Unily selected as a leading employee experience platform

ClearBox's report provides a comprehensive guide to the best intranet and employee experience platform features and capabilities currently on offer in the marketplace.

In a crowded market, recognition as intranet of choice is an outstanding achievement that will give both buyers and customers confidence that they are working with a top provider with the credentials to solve emerging workplace challenges. The accolade is a testament to the continued growth of our product and the expertise of our growing teams.

About the report

ClearBox is a specialist independent consultancy that specializes in the business challenges of the digital workplace: intranet strategy, SharePoint, Office 365, employee adoption, governance, and effective communication.

Every year ClearBox's reports are hotly anticipated and relied on as a source of impartial information on intranet developments and vendor comparisons. The consultancy has been writing reviews of intranet products for around six years, exploring their features against common business scenarios and sharing the results in its published yearly report.

A new report title recognizes the birth of a new breed of intranets

The main difference in this year’s report is that ClearBox has combined its independent intranet report with its SharePoint intranet in-a-box report. The change of title marks a significant shift in the sands that recognizes the evolution of intranet technology in the last six years. Re-orienting the report in this way allows for a more meaningful comparison of solutions in today's marketplace.

According to the report's author, Suzie Robinson, the decision to update the report approach was taken both because "Products have evolved and there’s been a shift in the way vendors discuss their software" and "SharePoint shouldn’t always be an automatic decision when considering your intranet landscape."

In making this change, ClearBox takes a more agnostic perspective, using business-oriented scenarios to compare independent platforms against ones that sit on top of SharePoint.

“All of our in-depth reviews are structured around ten business scenarios that we’ve formulated following our work with clients, as well as the trends we’ve seen in the industry. We don’t look for a tick-list of features, instead, we want to see how products address the common challenges that businesses face. We score these scenarios, giving you a way to compare different products equally so you can focus-in on the areas that matter most to you.”

How did Unily do?

Having been selected as intranet software of choice, Unily is a clear frontrunner against nineteen other fully reviewed vendors. The Unily platform excels in three main areas: simple news publishing, powerful admin, and overall user experience. Our new Engagement Automation feature was called out as an exciting update that saw us score highly in the 'wildcard' category. Overall, Unily was praised for being as powerful under the hood as it is slick and glossy on top.

"Unily is a top-tier employee engagement-focused intranet product that delivers an excellent experience across its well-integrated range of features. It can create good-looking, user-friendly intranets that meet the needs of complex multinational organisations thanks to its branding, targeting and administration capabilities. A very capable mobile app also extends the appeal to organisations that need to reach employees away from desktops."

- ClearBox

Easy-to-manage CMS

Unily was commended on ease of use when it came to content management system performance, due to its simple interface that supports employees, editors, and admins alike. Front-end content creation was highlighted as an added bonus - giving users the ability to create and publish stories without CMS access. One customer said: “We love the interface and the ease to manage and edit content and curate different pages."

"The attention to design and clarity of interface extends backstage too. Unily has one of the easiest-to-use admin interfaces we’ve come across. Considering how much can be changed and controlled through this interface, functions are clearly separated in a hierarchy with the ability to drill-down through layers of options and details. If you can’t remember exactly which heading an option is under, search will help you find it."

- ClearBox

Strong content governance capabilities

Clearbox highlighted Unily's content governance capabilities, which make it easy for administrators and publishers to manage their content lifecycle, ensuring everything remains fresh and up to date. The content review lifecycle feature arms administrators and communicators with tools to better manage content over time, ensuring everything remains brand new and relevant rather than getting old, obsolete, and potentially inaccurate.

"News and static content can have future publish, review, and expiry dates. Content owners get a notification when their content is due for review and can view the status of all their content in a ‘My Content’ dashboard in the CMS. Content passing expiry can be unpublished automatically but not deleted. Expiry can also apply to a whole site if needed."

- Clearbox

Outstanding innovation

Unily's innovative roadmap stood out as a selling point to prospective buyers. The introduction of Engagement Automation - Unily's campaign planning and workflow engine - was picked out as a highlight that set the product apart from other vendors. The use of ideation both within the product and on Unily's customer community platform - Universe - was also pulled out as a point of interest. One interviewed customer commented on the benefits of “an excellent range of widgets and functionality” and "upgrade path [that] is transparent with an ideation facility to generate feedback for improvements.” Another customer praised, “the constant innovation of the platform and the continuous attention Unily puts on evolving the product and keeping it upgraded with new and relevant features.”

"Unily’s new Campaigns feature brings what they are calling “engagement automation” to the product. This can be thought of as an internal communications version of marketing automation, with a timeline or event-based series of activities themed around a particular campaign with associated goals and tracking. The capabilities are extensive within the Unily platform, being able to automate branding (theme) changes, content publishing, notifications (intranet, app, email, MS Teams etc) based on a timeline and targeted to defined audiences."

- ClearBox

Attention to accessibility

Unily scored the highest when it came to accessibility, being the only vendor to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. The Web Content Accessibility Guideline is an international standard to help make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. There is no set requirement to comply with the WCAG 2.1 AA regulation, but Unily is proud to meet it across the board and continually hold up the standard.

Streamlined search functionality

Unily's search experience also scored well in the report in comparison to other vendors. The 'Google-like' search functionality is designed to give an experience users will be familiar with, being able to type keywords and find answers quickly and without having to trawl through mountains of information. The search is intuitive and integrated with all systems employees would use, providing a single knowledge repository to search through.

Highlights in the report outlined by Clearbox about Unily's search functionality include:

Unily presents search results in a large, categorized overlay panel that refines as you type. Search results are clearly presented in a list or grid
Refiners are smart enough to disappear if they would lead to zero results.
Search can be configured to prioritize recent content, something that could be useful where time is a factor, such as project news updates

Top mobile app experience

Finally, Unily's branded mobile app was commended as, "one of the better mobile app experiences on offer," making it an attractive offing to enterprises with frontline workforces. As the 'deskless disconnect' becomes a more pressing issue facing enterprises, the performance of Unily's mobile app experience is one to celebrate.

Blog

2021 highlights and what's up next for Unily in 2022

2022 is here, and so is a new year of employee experience innovation. Before leaping into another exciting 12 months, we're taking a look back at 2021: a record-breaking year of milestones and moments to remember. See what our clients achieved, how our product and business evolved, and get a first look at what's to come in 2022.

Learn more