What is Intranet Solution?
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Intranet Solution: An Introduction
The contemporary idea of a collaborative workspace has slightly changed with the available intranet technology and digital solutions. Modern enterprise intranet solutions represent an internal website that connects all your employees and assists them in smartly dealing with their day-to-day tasks, eventually leading to a more productive and collaborative workspace.
Apparently, an interactive and ready-to-go intranet solution is necessary to cultivate modern and digital practices among employees. However, choosing an intranet solution for your organization becomes even more important when it comes to yielding maximum returns on investment. Learn how a modern intranet solution can be a game-changer for your workspace.
What is an intranet?
The first thing that comes to our mind at the mention of term ‘Intranet’ is, “what is an intranet software application? And what is the purpose of an Intranet? We’ll help you find answers to all these questions.
An intranet is a private employee network to keep up with the lightning pace of business and handle the increasing needs of a dispersed workforce. An internal intranet software supports the employees of an organization to communicate, collaborate and perform their tasks in the best possible manner. The core purpose of an intranet solution is to empower employees to work smarter and collaboratively – across the functions, departments, and geographies. Choosing the right intranet software has a huge impact on the bottom line of your business.
Technological advancements mark the transformational journey of the traditional intranet into its present version. Learn how modern intranets meet all your present-day business requirements. Download this e-book guide to understand what is a modern intranet, its features, and why you should invest in it.
Intranet Benefits: Why Do you Need a Business Intranet Solution?
A lot of things have changed in workplaces over time, and the role of the intranet in businesses has also come a long way – from just a web platform, an internal communication platform, or a collaboration tool. Today, it is a one-stop solution to streamline communications, boost employee productivity, make work more efficient and improve your business revenues.
Today’s intranets have a vast range of benefits and functionalities that serve a variety of organizational purposes. Let’s discuss some of the primary intranet benefits.
Access to organizational data and files
SharePoint-based intranet offers unified storage for an organization's documents, files, and key information. Readily accessible files stored in cloud storage promote hassle-free information transfer among the employees, saving a lot of time. Furthermore, BizPortals 365 intranet solution acts as an add-on to your entire document management system. It offers specific document libraries with advanced search filters to classify, manage, and store documents systematically.
Increases internal communication
Improved internal communication remains one of the top advantages of an intranet. It reduces the overall response time, enhances productivity, increases employee participation, and contributes to informed decision-making. Integrated SharePoint solution proves to be a pivotal contributor to efficient internal communication strategy. It offers a multi-level communication channel where coworkers and management can contribute and connect.
Connects employees and drives employee engagement
Disengaged employees lead to a productivity drain in all companies. However, creating a more direct communication channel to connect all your employees is possible with an intranet. It offers an online platform where users can search for their colleagues, follow them and their activities, and learn from their ideas and experiences, irrespective of their location.
Increases employee productivity
It is the workplace environment that creates productive employees. Intranet is a mobile platform where employees can prioritize their tasks, access key project documents, and set reminders to ensure productivity. A digital workplace allows for efficient task management and helps track project deadlines and employee performance. It enables managers to assign tasks, track progress, and share resources with their team members to assure employees' productivity and accountability.
Reinforces workplace culture and values
For years work culture has been considered a natural source to enhance revenue. A productive environment, centralized resources, flawless communication, regular feedback, and adequate recognition of employees are among some crucial traits of progressive work culture. And building a digital workplace can offer you one.
Integrates with third-party tools
An intranet that integrates with third-party business-critical applications makes a robust solution to all your problems. BizPortals 365, a power-packed intranet solution, helps create a unified employee platform. Microsoft 365 features with integrated tools like Yammer, Teams, and Outlook contribute to effective coordination among employees. Similarly, OneDrive offers online cloud storage for documents, and Delve organizes them for users without changing the permission settings, improving employee efficiency.
