Posted by: Sotiris Filippidis
20 August 2026
Two options usually come up when an organization thinks about building or upgrading their intranet:
Do we build something custom, or do we use an intranet platform like SharePoint?
But these are not the only two options. There’s a third option that deserves attention:
Using Umbraco CMS as the intranet’s foundation.
Umbraco is mainly described as a web content management system, but that significantly understates what the software can be used for.
Built on ASP.NET Core and designed to be extended, integrated and customized, Umbraco can provide the content management foundation of an intranet while allowing the rest of the portal to be developed around the actual processes, systems and requirements of the organization.
The result is something between a traditional CMS and a custom business application.
And for many organizations, that is exactly what an intranet needs to be.
An intranet is no longer just an internal website
The traditional intranet was relatively simple: company announcements, policies, documents, telephone directories, and, perhaps, a few forms.
Modern intranet portals can be considerably more ambitious.
Employees may expect to use them to:
-
access personalized company information
-
find colleagues and organizational information
-
submit requests
-
view HR information
-
access documents and policies
-
interact with internal applications
-
see information coming from ERP, CRM, HR, ticketing or other business systems
-
complete forms and workflows
-
receive targeted announcements
-
access tools depending on their department, location or role
-
use a single organizational identity to access everything
At this point, a company should not be looking for the best platform for publishing internal pages but for the platform that provides the best foundation for building their digital workplace.
Takeaway
Modern intranets are becoming digital workplaces rather than simple internal websites. Employees expect personalized information, access to business systems, workflows, documents and tools through a single interface. The platform therefore needs to support much more than content publishing.
Building an intranet completely from scratch
A completely custom application provides maximum freedom: You can design exactly the required interfaces, workflows, database structure and integrations, but it comes with a significant downside: You also have to build everything that a mature CMS already provides.
Content management. Publishing. Media management. User management. Editorial permissions. Content structures. Navigation management. Versioning. Administration interfaces. Editor experience.
Then you need to maintain all of it.
A development team can easily spend a substantial part of an intranet project rebuilding capabilities that have very little to do with the organization's actual competitive or operational requirements.
With Umbraco, that foundation already exists, and developers can concentrate on the parts that are genuinely specific to the organization.
The CMS becomes the platform supporting the solution rather than the solution being constrained by the platform.
Takeaway
Custom development offers maximum freedom, but also means rebuilding and maintaining functionality that mature CMS platforms already provide. Umbraco supplies that foundation out of the box, allowing development effort to focus on functionality that is genuinely specific to the organization.
Using SharePoint
SharePoint is, of course, one of the most established intranet technologies in the world. For organizations heavily invested in Microsoft 365, it has significant advantages. It integrates closely with the Microsoft ecosystem and is particularly strong around documents, Microsoft 365 collaboration and standardized internal communication.
There are plenty of intranets for which SharePoint is the right choice.
The question becomes more complicated when the required intranet begins to look less like a SharePoint portal and more like a custom application used by employees.
SharePoint can be extended. Microsoft provides the SharePoint Framework specifically for extending areas such as pages, forms, toolbars, lists and other parts of the SharePoint experience.
But you are still developing within SharePoint's architecture.
That distinction becomes important.
If your portal requires a highly customized user experience, substantial business logic, unusual workflows or extensive integration with non-Microsoft systems, the platform itself may increasingly dictate how those requirements have to be implemented.
With Umbraco, the relationship is almost the opposite.
Umbraco becomes one component of your application architecture rather than your application having to become a customization of Umbraco.
That is a subtle difference, but on complex projects it can be an extremely important one.
Takeaway
SharePoint is a strong choice for Microsoft 365-centric collaboration and communication, but highly customized portals must still operate within SharePoint's architecture. Umbraco offers greater architectural freedom when the intranet needs to behave more like a bespoke employee application than a standardized collaboration portal.
Umbraco gives you a CMS without taking away development freedom
One of Umbraco's strongest characteristics is its extensibility. It is a .NET application built around technologies that experienced Microsoft development teams already understand. Business functionality can therefore be implemented as normal application code.
You can easily introduce external services, create custom APIs and consume existing ones, run background processes and develop business services independently of the CMS.
Umbraco itself exposes service APIs for working with its core entities, while its architecture allows developers to introduce their own services and extensions alongside the CMS.
There is also a large ecosystem of packages, generally distributed through NuGet, that can provide additional functionality without requiring every capability to be developed from zero.
This makes Umbraco particularly useful when an intranet is expected to evolve.
