Let’s be honest. The intranet is that thing everyone has at their company and nobody actually uses. It’s slow, it’s ugly, the last news post is from 2021, and there’s a team photo with people who left ages ago.
I discovered LumApps this week. And for the first time in a long while, I looked at an intranet without wanting to close the tab.
What is it exactly
A cloud intranet platform. But saying “intranet” is a bit like saying “car” when you’re talking about a Tesla. Technically correct. Completely beside the point.
The idea is a central hub. Internal communication, business tools, knowledge base, onboarding, all in one place. You need an HR doc at 11pm from your phone — no Microsoft 365 licence required, no work email. You scan a QR code. That’s it.
For field teams, travelling salespeople, warehouse staff, this isn’t a minor detail. It’s the difference between a tool people actually use and one they work around.
The thing that spoke to me as a Platform Owner
Fragmentation. That’s the real enemy of any platform.
Three Slacks, two SharePoints saying different things, email for everything else, and the important knowledge living in someone’s head because there’s nowhere decent to put it. LumApps addresses exactly that problem. Not perfectly. But head-on.
The low-code connectors, the micro-apps, the hub logic rather than isolated tool logic. These are decisions made by people who understood that managing a platform isn’t just about building a nice interface. It’s everything holding it together behind the scenes.
Gartner named them leaders three years in a row. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It means the people who buy this kind of tool look at them first.
The AI inside
They call it the “AI Employee Hub”. That’s marketing. But there’s something real behind it.
The AI personalises what each employee sees. The right information at the right time based on role, country, context. It’s not magic. But when you have 10,000 employees in 15 countries, it’s the difference between an internal newsletter nobody reads and a tool people open in the morning. A bit like GEO in SEO: AI isn’t there to replace, it’s there to contextualise.
What it isn’t
It’s a tool for large organisations, IT departments with a budget, internal communication teams handling volume.
But for understanding how to think about a platform, how to balance user simplicity with technical flexibility, how to deal with fragmentation before it becomes unmanageable — there’s plenty to take away.
What I take from it
Some integrations still require advanced development. The SDK can become a project in itself if you don’t have the resources. It’s a serious platform for serious organisations.
Not something you plug in on a Friday evening.
Which, in a way, is already reassuring.