The question that starts most of our first conversations is a reasonable one: we already pay for SharePoint, it is already deployed, and IT has spent two years on the intranet. Why would we buy anything else? The answer that usually gets given by vendors is a list of things SharePoint does badly, which is both unfair and unpersuasive to anyone who has actually run a portal. Here is a better answer. SharePoint is a strong publishing platform and a weak audience platform. It knows a great deal about your sites and pages and almost nothing about your workforce, and that is a design consequence of building site-first rather than people-first.
Which means the useful conversation is not about whether SharePoint is good. It is about which internal communication jobs it does well, and which four it structurally cannot do.
What SharePoint genuinely does well
Start with the case for the defence, in detail, because it is stronger than most comparison articles admit.
The publishing architecture is sound. Communication sites, hub sites and a home site give you a structure that scales past a few hundred pages without collapsing, and news posts flow across that structure rather than living in one place[1]. Organisation news sites let you designate which sites are authoritative, so a post from corporate communication is visually and structurally distinguished from a post by a project team[2]. That governance distinction is genuinely useful and many purpose-built platforms handle it worse.
Audience targeting works. You can target news and navigation at security groups from Entra ID, so the Belgian population sees Belgian content. Note the word targeting: SharePoint will deliver to a group. What it will not do is report back on what proportion of that group received it, which is the distinction the rest of this article turns on.
Delivery reaches beyond the browser. Viva Connections surfaces the same content inside Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile through a feed and a dashboard[3], which matters enormously for populations who never open a browser tab on a corporate page.
The unglamorous parts are excellent. Permissions inherited from your existing identity model. Version history and retention that satisfies legal without a separate project. Multilingual page variants. Co-authoring. Search across the estate. Documents already in place, so the policy the news post refers to is one click away rather than in a different system. And it is already licensed, already governed and already in the IT service catalogue, which removes a procurement conversation that competing platforms have to win.
If your requirement is to publish structured, permissioned, compliant content to a Microsoft 365 workforce, SharePoint is a good answer. Our guide to choosing SharePoint to build your intranet covers the build decision itself in more detail.
The four limits that are structural
These are not bugs, feature gaps or things a future release fixes. They follow from what the product is.
Reporting is attached to sites, not to people
Site usage gives views, unique viewers, average time spent and popular content for a site collection[4]. Every one of those is a property of a page. None of them is a property of a person or a population. So you can target a post at 4,200 people in manufacturing and then be unable to say how many of the 4,200 saw it, which is an odd asymmetry once you notice it, and it is the single most common reason a communication team’s intranet reporting stalls. Our note on which intranet metrics matter works through which native numbers survive scrutiny and which do not.
Organisational attributes are absent
Function, country, site, grade, language and contract type do not exist in SharePoint usage data. You can obtain them from Entra ID or an HR file, and you can join them yourself with enough export and enough patience, but nothing native does it. Every segmented question therefore becomes a manual data project, which is why most teams answer it once for a board paper and never again.
The intranet is one of several places the message lands
A typical announcement in a 12,000-person group goes out as a SharePoint news post, a Viva Engage thread, a Teams message from managers and a line in the weekly newsletter. Each of those systems reports in its own units, in its own place, with its own definition of a view. There is no native construct for one person reached once, which means aggregate reach across channels is not understated so much as unavailable. The double-counting problem this creates is the subject of our piece on measuring cross-channel internal communications.
History does not survive the things that happen to intranets
Usage data is retained for a finite window. Site usage is tied to the site collection and its URLs, so a redesign, a hub split or a rebuild of the news site restarts the series. Intranets get redesigned roughly every three to four years, and executives ask for multi-year trends, so these two facts collide reliably.
