Have a Question?

The major purpose is to deliver corporate data for employees, streamline communication and improve work efficiency with an additional set of tools. This toolset greatly varies and depends on the company’s type and size, its business objectives, established communications, required social options etc. For example, nonprofit or charity organizations require extremely collaborative, informational and supportive intranet provider. While banks mostly need to ensure  data security and permission levels .

The Internet is a public place, where everyone can publish, comment or simply read data freely posted on any of the sites.

An Intranet is a private network accessible only for the users with installed intranet solution and internet connection.

An extranet is in fact intranet, but it can be accessed by authorized users such as partners, customers, suppliers, vendors, and others to get specific data.

Social intranet is in some way a concept of social networking, which helps employees build relationships in the digital space.

There are 3 basic social intranet concepts:

• Authorship – an opportunity for all users to create and publish content;
• Connection – now you can see the authors, and build cooperative relations;
• Communication – everyone can like, comment and discuss all updates inside the portal.

Intranet software includes a great number of possible options, features and additions.

But we would select 5 most commonly asked tools:

1. Calendar – helps schedule working hours and sync with company events/meeting.
2. Employee’s Directory – to find colleagues’ contacts and other data easily and quickly.
3. File Share – allows safe documents storing in the cloud that can be shared and edited online.
4. Slider – visualize important company data: events/meetings/aims and objectives.
5. Newsfeed – to share corporate news and their discussion.

At first sight, they all seem too simple. However, their power is in this simplicity. Be it small, middle or big, any company will surely needs these options.

There are 6 fundamental aims of the intranet:

1. Access corporate information
2. Secure data storage
3. Provide communication tool
4. Stimulate collaboration
5. Support work culture
6. Create capabilities for high productivity

All the company opportunities can be greatly enlarged with any of intranet additions thus improving the work environment and team building.

You have to answer the following questions:

• Who is the end user of the intranet?
• What do they need and how they usually cooperate at work?
• Why will employees use intranet?

To answer all these questions you should conduct interviews/surveys to get staff’s feedback. The more open and sincere results will be, the more chances you can create a popular portal.

Yes, they should have intranet and here’s why:

Despite the size of the company, a number of employees, the intranet can be useful for both small companies and big ones. For example, some employees of one organization work in the office while others are remote, and even are freelancers from different countries.

Work on mutual projects can be streamlined by one portal that allows free communication, where everyone can chat, share news, comment them and discuss with the whole team.

So, in this way:

• Remote workers won’t omit any important detail about the project or latest company updates
• Employees will always have reliable channels to connect with colleagues
• You will build a collaborative team
• You can grow business and work without boundaries
• Get all common work programs in one place such as calendar, task management, newsfeed, surveys, photo gallery, file share and a lot of others in one digital place.

No, it shouldn’t be named.

There’s no strict requirement or necessity to name intranet. But to build more personal intranet and strengthen corporate culture its better to denominate your corporate portal. If you haven’t branded your intranet yet, a good way to engage your workers is to create a poll and let the community to make their suggestions and vote on a company name.

Yes, non-profit organizations need intranet software as well.

Just like the organizations from other industries, nonprofits including NGOs and philanthropic organizations have the same needs – keeping data in one protected place, communicating and collaborating between in-house and remote teams. Charity organizations have most of their teams dispersed across different geographical jurisdictions.

For that matter, to streamline workflows and augment teamwork contribution into their daily operations, such orgs require advanced instruments to connect employees, share information and strengthen staff engagement. Intranet can certainly assist nonprofit companies in all of the above exigencies because it is exclusive business software that supports the required functionality, flexibility and effecient cost.

Several factors measure the number of users that use intranet portal concurrently. Here are only 2 of them:

• What is the capacity of your team? Was your intranet deployed to support such a number?
• Do your employees have a smartphone app? Mind that intranet native mobile app fosters staff utilization of the intranet.

An obvious fact is the more users who integrate the intranet in their devices, the higher the number of concurrent users.

Our customers’ stats show that only 60% of employees use the intranet. Depending on the users’ time zones, their usual time of visiting the site may vary depending on their work schedules, tasks and the need to check emails, follow newsfeed, and chat with colleagues.

So on average, only 20-38% of users can utilize the intranet concurrently. Yet the purpose of the intranet is to share ideas and enable real-time communication between teams. Organizing the intranet can help boost user usage percentage.

Follow the steps outlined below for content management on your intranet:

1. Decide the kind of information that is useful and important for your employees. It’s crucial to understand the type of information workers would like to have. If you have no ideas, gather this data through public researches or own surveys (maybe internal polls, etc.).
2. Delegate responsibilities to your subordinates. Determine the persons who will prepare and publish content, manage its frequency, and select target auditoria for each direction/sphere of interests.
3. Upon launching the process of content management, monitor the analytics closely and take note of traffic: peak and fall times, the level of employees’ engagement, most used devices, and common subjects of discussions.

Projects vary depending on the level of complexity, customers’ requirements, budget, and the final objectives. However, there are some standard tools, which can streamline the entire project management process. These tools include:

–    Calendar

–    Task Management

Helps automate staff schedules – quickly assign tasks, see responsive persons and check deadlines.

