Over the last two weeks, Simpplr has made two significant announcements that have evolved its EX Unification Platform. Already a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions, a position it has held for several years. The new features should cement its position as a leader and possibly further extend its lead beyond competitors.
Last week, it announced Enterprise Search, an AI-powered enterprise search capability that extends search beyond the Simpplr platform and into connected enterprise applications. It enables employees to retrieve information from across the corpus of enterprise knowledge.
It has now announced custom apps. These apps build on the connectivity that Simpplr built for its Enterprise Search capability, enabling employees to bring information directly into their Simpplr Dashboard.
Dhiraj Sharma, CEO and Founder of Simpplr, commented, “Enterprises are constantly grappling with disconnected systems and fragmented workflows.
“Custom Apps address this challenge by giving IT teams the flexibility to integrate their most essential tools into one cohesive platform.
“This isn’t just about improving efficiency — it’s about empowering employees to focus on meaningful work by bringing everything they need into one place.”
In addition, Simpplr has added a new instant messaging capability to the platform, enabling employees to communicate effortlessly without switching windows. This instant messaging platform contains administration controls and supports chat and video calls for every employee. Instant calling (including video) is a premium add-on capability.
All these updates form part of its Spring 2025 release. It includes minor updates to recognition and rewards, curated personalised social media feeds, and improvements to AI-generated recommended actions.
What are Custom Apps
Organisations use a range of different systems, including systems of record such as HCM, Project Management, Finance, and CRM, through email, social media, and others. While no-code platforms are often implemented to connect these different systems, Simpplr delivers what the intranets always promised: a single portal for the organisation to work from.
Custom Apps further develop that vision, enabling employees to access data and insights from multiple systems in a single dashboard.
Organisations can deploy a customizable app tile that surfaces data from a third-party system such as Workday, Salesforce or Asana. Unlike collaboration platforms, it can combine data from many different sources on a single screen. Employees can have a personalised dashboard, so they rarely have to switch applications.
Simpplr highlights examples such as project data from Asana, available jobs or time off from Workday, outstanding tasks from Zendesk, or opportunity information from Salesforce. Where Enterprise Search enables an employee to ask any question from those data sources, the custom app tiles mean that the required data is surfaced all the time.
The integrations behind custom apps take advantage of the Simpplr bring-your-own-integration (BYOI) framework, which leverages the available APIs. Customers can quickly build custom app tiles using a drag-and-drop interface to connect Simpplr to data sources. They can design each tile with images and data, selecting which information they wish to surface.
Integrations supported include Zendesk, Salesforce, Workday, monday.com, ServiceNow, Airtable, Asana, Lattice, Notion, Cornerstone, and others. Simpplr also has several prebuilt app tiles for various applications. Once connected, the App Tiles update information drawn from these apps in real time.
Duncan McHugh, Chief Operating Officer at Nutrition Warehouse, said, “By utilizing Custom Apps, we’ve been able to centralize more functionality within our core system, the Scoop. I’d highly recommend this solution to anyone looking to centralize operations and improve cross-functional efficiency.”
Availability
The new App Tiles, Custom Apps, and instant messaging functionality are available to all customers now. The Enterprise usability improvements are also available now, but the full Enterprise Search and video calling are premium add-ons. Simpplr did not reveal specific pricing for these features. Access this blog for more details about the Spring release, including some short videos that demonstrate the new functionality.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Enterprise employees waste a huge amount of time switching between applications. In addition, research by Gartner found that organisations with over 10,000 employees spend $4.6 million per week on information consumption. Over a quarter of employees and 38% of managers report feeling overwhelmed by this excessive communication.
It makes sense to have the capability of displaying relevant information to employees at all times. This should reduce the amount of time they have to search for information or receive and check emails.
Gartner highlighted four strategies to combat this information overload. Implementing these new features could address three of these.
- Optimize channel management
- Enhance information relevance
- Build cross-functional relevance
Meanwhile, the fourth will benefit from the freed-up time that custom apps, custom app tiles, and Enterprise Search can deliver employees.
- Invest in skills development.
This is a significant release by Simpplr that adds three major features. Together, they can help improve an organisation’s collaboration, efficiency, and productivity. It may also help consolidate applications, replacing the need for separate instant messaging platforms. What isn’t yet clear is what actions employees can drive from the data surfaced through the custom app tiles. Can the apps perform action tasks within the third-party apps yet?
Clarification from Simpplr, employees can perform tasks such as ‘apply time off’ directly from an app tile without needing to go into the third-party system.
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