| Internal communication job | SharePoint native | What is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Publish structured, permissioned news | Strong | Nothing significant |
| Target content at a defined population | Strong | Nothing significant |
| Reach people inside Teams and on mobile | Good, via Viva Connections | Reporting that spans browser and Teams delivery as one figure |
| Report reach as a share of a population | Not available | A denominator, and a person-level view |
| Compare segments, for example plants against head office | Not available | Organisational attributes joined to activity |
| Show one reach figure across intranet, Viva Engage and newsletter | Not available | Cross-channel identity resolution |
| Show a three-year trend across a redesign | Not available | History independent of the site collection |
The Power BI route, honestly
The standard response to the table above is to build it in Power BI against the Microsoft Graph reporting API[5]. Several organisations run that well and it is a legitimate choice, particularly where there is a data team with capacity. Three things to know before you commit. The reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data. Customers have shown us Power BI dashboards returning KPI values that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period, which is a difficult conversation to have in front of an executive audience. And a dependable build needs a robust ingestion process, scheduled reconciliation against the native figures and a named owner who stays. Budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard, because the pipeline is the project.
What the alternatives actually offer
If you decide native plus spreadsheets is not enough, there is a real market and it is worth understanding it properly. Swoop Analytics has deep strength in Viva Engage and network analysis, and the collaboration-pattern view it produces is distinctive. Intlock’s CardioLog Analytics has a long SharePoint heritage and tends to suit IT-led deployments with detailed portal instrumentation. tygraph, now part of AvePoint, is strong in large enterprise governance scenarios where analytics sits next to a broader estate-management programme. Each of those is a credible answer to a slightly different question.
Tryane’s specific position is the internal communication director’s question rather than the IT or governance question: cross-channel reach in one figure, segmentation by organisational attributes joined from Entra ID or an HR file, and history that survives product transitions and site redesigns so the trend line does not restart. It reads SharePoint alongside Viva Engage, Teams and your newsletter platform. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosts in the EU by default with US data residency on request, deploys in a couple of hours over single sign-on with Azure AD or Entra ID, keeps unlimited history, and installs no agent on any device. The direct comparison sits in Tryane against SharePoint native analytics.
One caveat worth stating plainly. If you run a single communication site and want to know whether your pages are being read, none of this applies to you. Native reporting answers that question, it costs nothing, and you should build nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Is SharePoint good enough as an intranet on its own?
As a publishing and document platform, yes, for most organisations on Microsoft 365. As a measurement platform it stops at the site boundary, which becomes limiting the moment your reporting question involves a population rather than a page. Most teams reach that point when an executive asks about a specific part of the workforce.
Can we segment SharePoint analytics by department or country?
Not natively. You can target content at groups from Entra ID, but usage reporting carries no organisational attributes, so there is no native way to report what share of a department or country saw a page. Answering it means exporting activity and joining it to a directory or HR extract yourself, or using a layer that performs the join.
What happens to our intranet analytics when we redesign?
Site usage is tied to the site collection and its URLs, so the series generally restarts. Plan for it: capture and store the pre-redesign baseline before the cutover, and agree with your stakeholders which comparisons will and will not be possible afterwards. This is one of the more common ways a measurement programme loses two years of narrative.
Do we still need SharePoint analytics if we use Viva Connections?
Yes, and you need to be careful not to double count. Viva Connections is a delivery surface for content that lives in SharePoint, so the same post can be consumed in a browser or in Teams. Reporting them separately understates reach; adding them together overstates it. Resolving that requires a person-level view rather than a page-level one, which is covered in our note on Viva Connections analytics and intranet adoption.
Does Tryane replace SharePoint?
No. SharePoint remains the publishing platform and carries on recording what it records. Tryane sits above it as a measurement layer, reading SharePoint alongside your other channels and joining the activity to your organisational structure so that segmented and cross-channel questions become answerable. You keep the Microsoft 365 investment intact.
Sources
• Microsoft Learn, what is SharePoint in Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Learn, organisation news sites
• Microsoft Learn, Viva Connections overview
• Microsoft Learn, portal health and site usage
Further reading
• A guide to SharePoint native analytics
• Which intranet metrics matter to communications
• Measuring cross-channel internal communications
• Measuring frontline worker communications
• What SharePoint is, a complete guide for internal communication
Tryane runs a 15-minute working session with Heads of Internal Communication that starts with your SharePoint estate as it is: what the native reports can already tell you, which of your questions they cannot answer, and what the same period looks like once activity is joined to your organisational structure. Book a slot with Jérémy.