Automates tasks and workflows
Automation is an integral part of modern digital workplaces. It saves additional organizational costs and time wasted on redundant processes. Automated task approval processes help eliminate errors and streamline redundant business operations. Auto-generated tickets, automated form approval, and multiple ready-to-use templates can simplify hectic processes.
Boosts employee recognition and rewards
A single platform allowing users to share their ideas and act socially within the organization is a fantastic experience. Engage with your employees, appreciate their achievements and anniversary moments, ask for feedback, and make them feel integral to the organization. An intranet allows organizations to build a culture of productivity, engagement, and progressiveness.
Encourages knowledge sharing
Gather, store, and organize essential information, data, strategies, tactics, and employee experience in one place to make them available to all. Intranet features promote employee learning through videos, documents, and a help section. Users can access knowledge and share it with their coworkers even in a remote environment.
Building an Intranet: Your Custom Digital Workplace
Thanks to the strongly connected and technological world we work in a digital environment without any boundaries. In line with this emerging environment, a customized digital workplace builds the foundation of how we work and function every day in our organization.
The entire concept of how to design an intranet solution starts from an essential term, i.e., “Need.” Understanding the critical requirements for your specific business type is vital in selecting the right solution.
If you are a leading healthcare business, an intranet website must offer an adequate healthcare paper trial, record management, staff training, and a collaborative environment for multiple clinics, irrespective of location. So, a compatible and customized solution will always perform better for any business.
A true intranet software application brings data, applications, information, tasks and other collaboration tools together that are tailored to the role, tasks, and location of the employees. While a digital workplace makes employees more productive, it also enables the organization to retain talent, drive better revenues, and outperform the competition in the hyper-connected industry.
Furthermore, a SharePoint-based intranet solution must be secure and flexible. An organization’s database is a pool of corporate information, business tactics, and strategic data. The decision-making process relies on real-time access to business-critical information with multi-level permission settings. At the same time, selecting a future-proof, i.e., scalable intranet application will support the expansion of employees and future requirements of an organization. Let’s discuss some core components of an intranet to get a better insight into this topic.
5 Essential Components of an Intranet
The traditional intranet was only used for internal communication and file storage. However, it has gradually evolved into an interactive platform supporting an organization’s essential aspects. The core idea of an intranet revolves around creating a dedicated platform for unrestricted information sharing, secure and centralized storage, enhanced user engagement, and an interactive user interface. Here, understanding the basic components of the intranet proves beneficial while opting for a solution that fits best to your needs and yields the highest ROI.
User engagement
Current trends represent that organizations with employees at the center stage have higher chances of creating a productive environment. Employees feel unproductive when they are placed in isolated silos. At the same time, higher engagement leads to less absenteeism, reduced turnover, and higher job satisfaction. The modern intranet website serves as a platform where employees can interact with their associates, share their views, and contribute to the workplace.
Security
An intranet is for everyone in an organization. Still, at times not every employee will need access to key project documents floating around the platform. A secure intranet that offers hierarchy-based controls over content, records, and essential information is of utmost importance. Permission levels, access rights, and adequate encryption save the intranet from internal and external threats.
Personalization
Investing in your employees in meaningful ways ensures massive rewards. Employees who find a purpose prove to be the best assets for a company, and personalization is the key to these rewards. Provide employees with their own personalized intranet sites and offer them access to necessary forms, quick links, data, and project-specific requirements in one place. Get them access to the employee directory, recent documents, task reminders, and learning resources with a single click. It must be easy to operate and interactive to promote a better user experience.
Customization
Customization is an essential component that decides an intranet's functional relevancy, scalability, flexibility, controls, and security. Having an intranet customized strictly according to your business requirements benefits a productive workspace. Customized sites for departments, employees, projects, and learning resources add value to your intranet. A customizable homepage can be used to display essential information like company policies, values, working manuals, news, and announcements to enhance employee engagement strategies.
