This isn’t a Typo: I Meant to Say Intranet!

If you’ve ever worked for a large company, you likely understand the difference between sharepoint intranet and the actual internet.

I recall my first experience with a company intranet, and I must say I was pretty impressed.

At first, I thought they were mispronouncing the word but I soon realized what this intranet was all about. I was working for a bank, and they had their very own system in place.

We had to sign-in, and then we had access to this huge amount of information. There were portals that helped us complete our work, and inboxes with corporate messages. We had shared calendars, and the same search functions you see on the regular search engines.

Initially, I found it hard to wrap my head around this. I felt like I was on some specialized version of Google, where only the most relevant information, related to the bank I worked for, was available.

It really opened my eyes to the technology available today and helped me to better understand how large companies can remain cohesive and on the same page.

Your Company Intranet needs to be able to Keep up with Change & Growth

After my first impression was long gone, though, the intranet eventually seemed to become cumbersome. It was something we had to use, not something we wanted to use.

As the bank changed and grew, and new policies, procedures, and systems came into use, the intranet software just wasn’t able to keep up. We couldn’t integrate new programs with the existing ones and found ourselves using multiple platforms to do our jobs. The content started to become outdated, and the search function was slow.

Isn’t the Point of your Intranet Software to Meet your Business needs?

The whole point of getting a corporate intranet, or revamping your current one, is to make things more efficient. It’s to allow your employees to do their jobs better, faster, and with fewer hurdles.

But what happens if your intranet can’t keep up with the changes and growth? It suddenly becomes the problem, rather than the solution.

So while the words may seem quite similar, the internet and your company intranet are two very different things.

But, it’s important to understand that in order for sharepoint intranet to be useful in today’s world, it should have many similarities to the actual internet itself:

• You want your intranet to be full of relevant, current, and valuable content.
• You want search functions that are instant and provide the user with the exact solution they were looking for.
• You want social functions, which allow your employees to engage and collaborate.
• You want project management tools, which let even remote teams feel like they’re sitting in the boardroom together.

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