The World s Largest SharePoint Product and Resource Directory UNILY FOR SHAREPOINT ONLINE A superior 5 star product. SharePoint Online has never looked better Product Reviewed by Ron Charity January 2015 PRODUCT VALIDATION REPORT
INTRODUCTION Microsoft SharePoint has matured nicely as an offering - in its current 2013 release Microsoft has offered both online and on premise options. As many organizations have found, on premise solutions are costly to sustain and operate when you factor in operational and capital costs and when taken online the risks are compounded by providing online capabilities. Additionally, the effort required to design and build an Intranet is lengthy and costly, and in some cases organizations simply don t have the time and money to go through the exercise. For this review I will provide an overview of Unily (a turnkey Intranet offering), walk you through their product offering and suggest next steps should you decide to evaluate this product on your own. ABOUT UNILY Unily is the first product to come from award-winning* SharePoint Consultancy BrightStarr. BrightStarr have spent the last six years building Intranets and portals, with their mantra being to put the user first, and above everything, ensure that all solutions deliver exceptional user experiences. As Microsoft s Cloud Platform matured, BrightStarr have used their years of skills, knowledge and experience to build an out-of-the-box Intranet solution based on Microsoft cloud technology, enabling clients of all shapes and sizes to take advantage of new collaboration, file sharing and corporate social networking technologies, without investing heavily upfront. Unily (www.unily.com) is the cloud-based Intranet solution that unites the very best of Microsoft s cloud for greater collaboration and productivity. Developed on Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint, Unily draws on the full power of the Cloud and the capabilities of Office 365, SharePoint and Yammer to provide a united Intranet solution that will support and grow with your organization. * Nielsen Norman Intranet Design Award Winners; Everything Everywhere award in 2012; ABT Associates in 2014, Conoco Phillips in 2015 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 2
Unily offers a unique user experience that has been designed to drive user adoption. With branded multi-channel interfaces, your Unily Intranet will be a powerful corporate tool while still maintaining your brand consistency. Unily Intranets are delivered with ongoing consulting and support services to drive customer success and allows you to benefit from a true softwareas-a-service model, with a customer-led roadmap of new features to ensure your Intranet continues to meet your needs. An overview of Unily s features can be found here http://www.unily.com/intranet-features. The Unily FAQ can be found http://www.unily.com/about-unily-cloud-intranet here and Blog here http://www.unily.com/blog - both are very helpful in answering common questions. 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 3
ABOUT SHAREPOINT ONLINE SharePoint Online is Microsoft Cloud (Hosted) version of SharePoint. SharePoint Online delivers the powerful features of SharePoint without the associated overhead of managing the infrastructure on your own. Flexible management options ensure that you still retain the control you need to meet the compliance requirements of your organization. You can purchase SharePoint in the cloud as a standalone offering or as part of an Office 365 suite, where you can also get access to Exchange, Lync, the Office clients, and Web apps. More information can be found here http://products.office.com/enus/sharepoint/sharepoint-online-collaboration-software. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS As part of the package Unily delivers native Apps that can be found in App stores for Windows Phone, Android and ios, compatible with both mobiles and tablets, for the very best tailored mobile experiences. In addition to this, Unily itself has a responsive design supporting exceptional experiences on all desktop and tablet screen sizes. TEST ENVIRONMENT AND EVALUATION The test environment for the review consisted of a Windows 7 Laptop with IE 11.0.14, an ipad and iphone running the latest version of IOS 8.1 running either WiFi or LTE. BrightStarr provided me with access to their online demonstration and evaluation environment for Unily. From an evaluation perspective, the key features Unily offers were evaluated, including user experience, social tools, people directory, document center and workspaces (and more). 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 4
FIRST IMPRESSIONS - DESKTOP EXPERIENCE To begin the review, I first walked through the Unily demonstration site using my Laptop (Windows 7 with IE11 ) to get a sense of the full experience. Login from a Desktop takes you to the Office 365 login screen and then displays a Unily Intranet. Looking at the Figure 1 below, you will notice that the Unily site is quite different from a standard Office 365 experience. The base features common in Intranets are present (Workspaces, People Directory, News Feeds, Blog and Document repository), the site is Branded and much cleaner looking. Specifically, the Unily enhancements provide you with an Intranet that is 80% ready just add your staff and setup security and you re ready to start using your Intranet. Figure 1 - Home Page 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 5
Clicking through the various links I notice enhancements to Office 365 everywhere, for example figure 2 is a screenshot of the Blogs. Unily features custom Blogs, allowing any users to create content, using an approval process workflow to ensure proper governance. Blog posts are completely social, connected directly with Yammer, allowing users to Like, Comment and share content with peers quickly and easily. Figure 2 - Blogs 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 6