Integrated applications
Consider the challenges employees face while using different applications for sharing ideas, online meetings, instant messaging, file sharing, and analyzing data. Using multiple applications for different tasks takes a massive toll on employees' productivity. However, BizPortals 365, a turnkey solution integrated with Microsoft 365 tools, offers a unified solution to all your problems.
Customization
Customization is an essential component that decides an intranet's functional relevancy, scalability, flexibility, controls, and security. Having an intranet customized strictly according to your business requirements benefits a productive workspace. Customized sites for departments, employees, projects, and learning resources add value to your intranet. A customizable homepage can be used to display essential information like company policies, values, working manuals, news, and announcements to enhance employee engagement strategies.
Let Us Have a Look at an Example of an Intranet
It is essential to understand how a SharePoint-based intranet fits into your organization’s day-to-day activities. Apart from being an employee engagement platform, an intranet serves countless purposes based on their utility like project management, team management, document management, knowledge management, as well as HR and employee management.
The modern intranet application looks quite interactive compared to the complex webpage framework offered by traditional intranets. Now, when we are clear on what an intranet means, what an intranet is used for, and its benefits, let’s catch on to some examples of intranet sites.
Also read Intranet home page site
SharePoint-based intranet offers a single window platform to the employees with secured access to business-critical features and applications. A well-customized home page of an intranet helps create a productive environment for employees in many ways. Add quick links to crucial documents, resources, or information to reduce search time. Also, add important corporate alerts, news, notifications, and announcements to the portal and keep your employees updated.
Dedicated Project Workspace
An ideal example of an intranet site represents a dedicated project workspace to access essential project details and track their progress. Quickly access recent projects, project summaries, and specific documents all in one place.
Personalized employee experience
Modern intranet resembles more of an employee experience intranet. It offers a personalized experience to the employees by offering them access to all key information, applications, and software on a single platform. They can track tasks, set reminders, and assign priorities for a personalized user experience.
Efficiently manage your organization's content, teams, projects, and employee in a highly collaborative digital workplace. Book a free SharePoint Consultation now.
10 Intranet Best Practices to Ensure Maximum ROI
There are uncountable ways to make a productive and collaborative workplace and having an intranet for your employees is one of them. However, utilizing the full potential of what an intranet can accomplish remains a top concern for various organizations. Here are some intranet best practices to help you get more out of your investment.
- While content is vital in engaging employees, prefer creative and engaging content to outreach your employees.
- Leverage the intranet as a primary source to promote flawless employee communication.
- Intranet serves the purpose of engaging employees. Use an intranet to promote social collaboration among employees where they can freely present their views to their coworkers.
- Use the intranet as a platform to efficiently manage documents, tasks, teams, and employees.
- Save organizational costs spent on employee training. Use it as a knowledge center where employees can learn and grow as professionals.
- Add multiple tags, keywords, and metadata to produce more advanced search options for the best intranet experience.
- Promote bi-directional communication dialogues between management and employees to make them feel integral.
- Make your intranet user-friendly, interactive, and simple for your employees.
- Utilize your intranet to display broader organizational goals.
- Customize your intranet solution to represent a strong company culture.
BizPortals 365: An Intranet That Your Employees Will Love
Workplace communication is often considered a top-down process, where the information flow is limited to upper management. The traditional workplace environment accepted the management as the only content creator, restricting equal participation of the employees. This idea does not fit well in the modern workspace where employees’ contribution is seen as the first step to success.
The state of the sector 2022 global internal communication survey suggests that disengaged employees, complex internal communication channels, and unfit technical infrastructure remain the top three major organizational challenges. However, things are a bit different with organizations following an employee centric culture to boost employee engagement and productivity.
In the modern-day digital workplace, companies need an intranet as a business tool that is adaptive to the needs of employees and evolves with the business dynamics. The intranet serves a platform where they can engage, share their ideas, automate their tasks, be up-to-date with the latest company news, and contribute to the company’s goals collectively.
Now, when you know how an intranet solution can help you turn into a digital workplace, let us check out this short video on why BizPortals 365 is a one-stop shop for businesses.
