For the past five years ClearBox Consulting has published an annual review of the SharePoint intranet in-a-box products that are on the market. It truly is an evergreen resource, and even more so since we decided to update it quarterly.

The new issue of our report has just been published and is available to buy now. It’s nearly 600 pages of critical evaluations, buying advice and checklists, all richly illustrated with screenshots. You won’t find this information elsewhere, even if you visited every page on the vendor websites. This time around we cover 52 products – 30 in detail and 22 in summary – and you can see the full list of who’s included on the report page.

During the early hours of a morning in June, I was sitting thinking about business, finances, and upcoming work – a stream of thought that will be understood by business owners the world over. As I wrote my analysis for the remaining months of 2019, I happened to see an email arrive from Sam Marshall of ClearBox Consulting. I hadn’t spoken to Sam in almost two years, but his perfectly timed email offered the opportunity to be involved as an analyst for the next edition of ClearBox’s SharePoint Intranets-In-A-Box report. I have seen previous editions but never participated, and the timing of his invitation gave validity to responding in the positive.

So began a complex and mind-bending analytical process to review three of the products for the new report against the scenario scorecards that Sam and his team had developed. My three product reviews to write were WebVine’s Injio, Circle T’s Kasama, and Sope’s Sproket, and subsequently I also reviewed the SharePoint Online analysis that Sam wrote. The demos for my reviews happened in early- to mid-August, and the write-up and review process took through to the end of September. It was a larger piece of work than I expected – Sam isn’t over-estimating when he says there are over 700 hours of work reflected in the new edition of the report – but I like a challenging project and once begun I was committed to finishing.

Sam and the wider team at ClearBox Consulting have now published the new report. It is available for immediate purchase from ClearBox for US$595, and this includes access to the next three quarterly updates as well. As one of the authors, it is easy for me to say that if you are evaluating SharePoint as an intranet platform, don’t start work without this report.