Browsing through the People Directory, further enhancements can be seen that simply improve user experience simple to use and visually appealing. Figure 3 - Employee Profile 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 7
TABLET AND SMARTPHONE With the Desktop Experience review completed, I was anxious to see what sort of experience Unily offered on Mobile devices. Having reviewed many products I know where the gotchas are when developing on these sort of devices. First, I reviewed the iphone experience and immediately noticed the Unily product tailored the experience to the iphone. For example, figure 4 is the Navigation Menu that provides some nice extras such as followers, following and posts. Figure 5 is the News feed. Figure 4 - Navigation Figure 5 - News 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 8
The ipad experience is very similar to the iphone experience, but with more display real-estate. Figure 6 below depicts the home page experience. Figure 6 - Homepage 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 9
ANALYTICS The analytics available within Unily are greatly improved over standard Office 365 experience. Standard Unily reports include: User configurations information regarding their devices Visits time of day a histogram using a 24hr clock Visits day of work - a histogram Monday through Sunday Visit by Country Bar chart listing countries Visits Chart that provides visits past 30 days Top pages Table listing pages, visits, average time on page and bounce rate Figure 7 below depicts the Analytics using a Desktop (Windows Laptop). Figure 7- Analytics 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 10
CMS The CMS page is streamlined so that content author user experience is simplified - they do not have to be concerned with SharePoint content framework, such as content types, columns etc. Figure 8 provides a view of the Unily CMS page. Figure 8 - CMS 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 11
OVERALL RATING The following is a summary of the review that was performed over a 3 day period. Criteria Rating 1-5 Notes Device support 5/5 All major platforms are supported User interface / Ease of Use 5/5 This is where the product shines, experience is consistent across device News feed 5/5 Enhanced for user experience Social enterprise tools 5/5 Yammer is fully integrated People directory 5/5 Enhanced for user experience Document center 5/5 Enhanced for user experience Enterprise blogging 5/5 Enhanced for user experience Workspaces 5/5 Enhanced for user experience Content publishing 5/5 Simplified to reduce learning curve Analytics 5/5 Greatly improved over standard Office 365 experience 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 12
Online support 5/5 The Unily site is full of information to help you Help Desk Support 5/5 My questions were answered quickly regardless of time of day Overall 5/5 Great offering for Office 365 based Intranets RECOMMENDATION When considering a solution or simply evaluating Intranet solutions, think of Unily on Office 365 as a Turnkey offering that can help you deploy an Intranet within your organization quickly. Over time, you can utilize their consulting services to integrate existing application or build new functionality from scratch. As a first step, I would suggest a Product demo by one of their staff and request usage of one the Unily demo intranets to obtain some hands-on experience with the product. Before evaluating, assemble a list of requirements for your Intranet and have staff evaluate Unily based on those requirements to facilitate a thorough consistent evaluation. You can arrange a product demonstration of Unily here. SUMMARY With the continued pressure on IT to streamline costs yet provide more services and features, SharePoint Online will be the choice for many organizations. Additionally, with the increasing number of devices, the trend of mobile working increasing and more organizations adopting SharePoint, and products such as Unily enhancing SharePoint Online has never looked better. Want to share your experiences with these products? Contact me at roncharity@gmail.com. 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 13
PRODUCT REVIEWED BY RON CHARITY Ron Charity is an enterprise architect with a major US bank and has worked in consulting for 20-plus years. He has worked in the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe proving him with a diverse background and global perspective on IT. He has worked with SharePoint since its 2001 beta and is focused on governance, collaboration, search, social, mobility, and document management. He has written articles on governance, collaboration, document management, and mobility. PRODUCT VALIDATION REPORT The Product Validation Report produced by SharePointReviews.com in collaboration with industry s most renowned experts delivers independent validation of vendor product capabilities and provides insights on how the product compliments customers native Microsoft SharePoint deployments. This report should not be treated as a replacement for the evaluation process that you would normally conduct before making a purchasing decision, but it will provide independent information on the product to help you with your decision. This report includes opinions of the reviewer(s), and neither SharePointReviews.com nor the reviewers are responsible for any issues that may arise during your usage of the product. This research was sponsored by BrightStarr. 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E 14