If your company runs on Microsoft 365, chances are you already have SharePoint, whether you use it as your intranet or not. Native SharePoint gives you sites, libraries, security and search out of the box. It does not give you an internal newsletter, targeted push notifications, a mobile app your frontline teams can use, or design you can touch without a developer. Jint is not a rival to SharePoint: it is a native Microsoft 365 add-in that fills exactly that gap, on the SharePoint you already have.
According to McKinsey, employees spend on average 1.8 hours a day searching for information. A native SharePoint intranet nobody can navigate does not fix that. It usually makes it worse. With SharePoint already in place, the real question is not whether to use it. It is what you leave it to do alone, and whether that is worth doing by hand.
What native SharePoint does well
Native SharePoint is a legitimate starting point, not a compromise. Most organizations already running Teams, Outlook and OneDrive have it without realizing it, since it ships inside the same Microsoft 365 licenses. Out of the box, it covers five real use cases: internal communications through modern news pages, dedicated team collaboration spaces, knowledge management backed by Microsoft Search, an access portal to business apps, and basic workflow automation. Three things make it a rational foundation: native integration with Teams, Outlook, Entra ID and Copilot with nothing to synchronize separately; governance that stays inside the Microsoft ecosystem, Entra ID, DLP, e-discovery, data residency; and a navigation logic employees already know, so there is no interface to relearn. More than 200,000 organizations already run their Microsoft 365 intranet on it. None of this is in question. The real question is what happens once you need more than a foundation.
The real limits of native SharePoint alone
SharePoint is a toolbox. Microsoft provides the building blocks and leaves each organization to assemble them. Out of the box, six gaps show up fast for any organization that wants a real internal communications strategy, not just a document library.
- Communication stays basic. No built-in internal newsletter (the usual workaround is Outlook), no targeted push notifications, no one-click multichannel distribution to Teams, the intranet and a mobile app at once.
- Frontline workers are locked out. Access requires a full Microsoft 365 license, and the generic SharePoint mobile app was never built for employees who do not work at a desk.
- Personalization hits a ceiling fast. Modern pages and sections look fine out of the box, but custom backgrounds, high-impact editorial components and fine-grained webpart layouts mean custom development.
- Oversight stays coarse. Usage stats exist per site, but not by audience, content or device, so there is no way to know whether mobile-only teams are even reached.
- Contribution stays locked down in practice. SharePoint technically allows multiple contributors, but the interface is complex enough that internal communications usually ends up the only real publisher.
- Governance gets heavy at scale. Permissions by site, library and item become hard to audit past a handful of entities, with a real risk of over-exposure or lost access.
One customer put it bluntly: "I tried the community components. It was very complicated, not intuitive at all, I gave up." And the direction of travel does not help: SharePoint's classic alerts, the closest thing native SharePoint has to a notification, are being retired by Microsoft in July 2026 and replaced by more limited "modern rules" (Microsoft Learn, 2026). Even the little SharePoint offered on notifications is shrinking, not growing.
The hidden cost of custom development
The most common objection is that SharePoint is already included in the Microsoft 365 license, so it is free. True for the license line. Not true for the project. Three costs hide behind a custom SharePoint intranet.
Initial development. Reaching an acceptable experience, visual customization, custom components, coherent navigation, takes days of internal IT time or an outside vendor. Even something that sounds simple, an enhanced directory or a personalized homepage, can eat several weeks.
Recurring maintenance. Every Microsoft update can weaken a custom build layered on top of SharePoint. Without a dedicated IT team, the organization depends on an external vendor for every change, billed each time: build, break, fix, repeat.
Low adoption. Native SharePoint intranets deliver a 20 to 30% adoption rate on average. An intranet nobody uses creates no value, however well it was built. The biggest hidden cost is not what you spend. It is the value you fail to create.
That is the real comparison: not SharePoint versus Jint, but a custom build you maintain forever versus a ready-to-use extension already built, tested and updated for you.
Jint in brief
Jint (formerly Mozzaik365) is built by a 50+ team across Paris and Montreal, with 8 years of Microsoft 365 expertise, 300+ clients and over a million active users. It turns native SharePoint into a modern intranet, with a personalized news hub, advanced search, an employee directory, onboarding journeys and a mobile experience for frontline workers. On Capterra it scores 4.7 out of 5 (as Mozzaik365), with an 86% recommendation rate on G2. Your data stays in your own Microsoft 365 tenant.
Jint vs Native SharePoint: side by side
If you're comparing multiple intranet platforms, check out our full intranet software comparison for 2026.
When to choose native SharePoint alone, when to choose SharePoint + Jint
We'll be straight about it. Choose native SharePoint alone if your organization is small, with a single site and simple needs, if you have no frontline or mobile-first workforce to reach, and if internal communication means occasional news posts, not a real strategy. Choose SharePoint + Jint if you want a real internal communications strategy your comms team can run without IT, if part of your workforce doesn't hold a Microsoft 365 license, or if you want Copilot and AI agents to work from a well-structured intranet instead of scattered content. See our wider alternative to SharePoint comparison for the full landscape.
AI: a structured intranet is the foundation, not a feature
Everyone is shipping AI assistants now. The uncomfortable truth: an AI agent is only as good as the information it can reach. Point one at scattered or poorly governed content and it hallucinates or finds nothing. So the order matters. A well-structured intranet on Microsoft 365 organizes, updates and governs your knowledge, exactly what an agent needs to answer correctly. Jint Genius builds on that foundation instead of bolting an assistant onto chaos.
The bottom line
SharePoint is still the right foundation for a Microsoft 365 intranet. The governance is already there, the integration is native, and more than 200,000 organizations already run on it. What decides whether your intranet is alive in two years is not the choice of SharePoint. It's what you build on top of it, and how: by hand, with technical debt piling up at every update, or with an extension built for exactly that job. Your SharePoint deserves better than native.
Book a Jint demo to see it on your own SharePoint.
