Feature catalogue and roadmap

This page catalogues the majority of Kira’s key features. You can also view upcoming features in our current roadmap.

If you’d like a more general overview of what Kira can do, please visit the homepage.

Office 365 integration

Total integration with Office 365

Kira is extremely closely integrated with Office 365. This helps drives value from your investment in Office 365 by encouraging user adoption of the wider platform.

You’ll see throughout our feature list how closely Kira is wedded to Microsoft’s cloud software and roadmap.

Leverage Office 365 authentication

Kira doesn’t require a separate login process – if you’re logged on to Office 365, Kira will just work.

Permissions are managed through Office 365, too, so it’s easy to make sure appropriate access is given only to the people you choose.

Powered by built-in Office 365 sites

Unlike most intranet platforms, Kira is built directly on Microsoft’s own Hub, Team and Communications Sites.

This gives your intranet an unprecedented level of integration with SharePoint Online; you’ll gain new features more quickly, and won’t be impacted by any unexpected changes to SharePoint.

Supports access for external users

Kira lets you securely give guest users from other organisations limited access to your digital workplace.

This allows them to read pages and participate in conversations in selected areas of your intranet, without compromising the privacy and security of your internal corporate information.

Employee experience

Easy to use for everyone

We’re proud of how easy-to-use Kira is. Whether it’s crafting a news post, changing a page layout, altering the navigation or making things findable with metadata, you will be able to get it done with virtually no training.

Kira has been created with the input of communications, IT and business users, and literally hundreds of user tests. And each time we work with a new customer, their feedback informs its future development, ensuring it’ll stay great.

Branding and customisation

While we like to keep Kira simple, we know it’s important that your staff feel at home on your intranet, too. That’s why we provide opportunities to apply your brand and personality.

This includes areas to add your logos, customised brand colour schemes, and customisation and styling of individual components.

Support for multiple sub-brands

Not every organisation has sub-brands, but if yours does, Kira can handle them. Each one can have its own Hub Site within Kira, complete with its own colour palette and branding.

The Kira navigation remains on every page, unifying your intranet, and ensuring a sense of continuity across all your brands.

Navigation

Navigation bar

Kira’s mega-menu navigation is clear and intuitive.

The top two levels are managed directly by the administrator, so there’s no risk of them growing wild. The third level is drawn in from each site, letting you retain control of a top-level information architecture, while still allowing teams to manage their site navigation.

Easy to manage

Managing your site’s navigation is immediate and fuss-free.

If you’re a site manager, you can just choose the element you want to change, change it and hit save.

Your site’s navigation is updated instantly across the intranet.

Sites I'm Following

Another example of Kira’s close integration with Office 365 is the Sites I’m Following menu.

This gives each employee quick access to the SharePoint sites they’re most interested in, and is available wherever they are browsing in your intranet.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb navigation is shown at the top of each page, and lets you know exactly where you stand.

However deep you go into the intranet, you’ll always be able to find your way home.

Publishing / Content management

Intuitive publishing

Creating and publishing content like pages, news, policies and blogs on Kira is as easy as writing an email (and slightly more fun).

The editing experience is totally intuitive, letting anyone create a new page in moments, without the need for additional training.

Drag-and-drop

Quickly lay out your pages with Kira’s drag-and-drop interface for content authors.

No more worrying about how things will look – sections, headings, text and image blocks can be created and arranged in moments, letting you focus on making your content the best it can be.

Embed interactivity

Take your content to the next level by embedding interactive content from your digital workplace and beyond.

Kira lets you embed files (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF), streaming videos, maps, forms and event listings in seconds, creating a richer experience for your staff to enjoy.

Metadata panel

Metadata – small bits of data about pages and users – is what drives information on Kira. Our metadata panel is designed to enable your staff to create and manage it with ease.

Every piece of content can be tagged with keywords and optionally targeted at a particular department, location or role. Kira takes care of the rest.

Schedule content

Content – such as news items – can be scheduled to be promoted to visitors at a set date.

You can also set it to expire once it is no longer relevant, removing it from promotion areas (such as the homepage) and from search results.

Promote content

As soon as a content author publishes their work, Kira gives them the opportunity to promote it.