BizPortals 365 connects to Microsoft 365 productivity tools and offers a robust, feature-rich, and user-friendly business intranet as a service. It is a ready-to-go cloud intranet solution that offers pre-configured sites to help you connect, organize, and manage various business applications on intranet.
With the launch of Microsoft 365, you will get access to a wide variety of intranet collaboration tools and productivity apps. Leveraging these applications, you can also build a power-packed Microsoft 365 intranet solution to improve business processes and engage employees like never before.
Key Intranet Features
Cloud-based workplace
“Work is where we are”. The working lives have been reshaped dramatically by the millennials who don’t see work as a place but tasks that happen anywhere, from any device. BizPortals 365 delivers faster and better access to the information, roll out business improvements, and creates an engaged workforce while breaking down all the department and location silos.
Document Management
A dedicated space using Microsoft 365 is one of the simplest ways to store, organize, filter, share and version your documents throughout the content management lifecycle. Moving from paper-based content management to a digital workplace helps you increase productivity, improve business processes, save time, cut costs, reduce organizational risks, drive better customer service, and much more.
Project and Task Management
BizPortals 365 offers a SharePoint based project management solution that provides real-time updates and streamlines overall project portfolios. A project management software becomes an indispensable tool to supervise the tasks and boost employee productivity throughout the project lifecycle. Employees can update their tasks as they progress which makes it possible for project managers to make better and informed decisions.
Team Sites for Employees
The communication sites extend the capabilities of team sites on the intranet solution by opening up communication throughout the organization. The dynamic team sites provide a secure shared space for your team or department to discuss, author and share documents, create and manage tasks for better cross-team collaboration. The sites can also be customized to interact with data and resources across Microsoft 365 applications to bring all information in one place.
Employee Management
The HR department needs a central location where they have access to their documents and the tools to perform their diverse activities – from payroll to information dispersal to processing employee requests. The intranet solution provides a perfect solution with its ready-to-go employee management features and capability to integrate with external systems. It also keeps the employees informed and connected with news, contacts, links, and calendars.
Forms Automation for Employees
Relying on paper forms and manual approvals in this technology-driven age is a time waster. You can save a lot of time with a variety of pre-built and ready to use digital forms provided by intranet solution, streamline the approval processes, and customize forms based on your needs. Also, your intranet is a central repository of all your forms in one place and you can track their status – approved, rejected, or in-progress.
Workflow Automation
Automating repetitive and manual business processes, workflows, and tasks leads to improved business efficiency, simplified life of employees, reduced costs, saved time, and reduced errors. The intranet solution by BizPortals 365 easily automates a wide range of workflows and business tasks, from simple forms to complex management concerns while reducing the IT burden, improving employee productivity, and ensuring stronger accountability and compliance.
Mobile-Friendly
Take your business intranet solution wherever you go. BizPortals 365 is built with carefully crafted responsive design. It renders on mobile devices so that employees have access to information from anywhere, at any time, which boosts productivity
Powerful and Easy Search
Getting search results with information hyperlinks is not enough. The intranet search features deliver answers to all your questions, suggest insights, and enable you to take action. A powerful search built on Microsoft 365 makes it quick and easy to find the information you need such as documents, announcements, forms, events, and tasks. It enables personalized search with the application of artificial intelligence technology and make your organizational search more effective.
Integration with Microsoft 365 Tools
Get the most benefit of your Microsoft 365 by integrating with your digital workplace solution. Bring all the office tools – SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Yammer, Power BI, etc. together to leverage – all your applications, information, and work. Save time, automate and reduce costs.
Self-Service Tools
Provide self-help features to employees to take the burden off HR, IT and Admin staff. These include automated forms for processing requests and reporting problems, and knowledge base to address common questions, and training videos to help with onboarding, skill-enhancing programs, and much more.
