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PRODUCT VALIDATION REPORT

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

© 2014, SHAREPOINTREVIEWS.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. P A G E | 2

U N I L Y P R O D U C T V A L I D A T I O N R E P O R T

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

http://www.unily.com/



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 software-

as-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.

http://www.unily.com/Intranet-Features

http://www.unily.com/About-Unily-Cloud-Intranet

http://www.unily.com/Blog



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/en-

us/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).

http://products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-online-collaboration-software

http://products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-online-collaboration-software



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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 [email protected] .

http://hubs.ly/y0qdQx0

mailto:[email protected]



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.

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