Choosing an intranet in 2026 has nothing to do with 10 years earlier. What was an internal display portal has become a strategic infrastructure: it structures communication, conditions employee engagement, and directly impacts daily productivity.
However, the selection criteria often remain superficial.
Features, price, interface: we evaluate what is visible, not what really matters. Before comparing solutions, you still need to know what you are evaluating.
This guide offers a reading grid for IT and HR managers in the selection phase of a intranet software and the concrete questions to ask before signing.
The 5 criteria that really matter
- Integration: native, overlay or connector?
An intranet can fit into your existing environment in three very different ways, and the choice has real-world implications for maintenance, costs and long-term governance.
Native integration means that the platform is built directly on your ecosystem: for example on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint or Google Workspace for companies already equipped. No synchronization to manage, no double authentication: access rights automatically follow those defined in your directory.
The overlay builds on your existing tools but adds a separate application layer. More visually flexible, it involves additional maintenance and risks of desynchronization with each update of the underlying tool.
The third-party connector connects an independent platform to your stack via APIs. Maximum freedom of choice, but connectors create points of fragility and often hidden costs not anticipated at the time of signing.
The real question isn’t “does it fit?” ”, everything fits on paper.
It is: what level of integration are you willing to maintain, and who will do it internally?
- Data sovereignty: what it means in practice
Data sovereignty refers to the effective control that an organization maintains over its information: where it is stored, who can access it, under what legal framework it is processed.
In the context of an intranet, the issues are very concrete. Do your employees’ data (directory, documents, internal exchanges, etc.) pass through the publisher’s servers? Are they hosted in the EU? Can the publisher access it for support or product improvement purposes and within what contractual framework?
For regulated sectors: banking, health, public sector, these questions are not optional. The GDPR imposes specific obligations on the location and processing of personal data.
The basic distinction is that some platforms host their client’s data in their own cloud infrastructure (which automatically increases risk). Others operate entirely within the company’s environment in its cloud tenant, without the data ever leaving its perimeter. These two models are not equivalent, neither in terms of risk nor in terms of compliance.
- Adoption: the true criterion of success, rarely measured in advance
An unused intranet is a failed intranet, regardless of its technical level. However, the adoption rate is rarely asked during the evaluation phase.
Adoption can be read on several levels. Initial connection rate: how many employees connected at least once in the first 30 days? Regular frequency of use: weekly, daily? And above all active contribution: do employees publish, comment, share, or just consult?
A read-only intranet is an intranet from 2010. Modern platforms aim for two-way engagement: information flows from top to bottom, but also between peers, between departments, between geographic sites.
Systematically ask the publisher for their average adoption rate at 3 months and 6 months on deployments comparable to yours: same sector, same size, same transformation context.
- Employee engagement: beyond connection metrics
Login rate is a vanity metric if it’s not paired with real engagement metrics. An employee who opens the intranet every morning to consult HR news and does nothing else is not engaged, he is informed.
The indicators that count: the average session duration, the contribution rate (ratio of readings / publications / reactions), the effective reduction of internal emails, etc. These metrics must be natively accessible in the platform’s analytical dashboard.
Another dimension often neglected: the commitment of field, non-desk workers or itinerant employees. These profiles represent a significant portion of the workforce in industry, logistics, health and retail.
For them, the mobile experience is no longer a bonus, it is an eliminatory criterion. A mobile intranet worthy of the name must be accessible without a professional email address, work offline, and offer an interface as neat as the desktop version.
- Time-to-value: how long before it’s really useful?
Between signing the contract and the moment your employees use the platform on a daily basis, a lot of things happen: configuration, content migration, training of administrators, internal communication, support for change.
The actual time-to-value is the time before observing a measurable impact on usage and it varies considerably from one publisher to another. Some platforms offer preconfigured templates by sector which allow operational deployment in a few weeks. When others require a project lasting several months before the first release into production.
This criterion is directly linked to the total cost of the project: the longer the deployment, the more internal costs accumulate: team time, training/onboarding, communication. And the risk of abandonment or loss of momentum increases.
Questions to ask a publisher during the evaluation phase
On integration
- Is your platform native, overlay or connector to our current stack? What are the maintenance implications of your updates?
- Who is responsible for maintaining the integrations, your team or ours?
- What are the hidden costs of third-party connectors in your pricing model?
On data sovereignty
- Where are our employees’ data hosted, in your infrastructure or in ours?
- Do you have access to our data for support or product improvement purposes? In what contractual framework?
- Can you provide a GDPR-compliant DPA, and when?
On adoption
- What is your average adoption rate at 30, 90 and 180 days on deployments comparable to ours, same sector, same size?
- Can you put us in contact with 2 or 3 customers of comparable size for direct feedback?
- What change support mechanisms do you offer and are they included in the contract?
On employee engagement
- What engagement metrics are natively available in your analytics dashboard?
- How do you measure the difference between passive consultation and active contribution?
- What experience is offered for field employees?
On time-to-value
- What is the average time between signature and operational production on a deployment of our size?
- Do you offer pre-configured templates by sector or use case and what exactly do they cover? Do you have any examples?
- What are the client-side prerequisites to meet this deadline?
What it gives in practice
These criteria are not theoretical. Here is what they give on real deployments with Powell Intranet:
- Toulouse Métropole: 13,000 agents, adoption rate multiplied by 6.5 after deployment of the new intranet.
- SIX Connect: 55% adoption from day one, +115% session duration.
- La Poste: 40,000 unique visitors per month, 700,000 monthly page views.
In all three cases, the data remains entirely in the customer’s cloud environment: it never passes through Powell’s infrastructure. This is the native Microsoft 365 / SharePoint model, which directly responds to the sovereignty issues mentioned above, in particular for regulated sectors.
Conclusion
Choosing an intranet means choosing the infrastructure for the daily life of your employees for the next 5 to 10 years. A bad choice cannot be corrected in a few weeks.
The criteria presented here (integration, sovereignty, adoption, commitment, time-to-value) are not exhaustive, but they are the ones that make the difference between a successful project and an abandoned project. Ask the right questions. Ask for proof, not promises.
