Intralinks Data Room Review
The Intralinks data room offers the same security features that you can find in some of the other data rooms out there. These features include document access expiry, data encryption, and granular access permissions, but it lacks any innovative features that guard against camera-based attacks. After all, if someone really wanted to get their hands on certain information, they would be willing to simply take a picture of the document on the computer screen. Also, there is no remote document shredding which is a feature that really gives you peace of mind. You always know that if you upload something into the data room, it can be shredded whenever you need to.
The customer support that you get is fairly good as well. You get round the clock support in multiple languages by phone or email. Interestingly enough, there is no online help center available which means that you will have to contact customer support every time you have a question. They do not offer a free demonstration of the data room which is interesting given the prices that they charge. If you have never used a data room before it can be hard to learn all of the ways that a data room can facilitate your workflow, especially given the complicated features that are found inside the Intralinks data room. This results in customers using less than half of the data rooms’ capabilities.
As far as communication inside the data room is concerned, Intralinks offers a Q&A module but it is fairly limited. You cannot have a live discussion, set granular access threads, assign a question to a certain area of expertise. This makes Intralinks not suitable for conducting M&A transactions since such deals require a large amount of communication between participants in many situations this communication needs to happen in real-time.
While Intralinks is a big name in the data room industry, you have to wonder whether or not it is worth overpaying to use it. If you have a deal that is small or medium in scale, you could probably get a better deal somewhere else. If you have a complicated due diligence project, Intralinks would be a good choice, but given some of the communication features that are not available, it is difficult to see how it could handle an M&A deal. So be sure to shop around and compare prices and if you find that you do not need overly complicated features then it would be better to go with another provider.