This includes options to add the page to promote it as if it was news – even if it’s a normal page – add it to the site’s navigation, and share it with others.

Highlight content

Use the Highlighted Content component to draw in curated content from across the digital workplace.

Live content is automatically displayed in an attractive, interactive interface, while scoping and powerful filters let you control what gets shown.

Business apps

Kira is designed to work with advanced Office 365 features, and to enable your staff to make the most of them.

For advanced business users, Kira pages can feature embedded Power BI dashboards which surface key corporate data, and even customised business apps built using PowerApps.

Likes and comments

Pages can optionally feature likes and comments. Comments encourage discussion and foster a greater sense of community on your intranet.

Data from likes and comments feeds into Kira’s analytics package, helping determine employee sentiment.

Article information

Each page features an article information panel, displaying key data such as publication date, author and keyword tags.

This helps your staff identify how fresh a page is, what it’s about, and who’s responsible for its maintenance.

People cards

It’s handy to let people know who the contact is for a page.

That’s why Kira features People Cards – deceptively simple-looking components that, when clicked, let you find out more about the page author, and email, phone or instant message them.

News centre

Kira’s news centre is a central news repository where stories can be viewed, prepared, approved and published to different channels.

Policy centre

The policy centre is populated automatically using metadata set by your policy authors.

It refines the policy search results as you type, helping people quickly find the policy they need. Metadata-based filters help refine search results further.

Document centres

Our powerful aggregator component lets you create your own document centres, creating a quick way of surfacing, searching and filtering documents of a particular type.

The component can be independently configured to aggregate and search through any type of content.

Approval workflows

Built-in approval workflows, powered by Microsoft Flow, let the comms team act as ‘editors-in-chief’.

Content authors across the organisation can work on pages before submitting them for approval.

Homepage

Automatic tailoring

Kira’s homepage is tailored to each individual. This takes into account properties such as their current location, role and department, optionally drawn in from Active Directory.

Featured news

Homepage news includes hero/highlight news, standard news, campaigns and magazine articles. These are set by content authors when creating individual news items.

Streaming video

Prefer something a bit more interactive in your news? Choose a video roll-up to show a streaming video on the homepage instead of a static image.

Breaking news

The breaking news ticker makes it easy to alert people about current events. To keep messaging relevant, it can be tailored to an individual’s current location.

Twitter integration

Show your organisation’s Twitter feed directly on the homepage – a window onto your organisation’s external messaging.

Yammer conversations

Embed conversations taking place on Yammer. These can be tailored to the user currently browsing the homepage.

Tasks and tools

Link to your external systems with the click of a button using our Tasks and Tools feature.

Noticeboard

Let your staff buy and sell items and share charity events. Noticeboard creates another reason to return to Kira every day.

Events

Embed information about upcoming events directly on the homepage – both ‘real’ and online. Online events can be launched straight from within Kira.

Microsoft Stream

Stream is Microsoft’s private video streaming service. Kira is fully-integrated with Stream, and you can embed and play videos directly in any page.

Countdown timer

Add an attractive live countdown to an event, complete with a call to action.

Search and discovery

Find anything

Kira uses Microsoft’s private search engine, powered by the Microsoft Graph, to find pages, documents and people.

Advanced artificial intelligence takes into account how you work, what you’re working on, and who you’re working with to inform the results.

Search everywhere

A search box appears on every page of Kira, letting you quickly find the information you need.

Thanks to the Microsoft Graph API, as well as auto-suggesting items as you type your query, it can even suggest what you might be looking for before you start typing.

Document previews

Search results are dynamic, with in-line previews of documents so you can find what you need even faster.

Live document previews can be shown for more than 50 file types, including Word, Excel, PDF and even Adobe Photoshop documents.

Scoped search

Search results can be scoped to the current site, the whole intranet, or all of Office 365 at the click of a button.

This lets your employees narrow down or broaden their searches with ease.

Metadata

Findability across Kira is augmented by our enhanced metadata system.

Through our easy-to-use metadata panel, content authors are encouraged to tag their work with metadata, making it far easier to find later on.

People directory

Kira’s people directory is drawn directly from Office 365 user profiles.

