Why choose a Yunits community platform over Microsoft Teams?

For professional and trade associations, other membership organisations, and knowledge institutions, choosing the right communication platform is essential to supporting their community and encouraging knowledge sharing. We are often asked: What is the advantage of Yunits over Microsoft Teams?

While Microsoft Teams offers powerful tools for general collaboration, a specialised platform like Yunits excels through customisation, control and flexibility.

Below, we discuss the unique advantages of Yunits over Microsoft Teams and how it responds to the needs of these organisations:

1. Functionality and Branding

Specific functionalities
Designed for knowledge-driven communities, Yunits offers modules to suit specific needs, such as question-and-answer modules, document knowledge bases, event management (including registrations) and working groups. These functionalities are essential for a rich community experience and go beyond the standard Teams tools.

Control over branding
Yunits offers the ability to match the design of the platform to the organisation’s corporate identity and branding, helping to create a consistent and recognisable look and feel to members. Microsoft’s platforms offer fewer opportunities for such in-depth customisation.

2. Focused on building a collective memory

Yunits facilitates building a searchable collective memory, giving members easy access to both validated and user-generated knowledge and expertise. This fosters engagement and strengthens the organisation’s overall information position; your organisation’s capacity to generate and safeguard and label knowledge increases as more participants actively participate. Moreover, it also takes the burden off the organisation by making frequently asked questions and information easily available to all members.

3. Ownership and Control over Data

Data ownership
With a proprietary Yunits platform, the organisation retains full control over the data. This includes how data is collected, stored and used – an important issue for sensitive or confidential information.

Compliance and security
Yunits enables full compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and other privacy laws. We are ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified. This means that we have mapped our information processes, have appropriate security measures in place and are periodically reviewed on this. You decide which information flows and security measures are put in place, which ensures an increased sense of security and trust.

See what else we do in terms of data security.

4. Flexibility and integrations

Specific integrations
Yunits can be seamlessly linked to systems such as CRM software, making it possible to manage access, capture profile information and areas of interest, and streamline event registrations. These kinds of customised integrations are often more difficult to achieve within Teams. This allows you to offer a central, secure and trusted online environment to your participants.

Adaptability
The platform can be continuously adapted and expanded based on feedback and changing needs of your target audience. This gives an organisation the freedom to grow with the demands of the times.

5. Community-first design

Focus on community-building
Yunits is specifically designed to promote interaction and engagement within communities. Participants are automatically connected based on interest and expertise of self-selected, content-driven themes and it provides features such as discussion forums, event modules, noticeboards, knowledge bases and working groups designed to encourage collaboration.

User experience
Yunits’ user experience is optimised for the specific audience and goals of knowledge communities and communities of practice. In Teams, an organisation has much less control over the experience, as it is designed for broader, general use.

6. No Dependence on Third Parties

Independence
With a proprietary Yunits platform, you avoid dependence on third parties, such as Microsoft. This means you are not bound by their terms of service, policy changes, technical limitations or modifications. This gives you more stability and control over your digital environment.

Support
An in-house platform provides guarantees of uptime, response time to support tickets or requests and a dedicated person you can turn to for support.

7. Use Data for Efficient Relevant and Personalised Communication

Yunits uses data from data for – partially automated – personalised communication. Participants automatically receive emails and notifications about news, questions, blogs and events on topics they follow and working groups they are part of. They can customise the topics, working groups and frequency of updates themselves. This increases the relevance and efficiency of your communication. Yunits’ customers say they save about 30% time sending emails. This is something a more internal collaboration platform like Teams does not offer.

8. Specially Developed for Member Organisations and Knowledge Institutions

Yunits is specifically built to meet the unique needs of trade and industry associations, member organisations and knowledge institutions. It provides not only a platform, but also support in developing community strategies, including best practice sharing, tailored advice and implementation guidance.

Conclusion

While Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform for general collaboration, Yunits offers a customised solution tailored to the specific needs of member organisations and knowledge institutions. Its specialised functionalities, flexibility, integration capabilities and support make Yunits a logical choice for associations looking to increase engagement and interaction within their knowledge community.

Want to know more?
Read our blog post 8 reasons why you need a communication platform and find out how Yunits can support your organisation.