You might initially launch with just the usual: company news, policies, employee information, departmental pages, some forms, and document access, but six months later, you may want to integrate:
-
the HR system
-
an ERP
-
a CRM
-
a helpdesk
-
Microsoft Graph
-
Power BI
-
an internal API
-
a learning platform
-
an expense management system
-
a custom approval process
With an extensible application platform, these additions don't necessarily require rethinking the entire portal.
They become additional parts of the solution.
Umbraco itself can also participate in a broader composable architecture, with the CMS responsible for content management while APIs and other services provide additional capabilities. This is a model explicitly supported by Umbraco's current platform architecture.
Takeaway
Umbraco combines mature content management with the flexibility of a modern .NET application. Custom services, APIs, integrations and business logic can be developed alongside the CMS, allowing the portal to evolve as new organizational requirements emerge.
Active Directory and single sign-on
Authentication is one of the first requirements of almost every intranet implementation. Employees already have organizational identities and they should not need yet another username and password simply because the organization has introduced a new staff portal.
Umbraco supports external authentication providers using technologies such as OAuth and OpenID Connect. That includes Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory).
Both Umbraco backoffice users and front-end members can use external authentication providers, including Entra ID and other OpenID Connect compatible identity providers.
For employees, this can provide the familiar experience:
Open the staff portal. Sign in using your corporate account. Continue working.
In many environments, authentication may effectively be transparent because the user already has an active organizational session. But more importantly, identity information can become part of the portal's authorization model.
Depending on the organization's architecture, claims, directory groups, application roles or information retrieved from other systems can be mapped to portal permissions. That can allow two employees opening the same intranet to have very different experiences: A member of Finance could see finance applications, a branch employee could receive branch-specific announcements, managers could have access to management reports, and so forth. Different access and different content for different roles.
The intranet becomes personalized without requiring the organization to maintain an entirely separate identity database.
Takeaway
Employees can access an Umbraco intranet using their existing corporate identity through Microsoft Entra ID or other OpenID Connect providers. Identity information, groups, claims and roles can also be used to personalize access, functionality and content for different employees.
Integration is where Umbraco becomes particularly interesting
This is perhaps the biggest argument for considering Umbraco.
Most organizations already have the information they need. The problem is that it exists in multiple different systems.
An intranet can become the interface that brings those systems together.
With Umbraco, the portal can communicate with practically any system that exposes an appropriate integration mechanism.That might include REST APIs, SOAP services, Microsoft Graph, databases, message queues or custom internal APIs.
For example, a single employee dashboard could potentially combine:
-
announcements managed through Umbraco
-
employee data from an HR platform
-
outstanding tasks from another business application
-
support requests from the helpdesk
-
documents stored elsewhere
-
Power BI reports
-
leave information
-
company events
-
personalized shortcuts
-
data from legacy internal applications
The employee does not necessarily need to know which system owns each piece of information. They simply use the staff portal.
This is where an intranet starts creating genuine operational value.
Takeaway
An intranet can become the common interface connecting information that currently lives across multiple business systems. Umbraco can integrate with HR, ERP, CRM, helpdesk, Microsoft Graph, databases, APIs and legacy applications, giving employees one coherent place to work.
Editors still get a real CMS
There is another side to the equation that technical architecture discussions sometimes overlook: Someone has to operate the intranet.
Communications teams need to publish announcements, HR needs to maintain policies, departments need to update their information, and administrators need to manage content without raising a development ticket every time a paragraph changes.
This is precisely what Umbraco was designed to do.
Content structures can be designed specifically around the organization's requirements rather than forcing editors to think like developers. An editor creating a company announcement shouldn't be editing HTML or assembling arbitrary components.
They should see fields such as:
Title. Audience. Publication date. Expiry date. Department. Priority. Content.
The underlying implementation can then decide how and where that information appears.
This separation between content and presentation is one of the reasons a CMS-based intranet can remain manageable years after launch.
Takeaway
An intranet must be manageable by the people who operate it every day, not just by developers. Umbraco allows communications, HR and other departments to manage structured content through purpose-built editing interfaces while developers control how that information is ultimately presented.
You control the user experience
An intranet portal is software that people may use every working day. User experience therefore matters.
With Umbraco, the front end is yours. It doesn’t have to look like anything (not even like Umbraco), nor resemble a traditional website. It can be designed specifically around the organization and its employees.
It can look like a dashboard, a mobile application, a corporate news portal, an employee self-service platform, or all of those things at once.
The CMS handles content and administration behind the scenes. Employees simply experience the application that has been designed for them.
Takeaway
Umbraco does not dictate what the employee-facing portal should look like. The front end can be designed entirely around the organization's employees and processes, whether that means a dashboard, mobile experience, news portal, self-service application or a combination of all of them.