Business Reporting & Analytics
Instantly access custom reports for HR functions, performance reviews, project summary for a quick status update on current projects. Gain insights into business analytics and reports from other business systems like CRM for Sales, Marketing and Services, and Financials reports.
Employee Directory
It offers a clean layout of all employees with profiles that include a name, photograph, job title, department, location, skills, contact information, and a description. This enables employees to filter and refine the list to easily find the right people with the right skills in a digital workplace solution. It also offers multiple modes of communication like email, phone, or instant messaging.
News and Announcements
Use easy publishing features of BizPortals 365 to create and distribute corporate news and important announcements through intranet solution. It automatically reduces your dependence on emails and gives access to department heads to broadcast varied content for better employee engagement.
Notifications
Get notified when your forms and documents get approved. Subscribe to receive alerts for different activities on the portal, like a new announcement, task assignment, new version of a document, etc. Never miss out on information and stay tuned with everything in the organization.
Social
Being social and interactive is one of the impactful features of the intranet solution. It allows you to easily engage employees through various modes of communication like discussion boards, department chats, people directory. Moreover, the spotlight stories, birthday reminders, corporate event videos, photographs complement the reward and recognition programs.
Cloud-based workplace
“Work is where we are”. The working lives have been reshaped dramatically by the millennials who don’t see work as a place but tasks that happen anywhere, from any device. BizPortals 365 delivers faster and better access to the information, roll out business improvements, and creates an engaged workforce while breaking down all the department and location silos.
Document Management
A dedicated space using Microsoft 365 is one of the simplest ways to store, organize, filter, share and version your documents throughout the content management lifecycle. Moving from paper-based content management to a digital workplace helps you increase productivity, improve business processes, save time, cut costs, reduce organizational risks, drive better customer service, and much more.
What is an Intranet?
It is a private network specifically designed for an organization’s internal communication and information sharing. The traditional intranet definition demonstrates it to be an internal website used for employee communication. However, the modern SharePoint-based intranet is a more evolved version, also called an employee experience intranet, which is widely used to manage an organization’s documents, information, projects, teams, and employees.
What is the purpose of an intranet?
With evolving trends, the functionalities and the uses of the intranet have also grown exponentially. Organizations use it as a platform to share organizational updates, store information, and turn the traditional workplace into a more productive one. Furthermore, a modern intranet is used for better document management, task delegation, company-wide announcements, and tapping the organization’s intellectual assets.
What is Intranet Software?
What is the difference between Intranet and Internet?
The internet is a global computer network offering information to over five billion people worldwide. At the same time, an intranet is a private network that provides a comparatively reduced set of functions and is limited to an organizational setup. Simply put, an intranet is a restricted version of the internet giving access to only corporate stakeholders.
Practically, there are two aspects of content circulation. First, customer-facing, or external-facing information is displayed publicly to potential customers, like a company website that displays information related to products and marketing. This purpose is fulfilled by a website on the internet accessible to external users. However, information like a company’s employee manuals, key project documents, analytical reports, and classified information comes under internal-facing content that needs to be stored on a private network, i.e., an intranet. Your official portal restricted to the employees of an organization stands as the best example of intranet sites.
What is the difference between an intranet and an extranet?
The extranet is a private network shared between more than one organization. It is specifically designed to offer business-to-business functions reducing errors and promoting efficient information sharing. An extranet is widely used to communicate or share information within the distributors’ networks or partner organizations.
At the same time, an intranet is a restricted form that covers only the internal stakeholders of an organization. The fundamental objective behind implementing an intranet solution is to efficiently manage internal factors like employees, departments, teams, and projects. It aims to improve employee productivity, company culture, collaboration, and communication.
What are intranet sites
An intranet website is a collection of different sites that resembles a ‘mini internet’ acting within the organization. However, using a secure login, an intranet site can be accessed through a web browser, making it a perfect fit for the modern hybrid work culture. Intranet sites are the sections that offer different utilities and purposes. Even the homepage of your office intranet is an example of an intranet site that can be easily customized based on industry-specific requirements.