It features a simple, clean interface that lets you immediately find the person you need – with information including job titles and office locations.

Document centre

The document centre component lets users quickly search and filter pages and files.

It uses metadata to refine search results as you type, and can be customised to focus on a particular site or type of document.

Mobile

Analytics

Responsive design

Kira’s design is fully-responsive, meaning it will adapt to any device – whether that’s a desktop PC, a laptop, a mobile phone or an iPad.

Mobile-first

We design using the ‘mobile-first’ principle: components are optimised for a fantastic touchscreen experience that is at least as good as the desktop one.

Built-in analytics

A comprehensive analytics suite is provided which leverages Power BI dashboards, pulling data from Office 365 and stored in Microsoft Azure.

Analytics enables you to monitor what’s doing well and what’s failing to reach people. With advanced features like sentiment analysis and breakdown by office or department, you’ll never be left wondering what’s happening.

Document management

Full SharePoint integration

As part of our commitment to Office 365, Kira and SharePoint Online are tightly integrated, giving you fast access to your teams, groups and files.

Everyone on the same page

Kira with Office 365 lets you share and collaborate on the same copy of a document – meaning no more multiple, competing versions.

Show document libraries on pages

Document libraries can be embedded directly on intranet pages on Kira, making it easier to share ‘one version of the truth’ with the whole organisation.

Communications

Enterprise Social Network integration

We recommend Yammer as an enterprise social networking platform.

Yammer enables your staff to ask questions, share knowledge and participate in a wider corporate community, straight from within Kira.

Instant messaging with Microsoft Teams

Kira is fully integrated with the Office 365 Teams platform for instant messaging.

If your organisation’s Office 365 tenant has Microsoft Teams enabled, you can launch a conversation from within Kira, or attend an online Teams meeting with video chat by clicking one of Kira’s event components.

Full LinkedIn integration

Kira is fully-integrated with LinkedIn. Employees can opt-in to linking their LinkedIn profiles with their Office 365 (Active Directory) account.

LinkedIn data is then surfaced directly within Kira and Office 365, making it easier than ever to connect with the right people.

Engage everyone with Live Events

Engage the entire organisation with Live Events, powered by Microsoft Teams. Kira lets you create a dynamic component which lets employees join a company-wide live event.

Use it to run training webinars, make announcements, or get everyone involved in your next org-wide meeting.

Collaboration

Future-proof

Team sites & collaboration spaces

Kira lets each of your teams have its own site, with its own homepage and sub-navigation. This is a place for teams to collaborate, share information and create better outcomes for your organisation.

Communities of practice

Bring staff across your organisation together with external partners to get things done with communities of practice.

Based on a particular theme or area of your business, CoPs enable closer collaboration.

Instant access to all your sites

Team Sites and Communities of Practice can be quickly accessed from the Sites I’m Following menu, which is part of Kira’s global navigation bar.

Fully-aligned with the future of Office 365

We’re fanatical about aligning Kira with Microsoft’s own roadmap for Office 365.

That means organisations who subscribe to Kira will never be left behind when a new feature arrives – and the chance of unexpected updates breaking existing components is virtually eliminated.

Roadmap

Kira’s roadmap is constantly evolving. Because we follow Office 365 so closely, our roadmap combines our own innovations with ones on the Microsoft roadmap for Office 365.

At present, the following items are being actively developed, and we expect to enable them in Kira:

Activity Wall

Recent activities will be shown as interactive 'cards', drawing on information and notifications found across Office 365.

Site creation process

An intutive new site creation process will help users create, deploy and customise Kira sites within Office 365 even more easily.

Page layout templates

You will be able to customise page templates to your organisation’s needs, offering more consistent starting points for content authors.

Even better search

Search is already great, but we think it can be even better. Kira's search will be enhanced with more filters and interface improvements.

Sites and Teams

Connect an existing Kira site to a team in Microsoft Teams with a single click, making collaboration easier still.

These are just some of the most exciting new features we’re working on. We develop new features based on feedback from our customers, as well as inspiration from current trends and best practices… and our team’s own inventiveness! Check this page in future to see what’s lined up for upcoming versions of Kira.