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June 12, 2024
At Social Edge, we understand the power of community, connection, and collaboration. We believe that fostering these values within your organization is key to unlocking its true potential.
Choosing the right modern intranet platform is the first step and it requires careful consideration. We grasp the complexity involved in this process, as there are numerous platforms available to meet your intranet needs. Having worked with countless clients on evaluations and community implementations, we have curated a shortlist of platforms with a proven track record. We value each platform for its unique strengths, prioritizing finding the best fit for your specific requirements rather than relying on broad star ratings. That's why we are committed to exploring the top community platforms in-depth, ensuring you have all of the essential information at your fingertips to make the optimal decision for your business and community members. This is why people choose us as their third-party solution provider.
Now, let's dive into one of the intranet platforms on our shortlist—LumApps.
LumApps is an employee experience platform that provides organizations with a comprehensive intranet solution. However, we like to think it’s so much more than that. With a wide variety of tools and functionalities and a focus on personalization, LumApps helps organizations build community among employees, communicate the right information to the right people, create connections beyond their immediate teams, and foster collaboration.
Connected employees are also engaged, and engaged employees are the heart and soul of any successful company. This platform offers a personalized experience, empowering employees to curate their content and stay informed about what matters most to them. Through LumApps, your employees will feel heard, valued, and connected to the larger organizational narrative.
How do they accomplish that? LumApps has a robust range of features to facilitate seamless communication and knowledge sharing. In addition to easily creating news and communications using custom content types, employees can also participate in Communities or Spaces (the next generation of Communities) where they can ask questions and share posts, events, and articles. In addition, the platform provides robust search capabilities, allowing employees to quickly find relevant information and resources.
LumApps also offers extensive customization options, integrating with a growing list of popular productivity tools and applications. Microsoft organizations can tailor the platform to their unique requirements and brand identity because the digital workplace platform integrates with Microsoft O365, and other business software solutions, providing a unified employee experience. The same is true for enterprises using Google Workplace.
The employee experience platform caters to organizations of different sizes and scales, from small and medium-sized businesses to global enterprises with thousands of employees. LumApps' customers span across multiple sectors, such as technology, finance, manufacturing, retail, and more.
While LumApps serves a diverse range of customers across various industries. It is particularly valuable for large enterprises and organizations with dispersed workforces that seek to enhance internal communication and collaboration.
Customers of LumApps include multinational corporations, educational institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies, and other enterprises striving to create a connected and engaged workforce.
LumApps distinguishes itself from other intranet platforms by offering a comprehensive set of features and tools that encompass various aspects of digital workplace and employee communication. It combines the functionalities of an intranet, employee experience platform, and social collaboration tool into one cohesive solution, often at a more competitive intranet pricing point compared to purchasing these tools separately. With its modern and intuitive user interface, LumApps provides a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate user experience.
LumApps excels in delivering a personalized employee experience. With its ability to target content to specific user groups, LumApps ensures that employees see relevant information tailored to their roles, locations, or interests.
The platform offers options such as visibility settings, content highlighting, and targeted notifications, allowing organizations to deliver precise messaging to specific audiences. This level of personalization can enhance engagement, productivity, and overall user satisfaction.
In addition to personalization, the logical navigation structure for end users feels easy and intuitive. The effectiveness of an intranet hinges on the users' experience, emphasizing the critical need for a platform that is effortlessly navigable and user-friendly in order to truly maximize its potential and achieve success.
This ultra-personalized experience ensures that the right people see the right content at the right time. Content creators can do this in a number of ways:
This granular targeting gives you control to target the same piece of content in different ways, all at once. For example, a new HR policy might be visible (discoverable) to everyone, highlighted for the HR department, and notified to HR leadership.
Beyond this, LumApps offers functionality to send automated targeted messaging to employees based on where they are in their employee journey. By segmenting groups and orchestrating targeted communication campaigns, LumApps ensures precise messaging reaches the right audience when and where it's most effective.
One of LumApps' notable strengths is its extensive customizability. The platform allows organizations to tailor the design, branding, and content types to reflect their unique identity and operational needs. With unlimited design options, including theming, customizable layouts, and widget styling, LumApps enables organizations to create a digital workplace platform that is visually engaging, aligned with their brand, and optimized for usability.
LumApps widgets and integrations play a role in enhancing the functionality and appearance of your intranet. With the flexibility to add and style widgets, organizations can create dynamic and interactive pages that cater to their specific needs. At Social Edge Consulting, we offer a variety of widgets for LumApps, including a LumApps Accordion Widget, LumApps Hero Widget, and LumApps Mosaic Widget. Learn more about
With LumApps, the power of design lies with you. You have the freedom to design your intranet in a way that aligns with your brand and operational needs.