–    Workflow Management

This instrument lets you create different E-Forms for various tasks such as booking business trips, preparing payrolls and so on. Available templates enable you to manage workflows on the go.

Technically, you should follow these directions:

1)    Create a news article (based on the content type suitable for specific or all departments, various user interests, specialties, etc.)

2)    Identify audiences and create targeting groups for each of them.

3)    Classify all news types. Add them to the content store and tag each one of them for efficient document versioning.

4)    Choose portal architecture best suitable for publishing updates. Assign authors with the permissions. Also, provide appropriate language translation for the site.

5)    Create widget to place the news posts. Common practice involves showing the image, headline, subheading, and date of publication but you can provide any other information apt for your target group.

6)    Check if the criteria/method used to target the audience is appropriate.

There are a galore of technologies that allow you to build an intranet – Microsoft SharePoint/Office 365, WordPress, IBM Websphere Portal, Liferay, SAP Netweaver and a lot more. There is no single answer or a one-fits-all solution for all the organizations. The very answer depends on the type of a company, intranet team skills and what you value.

Also, you can rely on Nielsen Norman Group, which is a consulting firm that analyses user experience. One of their projects is researching on the best intranet solutions. Annually they learn about the most popular and valuable intranets. According to their latest report (2016), the top 9 technology platforms use SharePoint.

Why SharePoint intranet/Office 365 has such a big market share:

1. Customization

Each customer has his/her own needs. That’s why customization is so important. With SharePoint intranet, you can customize everything you see on a screen, and you don’t require technical skills to customize content on SharePoint.

2. Software Environment

Most organizations use Active Directory (e.g., 95% of Fortune 1,000 companies) for user management and Microsoft Exchange for mailing. When you launch your intranet, one of the first steps is to create or sync user profiles and manage them. SharePoint intranet and Office 365 have native support for Active Directory, and that’s why you will have no problem importing user profiles when deploying SharePoint.

3. Community

When you launch your intranet software, you will have to develop and support it. You need to train or hire technical staff to make it possible or contract a third-party supplier. The bigger the number of technical specialists and suppliers, the better the quality of the services provided. And of course, a large community means finding answers has been made easier.

There are more than one million SharePoint intranet developers around the world and millions of professionals who know this platform good enough to create business solutions.

4. SharePoint Intranet Reliability

A big vendor makes a sizable budgetary allocation for R&D and building a support team. Microsoft is one of the Top 3 publicly traded companies around the world with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion.

There are no absolutely free intranet solutions.

Probably only some separate components or additions. But then you can hire an intranet specialist/developer to build a platform for your company from scratch, which isn’t cheaper than SaaS solutions.

Considering low-cost intranet solutions, we advise you to take a look on the available ready-to-use packages. Our experience has proven that about 80% of our business clients have a similar set of assignments. The remaining 20% require particular specifics that are apt for their unique line of business. SaaS providers can easily redevelop solutions in case if there’s a need.

LS Intranet has about 50 tools and features tailored to meet the needs of most organizations. Also, it is one of the low-costed intranet solutions you can find around. The standard package involves all that common company demands: my space, support, updates, workflow management, task notifications, blog, news feed, calendar, and even more at only $699 per month for 499 users.

Intranet has not only benefits but disadvantages as well.

The main Intranet advantages are:

1)    It facilitates data storage and exchange

2)    Promotes remote workplace

3)    Bolsters productivity in key KPIs

4)    Intranets are secure tools for communication

5)    Robust documents protection

Learn key intranet drawbacks in our blog article.

Email system has a lot of limitations for a corporate work which comprises of:

• Hundreds of correspondences
• Data loss
• Insecurity
• Missed appointments
• Work delay
• Chaotic data organization
• Difficult to filter important content

There are more efficient ways that a business can leverage to properly manage work correspondence using the intranet. Here is how;

1)    Data segmentation and categorization

2)    Instant Dissemination of News

3)    Advanced Search

4)    Information Protection

To get more detailed info download our free whitepaper.

The intranet enables you to be in driver’s seat giving you complete control over all processes taking place. You can set permissions for users, which will regulate all the accesses, documents to be shared, permitted actions, and the level of the influence they have on the intranet as a whole.

Administers – responsible persons who can assign the user with permissions, moderate News Feed, Blog and other widgets, tune the portal’s appearance and track all users’ analytics.

Publishers – can create content, post it on the intranet portal.

Participators – can use the tools at their disposition, read the content (like or comment on it) and participate in discussions.

Also, there can be other roles, and rights required for some specific instruments on the intranet.

You can utilize the following three options in your intranet to spearhead corporate communication:

1)    News Feed –  facilitates the broadcasting of corporate news by departments, groups of interests, etc.

2)    Blog Tool – lets managers share their knowledge, experience, and updates with colleagues.

3)    Private Chatroom – provides every user with an opportunity to ignite a conversation with anyone from their team or the whole group of people.

All these tools are quite intuitive for users. Comments, likes, @mentions, private invitations, email notifications are also available. It’s more like the conventional social media platforms.