Vendor profile: Iris intranet

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 Iris intranet

In a brief paragraph, who are you?

We are triptic, an agency for digital communications in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, founded by architects in 1997.

After years of developing solid online solutions in the widest sense, we started devoting our time to one specific thing that feels very meaningful to us: intranets.

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

We wanted to focus on internal platforms for organisations to help people work smarter and in a more enjoyable way – both individually and collaboratively.

Working with our clients and keeping up with general developments around us, we had recognized a need for more efficient and more flexible ways to fulfil daily tasks together.

In many organisations, finding information often takes longer than necessary, and so does finding the right specialist for something. Also, we felt like there should be easier and more appealing ways to present important information and more user-friendly ways to interact with each other.

We came up with our concepts of a customized dashboard and the ‘Swiss Army Knife’, and then she started to come to life. We named her Iris Intranet.

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

You can find Iris Intranet in a wide variety of organisations, with the number of employees varying from, say, 50 to 10.000.

Iris typically works for organisations who want to enable their employees to make the most of their work, and to collectively adapt to changes, like mergers or new ways of working.

For instance in healthcare, in several cases, Iris is there to facilitate information and communication for self-managed work teams.

But Iris also helps companies work toward other kinds of goals. Another interesting example is Dorel Juvenile who bring you brands like Maxi-Cosi and Quinny. They have different divisions on different continents and they are now working towards one shared identity together, connecting across the globe.

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

As previously mentioned, triptic is founded by architects. And when architects start an agency for online communication, you’ll get tools in which you feel at home. Iris Intranet is one of them.

Iris comes to life thanks to Intranet Design Thinking. That’s a process in which we find out what your typical work day looks like, what kind of information you need during the day, and how the intranet can help you get it. That’s how Iris gets ready to help you work even smarter, faster, better.

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

What we hear most often is that people appreciate the general ease of use, throughout the platform. As for a specific feature; a lot of our customers tell us they appreciate the customizable personal dashboard on Iris Intranet.

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

The most under-used feature might be the menu structure in the group spaces. You can click a + and add a new page that the group members can see and comment on. Most information is shared in the group timeline, but we like to encourage creating such pages to store information that’s more permanent.

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

Iris can be ready to go within a week. That’s a full-blown social intranet in your organisation’s own look and feel.

However, often some customization is required, to further tailor the intranet to the most important tasks in a specific organisation and really embed it into the processes. That way the intranet has a reason to become a part of employees’ daily routine – which is necessary to have it support the organisation’s goals.

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

1) What organisational goal(s) should the intranet support, facilitate, enable? Make sure you know what it’s for, and make sure you communicate this clearly to everyone involved, so they understand why they should join you on the platform.

2) Also, pay a lot of attention to usability. ‘User-centric’ should be the norm in your organisation, the intranet has to be accessible and inviting. It has to be a pleasure to work with.

3) Keep in mind: you’re in it for the long haul. It takes time to get your colleagues on board, to get the intranet embedded in daily routines, and to reap what you have sown.

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

Fixed price – unlimited use – annual / monthly

What are the hosting options?

On Premise, Private cloud

Who are your main competitors?

SharePoint comes to mind. There are a lot of companies who sell SharePoint-based intranets. However, developing SharePoint-projects requires significant amounts of time and money. The main with SharePoint difference is that Iris is ready to go in a blink of an eye. Iris can connect to SharePoint to make to most out of its capabilities.

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

The notion and the readiness to organise things well – to guide their organisation through the change, to promote the intranet, champion it, to provide training and everything needed to get everyone engaged.

It’s about the will, the belief, and the patience needed to adjust to a more flexible, more open, more accessible way of working together.

What does the future have in store for your product?

The next step in tailoring the platform to clients’ organizations, making it so you get information tailored to your specific location – for instance, a doctor who goes to a different department in a hospital will then get specified procedures shown more prominently on his intranet.

What does intranet 2017 look like?

In 2017, an intranet should be the central place to start your day. It knows you and adapts during the day, according to your needs. For instance: when you have a meeting coming up on internal communication, the intranet shows you the latest updates… Automatically!

We see a merger between consumer oriented platforms and enterprise software: the last will become more understanding and helping.

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

Feel free to contact Arthur Turksma, co-founder of triptic and the godfather of Iris. He’s on Twitter, @dutchart. Or you know what, why not talk to Iris herself at info@irisintranet.com!

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

That’s a hard question. If someone is looking to purchase a new intranet or digital workplace, they want to know what they’re buying. So what is the true value of Iris Intranet?

One of our design principles is that information should find you. Iris gets data from other business systems and presents the most important information to you on your personal dashboard. Bite-size. That’s a nice example of how Iris helps you get informed quicker.

She gets the essential information for you, she prioritizes content based on the device you’re using, and, in doing all that, she enables you to work smarter. That’s why we say Iris brings out the best.