Making working life sweeter with Honey, the next-gen intranet

4 February 2020 | 2809 Shares

Source: Unsplash

The Honey platform’s creation clearly has roots in solving the type of problems its own founder was experiencing.

Like all people working for a living today, the original architects were using dozens of tools, collaboration platforms, chat apps, file stores, calendars, email apps, and more besides. Being connected was great but how connected were all those different elements?

If most businesses’ experiences are anything to go by, probably not very connected at all.

The situation in many companies and organizations today is, unfortunately, one of information overload, duplication, and fragmentation, all of which hinder the original purpose of even the simplest app working as it might.

An essential email from the boss gets lost amid Slack messages, people get distracted from the constant need to shift from app to app. And there’s usually a great deal of cut and paste from one channel to another, a considerable amount of searching around for key resources, and the vital connections that have to exist between colleagues are lost.

To say that Honey solves all these issues is to underestimate it. It becomes a virtual place at the center of the organization where people come together to share, work, collaborate, communicate, and achieve. But also, it’s where they go to have fun and socialize too.

The technology behind Honey makes a company with ten remote offices feel like an intimate, one-room outfit, where the individual comes first, and the emphasis is always on improving everyone’s working day.

Source: Honey

Honey pulls together the disparate strands of an organization’s work and presents them in a beautiful, easily-managed interface. The interface “language” isn’t complicated; in fact, anyone capable of using a smartphone will ace it. In the app (on the desktop or iOS and Android) it’s easy to organize and share files, access content, exchange information, pool calendars, and get an overview of resources.

Note that using Honey doesn’t mean a “tear down and start again” approach. You still have Skype video, Box, SAP, and Workday. But the Honey platform draws those threads together.

It’s simple to set up groups with specific capabilities, whether for standalone projects or permanent departments, and personalized feeds and notifications mean that the experience is intuitive.

Although the concept of a company intranet is as old as the web itself, the idea of a static data “black hole” is one that’s as outdated as the abacus. Honey helps people find the files, videos, audio, documents, or messages they need to access and engage each employee in the ways he or she favors.

There’s also simply-accessed capability for responding to questions, surveys, and providing feedback to shared items, meaning that data silos between departments break down, irrespective of time zone and location of a branch office or offshoot.

There are several case studies on the Honey site that bear scrutiny and are worth a read. Organizations that use Slack, email, Trello, bespoke ERPs, Google Drive, Dropbox, and dozens more apps and services are featured, and the range of companies on Honey’s client roster shows that integrations are a snap for even the technically complex platforms used by digital teams. And the “common” collaboration and messaging platforms like Slack and Skype are a cinch.

With Honey, you’ll manage to hit the ground running and integrate all those different platforms with very little detailed technical activity needed under the hood, with unlimited help available if your business accesses data from somewhere unusual.

Honey claims that it only takes 24 hours to get the platform off the ground, and there’s almost no need for supplementary training: Honey uses a visual language and an interface that’s second-nature to 99 percent of people.

The roots of Honey grow from its inception in a large design agency, and that emphasis on pleasant usability (some of TechHQ Mac-using team will attest to this) makes work a more enjoyable experience: there’s no wrestling with strange interfaces or methods of working, no pop-ups, error messages or dread blue screens of death.

To learn how you too can benefit from the collaborative and conjoining effects that Honey brings to companies at any scale, why not sign up for your own demo, today?

Honey’s support and implementation team are some of the friendliest folk you’ll come across, and the benefits are literally already under your fingertips: it’s just bringing them into play in one Honey-coated place that’s necessary.