Should LumApps Be On Your Intranet Shortlist?

At Social Edge, we understand the power of community, connection, and collaboration. We believe that fostering these values within your organization is key to unlocking its true potential.

Choosing the right modern intranet platform is the first step and it requires careful consideration. We grasp the complexity involved in this process, as there are numerous platforms available to meet your intranet needs. Having worked with countless clients on evaluations and community implementations, we have curated a shortlist of platforms with a proven track record. We value each platform for its unique strengths, prioritizing finding the best fit for your specific requirements rather than relying on broad star ratings. That's why we are committed to exploring the top community platforms in-depth, ensuring you have all of the essential information at your fingertips to make the optimal decision for your business and community members. This is why people choose us as their third-party solution provider.

Now, let's dive into one of the intranet platforms on our shortlist—LumApps.

What is LumApps?

LumApps is an employee experience platform that provides organizations with a comprehensive intranet solution. However, we like to think it’s so much more than that. With a wide variety of tools and functionalities and a focus on personalization, LumApps helps organizations build community among employees, communicate the right information to the right people, create connections beyond their immediate teams, and foster collaboration. 

Connected employees are also engaged, and engaged employees are the heart and soul of any successful company. This platform offers a personalized experience, empowering employees to curate their content and stay informed about what matters most to them. Through LumApps, your employees will feel heard, valued, and connected to the larger organizational narrative.

How do they accomplish that? LumApps has a robust range of features to facilitate seamless communication and knowledge sharing. In addition to easily creating news and communications using custom content types, employees can also participate in Communities or Spaces (the next generation of Communities) where they can ask questions and share posts, events, and articles. In addition, the platform provides robust search capabilities, allowing employees to quickly find relevant information and resources.

LumApps also offers extensive customization options, integrating with a growing list of popular productivity tools and applications. Microsoft organizations can tailor the platform to their unique requirements and brand identity because the digital workplace platform integrates with Microsoft O365, and other business software solutions, providing a unified employee experience. The same is true for enterprises using Google Workplace.

Who are LumApps' Customers?

The employee experience platform caters to organizations of different sizes and scales, from small and medium-sized businesses to global enterprises with thousands of employees. LumApps' customers span across multiple sectors, such as technology, finance, manufacturing, retail, and more.

While LumApps serves a diverse range of customers across various industries. It is particularly valuable for large enterprises and organizations with dispersed workforces that seek to enhance internal communication and collaboration.

Customers of LumApps include multinational corporations, educational institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies, and other enterprises striving to create a connected and engaged workforce.

What Makes LumApps Stand Out?

LumApps distinguishes itself by offering a comprehensive set of features and tools that encompass various aspects of digital workplace and employee communication. It combines the functionalities of an intranet, employee experience platform, and social collaboration tool into one cohesive solution. With its modern and intuitive user interface, LumApps provides a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate user experience.

Personalized User Experience 

LumApps excels in delivering a personalized employee experience. With its ability to target content to specific user groups, LumApps ensures that employees see relevant information tailored to their roles, locations, or interests. 

The platform offers options such as visibility settings, content highlighting, and targeted notifications, allowing organizations to deliver precise messaging to specific audiences. This level of personalization can enhance engagement, productivity, and overall user satisfaction. 

In addition to personalization, the logical navigation structure for end users feels easy and intuitive. The effectiveness of an intranet hinges on the users' experience, emphasizing the critical need for a platform that is effortlessly navigable and user-friendly in order to truly maximize its potential and achieve success.

This ultra-personalized experience ensures that the right people see the right content at the right time. Content creators can do this in a number of ways:

• Visible to: Decide who has permission to see the content.
• Highlighted for: Decide who this content should be highlighted for. A content creator might set visibility to All, and then choose a smaller group—such as employees in a specific location—to highlight the content for. This means that only these employees will see this content prominently displayed on the homepage and other landing pages. 
• Notify: Send the content directly to email for everyone or for a subset of employees. Similar to highlighting, notifying puts the content front and center for a selected group of people. 

This granular targeting gives you control to target the same piece of content in different ways, all at once. For example, a new HR policy might be visible (discoverable) to everyone, highlighted for the HR department, and notified to HR leadership.

Beyond this, LumApps offers functionality to send automated targeted messaging to employees based on where they are in their employee journey.By segmenting groups and orchestrating targeted communication campaigns, LumApps ensures precise messaging reaches the right audience when and where it's most effective.

Customizability and Design Flexibility 

One of LumApps' notable strengths is its extensive customizability. The platform allows organizations to tailor the design, branding, and content types to reflect their unique identity and operational needs. With unlimited design options, including theming, customizable layouts, and widget styling, LumApps enables organizations to create a digital workplace platform that is visually engaging, aligned with their brand, and optimized for usability. 

Key features include:

• Theming: It’s easy to create a custom style for one site or the entire platform; in addition, there’s an option to add a custom CSS stylesheet using theming variables
• Color palette: The ability to define a set of colors as well as the primary and secondary accent colors 
• Flexible layouts: Each page and content type can have a mix of columns and rows. Layouts can be fully locked down, or made adjustable for the editor to rearrange or add new widgets.
• Widget styling: Ability to adjust individual widgets with out-of-the-box display options, as well as set global styles that content/page editors can then use to change up the look
• Figma file plugin: In addition to the custom stylesheets, you can use a Figma file plugin to design your site in that tool and then export it into Lumapps.

