Vendor profile: Twine

The Intranetizen team are often asked advice about intranet vendors that supply software and hardware solutions to run your intranet. Whilst we have 44 years of blue-chip intranet experience between us, in common with many intranet practitioners, we have relatively limited experience of the 200+ software systems that companies use.

To help you, to help us and to help the vendors themselves, we run a series of posts showcasing intranet companies. We don’t ask for any payment to feature them and we aim to include any relevant platform that is willing to openly respond to our questions.

We’ve supplied them with the same standard set of questions and will publish their answers in their own words to ensure equity! All the images have been supplied by the company themselves and are reproduced with permission.

Today, we showcase Twine

In a brief paragraph, who are you?

Hello, we are Twine.

Twine is a platform that helps people work better by making it easier to collaborate. It’s an online space that brings people, content and knowledge together – wherever they might be.

Briefly describe your product’s history? Why did you start it, where does it come from?

Twine is made by digital studio, Browser London. We create digital web products that help people work better.

We think that workplace digital tools should be just as good as the technology that we use in our personal lives. For many businesses, this isn’t the case. This is why we pay special attention to making our products work beautifully and designed around users.

We built Twine with this principle in mind. It’s designed to be a joy to use and customisable enough to suit your business.

Describe your typical customer – what kind of company, what size, what are the kinds of problems they need to solve?

We help companies that have a problem connecting people, content and knowledge together. Typically this tends to be medium and large businesses, often those with a dispersed workforce, lots of remote workers or in need of a portal to connect people.

What do you see as your product and company’s USP?

Flexibility and customisation is what Twine really excels at.

Individual businesses can choose which features they need, which they don’t and even work with us to develop new ones. This flexibility means that Twine can be used as a starting point for any situation where businesses need people to collaborate easily.

Which feature(s) of your product do your customers rave about most?

Twine forum screenshot

Flexibility and customisation is what Twine really excels at.

Individual businesses can choose which features they need, which they don’t and even work with us to develop new ones. This flexibility means that Twine can be used as a starting point for any situation where businesses need people to collaborate easily.

Which feature(s) of your product do you feel are most under-used?

Generally we find that things like policy documents get the least hits. However, that doesn’t mean that policy documents aren’t important, just that they don’t need to be accessed as regularly as features like the forum.

The good thing about Twine is that if it’s clear that a feature isn’t useful for business, we can turn it off.

How much customisation does your product typically need / how much to you recommend your customers make?

Twine is very flexible. From the initial ‘out of the box’ product it can be customised in a few different ways:

• Appearance and content: you can skin Twine with themes, logos and taxonomy which all contribute to creating a personal experience
• Features: you can choose which features you need and turn off the ones you don’t
• Custom development: you can ask us to develop something on top of Twine that isn’t in the ‘out of the box’ version

Twine Dashboard screenshot

If a customer is on a limited budget, we encourage them to stay as streamlined as possible. This means we’ll turn off the apps that they don’t need and keep things simple.

For those with more complex requirements and a bigger budget, we can work to develop extra features on top of Twine. In the past clients have taken the base Twine product and developed it into something quite different: an insights portal, a collaboration platform, a talent management system.

As we say; it’s very flexible!

What advice would you give a company planning to invest in a new intranet platform? / what are the most important factors to consider?

Think about the following:

• Why do you want a new platform?
• What problems do you want it to solve?
• What feedback do you have from users of your current system?

This usually gives the client plenty to think about and puts them in a much better position to know what they really need from the technology. This means a better end product and a better case made to internal stakeholders.

What are the hosting options?

On Premise, Private cloud

What’s your cost model? Free; one-off; per seat per month charging; something else?

Per user

Who are your main competitors?

Traditionally this space is dominated by big, powerful software like Sharepoint, but nowadays, it’s a bit more complex than that.

As companies realise that they don’t need that kind of power and budget spent on development we’re seeing much more lightweight, flexible platforms gaining popularity to meet this need.

That’s the circle that Twine is in. Fast to setup and easy to start using straight away – it does the basics beautifully and has scope to do the more complex stuff if you ever need it.

What do you need from *your* customers to deliver intranet success?

The most essential thing that we need from our customers is knowledge of their problems and their users. Once we are both really clear on what these things are, we can begin to decide which features are necessary, which aren’t and how it’s going to work in the organisation.

What does the future have in store for your product?

The future is largely dictated by user habits, so let’s look at where they are going.

Long term, this really difficult to predict, but in the short term we expect to see even more uptake from mobile devices. As 4G comes into the mainstream and remote working increases, accessing documents, team members and knowledge on the go is going to be the norm. We’ll be making sure that Twine is ready for any change in user habits/technical advances.

What does intranet 2017 look like?

It’s a utopian world where clunky enterprise software is dead, and well designed intranets are making people smile 🙂

Who should Intranetizen readers speak with to find out more about your product?

If you just want to snoop around the product yourself – pick up a free login from our website: http://www.twineintranet.com/try-it-free/

And if you want to chat, send an email to hello@twinehr.com or give us a call on + 44 2035984209.

What question should we have asked? And if we had, what would the answer have been?

You’re probably thinking: ‘All very nice, but what makes Twine different?’ Well…

• You can build it for your business: pick the apps you want and leave the ones you don’t
• It gets teams together: you’ll get social apps like blogs, forums and messaging
• People actually want to use it: we’ve developed it alongside real users
• It’s on brand: you can use your own custom branding and content
• It’s mobile friendly: Twine works beautifully on any device