LumApps goes beyond the mere tagging of content with a hierarchical approach to metadata, enabling multiple levels of categorization. This takes the platform a step beyond many of its digital community peers, introducing a level of granularity that significantly bolsters content management and accessibility.
Primarily, it offers improved content discoverability and organization. The depth of metadata helps users find the precise content they need with minimal effort. It also allows for more effective content filtering and sorting, reducing time wasted on fruitless searches.
LumApps' advanced metadata support is a powerful tool that drives efficiency and personalization within your digital workplace, adapting to the complexities of your business and enhancing user experience.
While LumApps shines as a digital workplace and employee communication platform, it also integrates CMS-like features that amplify its versatility and adaptability. Specifically, its ability to define custom content types and utilize templates provides a level of control and efficiency that's commonly found in dedicated Content Management Systems.
While LumApps is not strictly a CMS, these features contribute to a CMS-like experience within the platform. They enhance the flexibility and efficiency of your content creation and management process, making LumApps a versatile tool for unique business needs.
LumApps recently introduced the LumApps AI (Artificial Intelligence) digital assistant to help guide employees through IT, HR, and Operations-related requests by tapping into the powers of automation and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). From issuing reminders to initiating automated processes or answering frequently asked questions, the AI assistant proves to be a tireless digital ally—all while seamlessly integrating with your digital workplace. And we just got word that the digital assistant will soon integrate with ChatGPT. We’re excited to see how this changes the way people work.
Innovation is frequent and robust; LumApps demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. They actively communicate their roadmap and regularly introduce new features and enhancements to meet evolving customer needs.
The admin console (Back Office) is well-designed and easy to use. LumApps offers an intuitive and user-friendly admin console where administrators have control over security settings, theme customization, notification management, search fine-tuning, and more. This centralized console simplifies administrative tasks and provides a comprehensive control center for managing the platform effectively.
While LumApps offers many impressive features, there are a few areas where we believe there is room for improvement. One aspect we would like to see clarified is the differentiation between Tags and Metadata. Currently, there is some overlap between these categorization features, leading to confusion about when and how to use them effectively.
We recommend providing clearer guidelines and documentation to help users understand the distinction between these two functionalities, or even combining them into one easy-to-use feature. We'd like to see metadata extended to Communities and the new Spaces, and we'd like an easy way to upload a set of metadata through the UI instead of manually adding one at a time.
Another area where improvement can be made is in the support documentation. While most support team members are knowledgeable and responsive, we have found that some of the documentation could be enhanced. Providing comprehensive and detailed resources would enable users to find answers to their questions more easily and empower them to make the most of the LumApps platform.
Additionally, while LumApps offers analytics and reporting functionalities, we believe there is room for improvement. In the last few months, LumApps has invested in enhancing analytics capabilities by introducing more robust reporting features and better data management. We look forward to seeing further developments in this space to provide organizations with valuable insights into their digital workplace engagement and performance.
Overall, continuing to improve the metadata editing experience, improving documentation, and expanding analytics and reporting capabilities would further elevate the LumApps experience for its users. With their record of frequent enhancements, we expect they will address these concerns in short order.
"We were looking for that right balance of power and ease of use to achieve our goals around content quality for our corporate information."
Elise Dunham
Knowledge Manager | Zapier
In January 2022, Social Edge Consulting played a pivotal role in Zapier's LumApps implementation and tailoring it to their unique needs. Delve deeper into this success story by exploring our detailed Zapier intranet case study.
LumApps has proven to be a favored choice among our clients who have selected it as their employee experience platform. For organizations seeking to replace their traditional intranets with a dynamic and collaborative community, LumApps emerges as a strong contender.
It strikes a fine balance between providing robust features for management communications and enabling effective team member collaboration. If these aspects align with your company priorities, we highly recommend considering LumApps as a top contender for your shortlist. We’ve enjoyed working with LumApps over the years and watching this platform innovate and grow.
Curious about the future of intranets? Watch the webinar we did with LumApps, "Are Intranets A Thing Of The Past?" to learn more about how employee experience platforms are transforming workplace communication and engagement. Our experts discuss the evolution of intranets, the changing goals of these platforms, and how to evaluate and enhance your existing environment.
If you’re interested in exploring LumApps further, want to see how it can fit into your organization, or need help with the LumApps setup process, contact us to book an intranet demo or learn more about intranet consulting services.
Our team at Social Edge Consulting is here to help you find the best intranet solution for your needs and guide you through the implementation process. Let’s create a connected and collaborative community within your organization with the support of LumApps.
