems, workflows and project planning are built against Valo Intranet. c) solutions serves clients such as Tony’s Chocolonely, PostNL and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
More platform reviews?
Earlier we wrote about Jive, Iris Intranet, Viadesk, Speakap and a&m impact.
