Vendor profile: Nooq

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 Nooq

In a brief paragraph, who are you?

nooQ have developed a revolutionary software which transforms individual, team and company productivity with the solution to the information overload problem. The traditional social software offerings provide a, linear product which merely lists the unsorted messages resulting in users needing to read even more information to stay informed. nooQ is a game changer. By sitting on top of other ESNs and social software products nooQ sorts, filters and displays information in a way which allows the user to instantly see what is important to them.

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

nooQ was founded in Glasgow, Scotland by CEO Graeme Bodys after realising there was a gap in the market for a truly efficient business communication and collaboration tool. From his experience working at global brands, communication flows in a company were woefully inefficient. People spent their time in email inboxes, conference calls and meetings. There were huge knowledge gaps about what was happening within a company and it was a challenge to find expertise and answers when you needed them.

Frustrated with this Graeme and his team set out to revolutionise workplace interactions and create a more productive environment using visualisation to priortise what was important to each individual. Coupled with intelligent machine learning algorithms to sort and filter according to personal preferences, communication would be far more efficient and stop the needless manual sorting, filtering and searching that everyone does.

Given that people spend 28% on email and a further 31% looking for answers, expertise and decisions, nooQ aims to solve this pain point.

In April 2015, nooQ launched its product to the European market at the Social Now conference in Amsterdam where it received three awards; “Coolest Tool”, “Coolest Feature” and “Best Fit for your Organisation”.

The European launch was followed by a US launch in Las Vegas at the Collision Conference in May 2015. .

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

Our target market are companies who are looking for a more innovative approach to enable collaboration and communication within their organisation. Typically creative, technology and digital businesses who need to collaborate across departments or with colleagues working remotely and as a result, want to find a solution which keeps everyone connected. They want to keep everyone informed and involved in the decision making process and does not want to waste time talking to the wrong person when they can get answers directly.

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

nooQ is the first application to graphically represent an organisation activity like a map the user can explore. It visualises data according to an individual’s personal preferences and extends the value of traditional linear inboxes and activity stream to apply intelligence, filtering and making the content visually significant.
nooQ is innovative in that it gives everyone a voice in decisions and alerts people to subjects or ideas in their interest so that serendipity happens more frequently. Every other company in this space uses a linear style approach – either Facebook style or chat style interface, both of which get very noisy and don’t scale to large amounts of postings.

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

Volume controls. A key feature is the ability for individuals to filter and personalise their view of the data through a series of volume controls which adjust the weighting of importance of specific tags or people within the user’s own visualisation display. These volume controls allow the user to turn subjects up, turn people down or even mute, resulting in saving everyone the most valuable of resources, time

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

nooQ’s features are used to a different degree depending on each person’s job tasks and who they regularly communicate with. Our deadlines feature are probably under-used at present. Internally at nooQ we post daily and weekly tasks with deadlines and use a weekly hashtag so that you can see instantly what people are working on, what is a priority and what deadlines are approaching. Items on nooQ get bigger as deadlines approach and go past. It is a very efficient way to get a snapshot of what a team or project is working on.

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

All nooQ versions are very flexible and allow all customers to use nooQ REST API for integration, we have Zapier integration for 400 other SaaS applications to integrate with nooQ and also Chrome and Firefox extensions for clipping web articles and text directly into nooQ. Those would be the starting points to customising nooQ. You can also customise the colours and user-interface to your own branding. We can also provide custom integrations and migrations to most other data sources. We have adapters for Twitter, Yammer and Slack and working on others at the moment.

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

Most intranet platforms focus on the company broadcasting information. Focus on personalised content, making it simple to find news, find answers, collaborate transparently on files, articles and ideas.

Put a communication plan in place to post relevant content to different people’s needs but start of with one or two areas that need it the most. Get an executive to champion the project and he/she must be posting on their own, reflecting the new style of open communications. Ghost writing and having personal assistants post on their behalf does not work.

Have fun. Be open, transparent and test out small projects and see what works in your company. Use champions to encourage participation. Measure what works, try new concepts, have competitions, idea sharing and fresh content. Encourage people to contribute content, embrace working out loud.

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

Per user, Fixed price – unlimited use – annual / monthly

What are the hosting options?

On Premise, Private cloud, Hybrid

Who are your main competitors?

Microsoft who have focused its social efforts on SharePoint and Yammer naturally hold a piece of the market. However, one of the industry issues is that there is huge dissatisfaction with the user experience.

The Facebook-style user interface approach which been taken by most other vendors (i.e. Slack and Hipchat) offers little differentiation amongst them all and none solve the problem of information overload. We believe people want to control their messages and be informed on what is relevant to them. They do not want to move from 150-200 emails to 300 messages on a social enterprise network, not to mention the increased notifications list that comes with it.

This is where nooQ is revolutionary. If you are looking for a simpler collaboration platform which takes a more creative, visually engaging approach to managing and finding answers nooQ is worthy of your attention.

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

Executive sponsorship, willingness to change and engagement.

What does the future have in store for your product?

We are excited about the future here at nooQ. We are constantly developing our product and increasing our features list to offer the best social solution possible. We are in fact looking to extend our product line to cover other areas of information overload such as social and email.

We truly believe we have a unique product with the opportunity to revolutionise the workplace.

What does intranet 2017 look like?

nooQ everywhere.

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

Get in touch with Anne or Graeme via Facebook or Twitter @nooqsoftware.

Or sign up for a free trial on our website www.nooq.co

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

What’s the one thing you cannot wait to introduce in 2016?

The nooQ mobile app!

Our brand spanking new mobile app is in its final stages of development and we are very excited about launching it shortly.