How Stravito works with SharePoint for better research and insights

Many organizations use SharePoint, Microsoft’s content management system, to store files, collaborate on projects and documents, or for branded intranet sites. Its popularity is understandable—it’s readily available as part of Microsoft 365—but when it comes to serving as a knowledge management solution for market research and insights, Sharepoint often creates more problems than it solves. 

Stravito, in contrast, is a centralized knowledge management solution that makes it easy to organize, curate, collaborate, and share insights. It’s not necessarily a replacement for SharePoint. In fact, Stravito can integrate with SharePoint, providing a much better user interface, search that works, and GenAI features that pull information from your trusted enterprise knowledge. 

Here’s why it's best not to rely solely on SharePoint for knowledge management, and how an integration with Stravito is better for market research and insights.

1. It takes too long to upload, organize, and find documents in SharePoint.

Most large, global organizations have more research and insights than time. While they may have some solution in place to help find documents more easily or curate by topic, it’s also likely researchers and other users spend too much time just looking for files.

Stravito, on the other hand, is specifically designed to make documents and data shareable and findable, especially for market research and insights teams. As a result, it’s simply much easier to use than SharePoint.

The upload is straightforward, and it automatically categorizes, tags, and summarizes documents. It even provides insights suggestions personalized by user. 

The integration between Stravito and SharePoint, allows you to sync folders and documents automatically, ensuring all your content is updated without tedious manual work. Stravito also readily integrates with research vendors like Mintel or Kantar, providing multiple sources for a more comprehensive picture. And Stravito makes it easy to find and organize all these disparate sources.

For example, CMI teams can create a user-centric experience on top of pages or content managed by others in SharePoint. A team can determine which files or folders to access, and Stravito can index that content, as well as third-party data, leading to more granular and actionable insights. 

So while SharePoint may be valuable as a familiar store of enterprise information, integrating with Stravito makes it easier and quicker to perform and synthesize research, as well as greatly reducing the likelihood of organizational memory loss and knowledge silos.

3. It takes too long to find information within documents.

Some types of information are easier to digest than others. For example, you can generally get a quick understanding within a few seconds from an analytics dashboard. But when it comes to consumer research reports or videos, it requires more time and effort to quickly pinpoint the relevant information, and there is no way to efficiently do this in SharePoint.

Stravito, however, provides the ability to go directly to the relevant points in both videos and documents. In other words, you can go directly to the methodology, target group, or key findings, which saves considerable time and makes for more accurate insights.

3. It’s too difficult to effectively share insights. 

In the same way that a specialized knowledge management solution like Stravito can make it easier to scan reports, it can also help you to share insights effectively. This may be on the basic level of being able to search for and find information that others have shared. But for most large, global organizations, more powerful technology is required to share efforts across siloed teams and departments, especially those in different timezones.

It’s not just a matter of simply disseminating the research and insights—the frequency and amount is actually a delicate balancing act. If you don’t share enough, you run the risk of reinforcing knowledge silos. If you share too many insights too often, and if they aren’t relevant to the reader, you create an information overload in your audience. As a specialized knowledge management solution, Stravito not only makes it easy to share; it also provides an array of sharing options—manually or automatically, to a group or one person, with colleagues or external partners. 

One example is the “Collections” feature, which allows users to curate insights or reports for a specific use case, theme or project. They can easily share a collection with others, who can also add to them, so it’s a feature for curation and collaboration. (See our case study on how Shell is using Collections to share valuable consumer insights on a wide variety of topics.)

Another example is the “Insights Feed,” which functions as a kind of homepage for the user—it’s the first place they land when they log into Stravito. Here, they can follow content on topics of their choosing; for instance, if a user is interested in sustainability, their Insights Feed will automatically be populated with the latest knowledge on the topic. The result is a more vibrant culture of insights-sharing and collaboration.

4. Microsoft’s GenAI tools aren’t great for market insights.

Microsoft Copilot is useful for generating ideas and document drafts. It’s considerably less useful for exploring complex research questions or insights. Stravito Assistant, a conversational AI tool, has proven to be a more accurate, useful way of generating and honing market research and insights. 

Perhaps foremost is the issue of accuracy: Assistant greatly outperformed Copilot for generative AI tasks that drew on SharePoint documents—Assistant was 98% accurate compared to 15% for Copilot. Assistant is also designed to make it easy to synthesize information from multiple sources, ask better questions, and draft easily shareable presentations to encourage collaboration. Assistant also supports multi-language capabilities, a must for global enterprises. 

To sum it all up: SharePoint is a useful tool for large companies. But in order to get the most value from your market research and to let you focus on proactive insights work, you may want to consider investing in a specialized solution like Stravito to enrich your organization’s overall knowledge management strategy. 

For more on how Stravito makes knowledge management more efficient, see How Roche is Partnering with Stravito to Work Against Insights Inflation. Or request a demo, and we’ll show you how Stravito can partner with SharePoint to help you make the most of your research and insights.