A company intranet for people who are never going to buy SharePoint

The gap between a Slack channel and SharePoint

At forty people you notice the same three questions arriving every week. Where is the handbook. Which of these two dashboards is the real one. When is the deadline for the benefits thing. Nobody minds answering once. The tax is answering the same question for the eleventh time, in a channel, where the answer will be unfindable by Thursday.

So you look at intranet software and find it is not built for you. The category sells to HR and IT departments at five hundred seats and up: governance modules, publishing workflows, a rollout with a consultant attached. You do not have a communications team to run a publishing workflow. You have an office manager with four hours a week.

Most of an intranet is three things

Strip the enterprise feature list back and what a small company reads an intranet for is: who we are, what you need, and what is due. Announcements and orientation. The links and tools of the job. The dates that matter. Those three fit on a board.

In Linksley a board holds text blocks for the writing, links organized into categories and one level of subcategories, checklists with a recurring cadence for anything that repeats weekly or monthly, and read-only team calendars pulled from ICS feeds. An intranet nobody opens is worth less than a board that is already on the screen.

• Text blocks: the announcement, the policy summary, who to ask
• Links in categories: tools, templates, systems, per-department sections
• Checklists: the monthly close, the weekly report, the quarterly review
• Calendars: shared deadlines and company dates, from the calendar you already run

The company front page, on every new tab

The extension makes those boards the browser's new-tab page in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera. This is the part that decides whether an intranet lives or dies: not the content, but whether reaching it costs a decision. A new tab costs nothing, and people open dozens a day.

Admins can mark boards as required, so the company board arrives on every member's new tab when they join and cannot be removed. On the Business plan, white-label puts your logo on the app, the extension and the new tab, so the first screen of an employee's day looks like your company rather than a vendor's.

Who sees what

Share boards with individual people or with groups, so Finance gets the finance board without anybody maintaining a list of names. Cap a person at view-only and the cap holds in the app and in the extension, which is where people actually click. Delegate the Can share right to a department lead and they can run their own section without every request landing on an admin.

Offboarding is one revoke, and every link stays with the company. Boards can be reassigned to a successor, which is more than can be said for the departing employee's bookmark bar.

When you should buy a real intranet instead

Be honest with yourself about scope. If you need document management with versioning and approvals, request-and-approval workflows, an employee directory and org chart, or HR records that have to be audited, buy an intranet platform. Linksley is the front page, not the filing cabinet, and pretending otherwise wastes a year.

If your need is closer to "everyone should be able to find everything, and know what is due", the shape here is a board rather than a platform. Pricing is $9 a month plus $2 per person with no member cap, there is no implementation project, and export to standard bookmarks HTML is on every plan.