With LumApps, the power of design lies with you. You have the freedom to design your intranet in a way that aligns with your brand and operational needs.

Advanced Metadata Support

LumApps goes beyond the mere tagging of content with a hierarchical approach to metadata, enabling multiple levels of categorization. This takes the platform a step beyond many of its digital community peers, introducing a level of granularity that significantly bolsters content management and accessibility.

How does it work? 

• Content creators tag content to make it surface dynamically on the pages where they want it to appear. These pages have widgets that are set up to display this tagged content.
• It highlights the context and relationships between pieces of content.
• The multi-tiered structure allows you to create more nuanced categorizations. For example, a single document can be tagged with metadata indicating its relevant department, project, and sub-project, each level providing more specific context.

How does this deeper level of metadata impact your business?

Primarily, it offers improved content discoverability and organization. The depth of metadata helps users find the precise content they need with minimal effort. It also allows for more effective content filtering and sorting, reducing time wasted on fruitless searches.

LumApps' advanced metadata support is a powerful tool that drives efficiency and personalization within your digital workplace, adapting to the complexities of your business and enhancing user experience.

Custom Content Types and Templates

While LumApps shines as a digital workplace and employee communication platform, it also integrates CMS-like features that amplify its versatility and adaptability. Specifically, its ability to define custom content types and utilize templates provides a level of control and efficiency that's commonly found in dedicated Content Management Systems.

• Custom content types: These in LumApps allow you to extend beyond the standard content classifications, tailoring them to reflect the unique needs of your business. These could range from project reports to HR announcements to executive memos, each structured with specific metadata fields, customized layouts, and unique widget configurations. This feature fosters consistency and logical organization in your content creation process.
• Template functionality: These work in tandem with custom content types, LumApps offers template functionalities. Once a template for a particular content type is set up, users can streamline the creation of new content. These predefined structures ensure uniformity across similar types of content, saving time and maintaining a cohesive appearance on your platform.
• Publishing workflow: Not only can this content can be set with expiration dates (either optional or required), but you can also set up an approval process for publishing. In addition, content types can be restricted to certain user groups.

While LumApps is not strictly a CMS, these features contribute to a CMS-like experience within the platform. They enhance the flexibility and efficiency of your content creation and management process, making LumApps a versatile tool for unique business needs.

AI Digital Experience

LumApps recently introduced their AI digital assistant to help guide employees through IT, HR, and Operations-related requests by tapping into the powers of automation and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). From issuing reminders to initiating automated processes or answering frequently asked questions, the AI assistant proves to be a tireless digital ally—all while seamlessly integrating with your digital workplace. And we just got word that the digital assistant will soon integrate with ChatGPT. We’re excited to see how this changes the way people work.

Other Key Aspects

Innovation is frequent and robust; LumApps demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. They actively communicate their roadmap and regularly introduce new features and enhancements to meet evolving customer needs.

The admin console (Back Office) is well-designed and easy to use. LumApps offers an intuitive and user-friendly admin console where administrators have control over security settings, theme customization, notification management, search fine-tuning, and more. This centralized console simplifies administrative tasks and provides a comprehensive control center for managing the platform effectively.

What We’d Like to See

While LumApps offers many impressive features, there are a few areas where we believe there is room for improvement. One aspect we would like to see clarified is the differentiation between Tags and Metadata. Currently, there is some overlap between these categorization features, leading to confusion about when and how to use them effectively. 

We recommend providing clearer guidelines and documentation to help users understand the distinction between these two functionalities, or even combining them into one easy-to-use feature.We'd like to see metadata extended to Communities and the new Spaces, and we'd like an easy way to upload a set of metadata through the UI instead of manually adding one at a time.

Another area where improvement can be made is in the support documentation. While most support team members are knowledgeable and responsive, we have found that some of the documentation could be enhanced. Providing comprehensive and detailed resources would enable users to find answers to their questions more easily and empower them to make the most of the LumApps platform.

Additionally, while LumApps offers analytics and reporting functionalities, we believe there is room for improvement. In the last few months, LumApps has invested in enhancing analytics capabilities by introducing more robust reporting features and better data management. We look forward to seeing further developments in this space to provide organizations with valuable insights into their digital workplace engagement and performance.

Overall, continuing to improve the metadata editing experience, improving documentation, and expanding analytics and reporting capabilities would further elevate the LumApps experience for its users. With their record of frequent enhancements, we expect they will address these concerns in short order. 

What Our Customers Say About Lumapps

"We were looking for that right balance of power and ease of use to achieve our goals around content quality for our corporate information."

Elise Dunham

Knowledge Manager | Zapier

In January 2022, Social Edge Consulting played a pivotal role in Zapier's LumApps implementation and tailoring it to their unique needs. Delve deeper into this success story by exploring our detailed case study.

LumApps has proven to be a favored choice among our clients who have selected it as their employee experience platform. For organizations seeking to replace their traditional intranets with a dynamic and collaborative community, LumApps emerges as a strong contender. 

It strikes a fine balance between providing robust features for management communications and enabling effective team member collaboration. If these aspects align with your company priorities, we highly recommend considering LumApps as a top contender for your shortlist.

We’ve enjoyed working with LumApps over the years and watching this platform innovate and grow. If you’d like to learn more about LumApps or another platform contact us to book a demo.

Stay tuned for the next edition of our Platform Evaluation Series.