Linchpin Intranets are becoming more and more popular. There are multiple partners, both from the Atlassian ecosystem and from outside the Atlassian realm, that offer full-service deployments for Linchpin. This blog post describes how a project with one of these partners looks like.
Companies Involved
Let’s start with the companies that are involved:
- Your company, the customer
- Your professional services provider, e.g. an Atlassian Expert, an intranet specialist, or any other services provider as well as a combination of those
- //SEIBERT/MEDIA, the manufacturer of Linchpin
- Atlassian, the manufacturer of Confluence, the software basis for Linchpin
- Third party vendors, whose addons are part of the Linchpin suite
You, the customer, will most likely only talk to the professional services provider (no. 2). All manufacturers (no. 3-5) provide their products through the professional services provider.
The pricing for the project remains completely transparent for you. The price for the technology (no. 3-5) is public. There is no way to haggle about pricing with Atlassian or third party vendors (no. 4-5). They offer low pricing to reach a high volume in the enterprise market. All transactions are digital. It will always be the same pricing with no exceptions.
If you are looking for discounts, they need to come from either //SEIBERT/MEDIA for Linchpin (no. 3) or your professional services provider (no. 2). We offer small benefits for customers who help us with our marketing efforts, but that’s all we can do. As for your professional services provider (no. 2), whether they offer any discounts is strictly their business.
Custom Pricing
When we realize Linchpin projects ourselves, we offer a fixed price package that makes the deployment and rollout easy and safe. We don’t offer discounts on this fixed price package, and the reason for that is simple: we usually deliver way more hours than calculated to ensure a successful rollout. That’s a huge discount for the sake of a successful outcome.
We recommend to our Linchpin Partners to follow our offering, but we realize that every project is different and custom pricing often is more suitable. To make a long story short: you will have to discuss pricing with your professional services provider. There are partners that adopt our recommended prices and there are partners that don’t. If they doen’t, that’s because your professional services provider has discussed your needs with you and put together a package that fits your situation better.
Full-Service vs. Cherry Picking
If you place an order for Linchpin, we will ask you to get the full-services experience from the company you order with. From our experience, that is the only way to make sure the introduction of your new intranet will be successful. But depending on your level of expertise, you might only need a certain set of services (e.g. installation, configuration, theming, training, etc.). How deeply you involve your professional services provider is up to you.
We do have best practices and recommendations for time tables, project activities and other useful resources that your partner will share with you during the project to help you prepare your deliverables.
Choosing the Right Partner
There is no golden rule on how to choose the right partner. One thing we have learned, though, is that a lot of customers prefer local partners whom they can easily reach out to. We are working on providing a list of experienced partners. At this point we would like you to ask us for a recommendation. Please contact us if you’re interested.
What questions do you have about Linchpin and projects delivered by partners? Add them as a comment here.
Additional Information
Differentiating between Confluence and Linchpin: Why you need Linchpin for your intranet
The Future of Linchpin Intranet in 2016
Social Intranet With LINCHPIN – Highlights & Features