You control the architecture as well
The same applies below the surface.
Organizations can make architectural decisions based on their own infrastructure, security and operational requirements.
Depending on the implementation, Umbraco can be part of an architecture involving:
-
cloud hosting
-
private infrastructure
-
corporate APIs
-
identity providers
-
separate application services
-
CDN and caching layers
-
search platforms
-
document management systems
-
existing Microsoft services
-
third-party SaaS platforms
That flexibility can be particularly valuable for larger organizations where the intranet has to coexist with an established technology landscape rather than replace it.
Takeaway
Organizations are free to design the intranet around their existing infrastructure, security requirements and technology landscape. Umbraco can coexist with cloud services, private infrastructure, APIs, identity platforms, search systems and SaaS applications rather than forcing everything into one platform.
Umbraco doesn't have to replace Microsoft 365
There is another misconception worth addressing. Choosing Umbraco for an intranet does not mean abandoning Microsoft technologies.
Quite the opposite:
An Umbraco portal can use Entra ID for identity, communicate with Microsoft Graph, link to or integrate information from Microsoft 365 services. Documents can continue to live in systems designed specifically for document collaboration, Power BI can continue handling business intelligence, Teams can continue being Teams.
The objective is not necessarily to replace every existing platform.
The objective is to give employees one coherent digital front door to the organization.
Umbraco can provide that front door while other systems continue doing what they do best.
Takeaway
Choosing Umbraco does not mean replacing the Microsoft ecosystem. Entra ID, Microsoft Graph, Power BI, Teams and document platforms can continue doing what they do best, while Umbraco provides the unified employee experience that brings those systems together.
And this is also where the comparison with SharePoint needs to be fair
There are cases where we would recommend SharePoint.
If an organization's primary requirement is document collaboration and relatively standard internal communication, especially when the company already operates almost entirely inside Microsoft 365, SharePoint may be the most straightforward answer.
Umbraco becomes particularly compelling when the requirements include phrases such as:
"Our processes are slightly different."
"We need it to talk to our existing systems."
"Different employees need completely different dashboards."
"We need to add some custom functionality."
And especially:
"We don't know exactly what we'll need two years from now."
That last requirement is more important than it sounds: An intranet is rarely ever considered “finished”, as it evolves with the organization.
Choosing a platform that can evolve with it is therefore an architectural decision, not simply a CMS decision
Takeaway
SharePoint may be the most straightforward choice when document collaboration and standard Microsoft 365 communication are the main requirements. Umbraco becomes more compelling when organizations need custom processes, integrations, personalized experiences or the flexibility to accommodate requirements they cannot yet predict.
We have seen this approach work in practice
This isn't only theoretical for us. At DotSee, we have worked on multiple Umbraco-based intranets and staff portals, either creating them, contributing to their development or supporting and maintaining them afterwards.
One of these projects involved creating a staff portal for a large Greek organization. We cannot identify the organization because of our NDA, but the project demonstrated exactly why Umbraco can work so well in this environment: a strong content management platform combined with custom functionality, authentication, integrations and an experience designed around the organization's own employees and processes.
We have also helped create and maintain a number of other intranet solutions, giving us the opportunity to see not only what is required to launch an intranet, but what becomes important several years later when the portal needs to change.
And that second part matters.
The real test of an intranet platform isn't whether it can satisfy the requirements written at the beginning of the project.
It is whether it can satisfy the requirements that nobody has thought of yet.
Takeaway
DotSee's experience with Umbraco intranets shows that long-term adaptability is just as important as satisfying the requirements defined at launch.
Don't choose an "intranet product". Choose the right foundation.
There is no single technology that is right for every organization's intranet. A small business needing shared documents and company announcements has very different requirements from a company with thousands of employees, multiple departments, complex permissions and multiple internal systems.
But organizations evaluating their next intranet portal should look beyond the traditional custom development versus SharePoint decision. That’s where Umbraco occupies an interesting middle ground.
You get a mature content management platform, an editor-friendly backoffice, enterprise identity integration, the ability to integrate existing systems, and, crucially, you retain the freedom to develop the application your organization actually needs.
For many intranet projects, that combination is considerably more valuable than simply choosing the product traditionally associated with intranets.
Your intranet shouldn't dictate how your organization works.
It should be flexible enough to reflect how your organization already works, and how it wants to work next.
Takeaway
The right intranet platform depends on the organization, its people and the complexity of its systems. Umbraco occupies a valuable middle ground between completely custom development and packaged intranet platforms, combining mature CMS capabilities with the freedom to build and evolve the solution the organization actually needs.
