The intranet now has a growing strategic role in supporting work processes and collaboration; with its main objective to create a more efficient flow of information to advance productivity.

An intranet makes use of the technologies of the World Wide Web to distribute information within a single organisation over its internal network and is protected from unauthorised users by a firewall.

The company intranet now has serious competition when faced with employees’ expectations and is required to do much more than host the company phone book and HR manuals. With the boom of social networking and collaboration sites, expectations have changed enormously and when that person walks through the door of their workplace they expect to instantly get the latest news, information and updates – configured to their own personal style and taste.

The benefits of an Intranet

No matter how small or large your organisation may be, an intranet is an important business tool that can help save money and time. Here we will look at some of the key benefits.

Cost Saving

Viewing information and data via a web browser allows for a paperless environment. Meeting, travel, and telephone time reduction. Training, corporate, administrative and operational communications cost savings.

Time Saving

Accelerates employees communication. Employees can link to information at their convenience as opposed to be distracted indiscriminately by email.

Increased Collaboration

With information easily accessible by all authorised users teamwork is enabled.

Increased Productivity / Efficiency

Flexible and open communication allows users to locate and view information faster and use applications that are relevant to their role. Better learning and knowledge management. Ability to collaborate in multiple media, without time or geographic constraints.

Low Cost Development and Delivery

The intranet can be linked to a organisations management information system. Easy to use. Rich format. Low entry cost. No vendor lock-in.

Building your Intranet

Ixxus have a wealth of experience in designing, architecting, building, deploying and supporting intranets. Here are some aspects of your intranet that you may want to consider if you are planning a new or redeveloped intranet project:

Employee details

The details which the directory returns on an employee should seek to be as helpful as possible. Some of the most important details include:

• E-mail address
• Department
• Phone number (both for internal and outside dialling)
• Location
• Job titles and main responsibilities (including any pages the person is responsible for on the intranet) Photo
• Manager

Employee directory

How do you contact fellow employees? – One of the leading usage areas of an intranet. For this reason, you should always provide a dedicated central employee directory on your intranet.

• Every page on the site should provide access to this repository, and it should include all employees' details. There should be one place that people can go and be confident that they can find any colleague.
• Support different ways of searching and browsing.
• You should also bear in mind that people will not always be able to provide the full name of the person they're looking for. You may have to allow users to search/browse according to:
  • Departments people work for ( for example “ I met someone in HR last week, and can’t remember who they were?”)
  • Job titles and/or responsibilities (for example “Who is responsible for charitable sponsorship?”)
  • Phonetic spelling of a name (for example “I'm looking for a colleague who’s first name sounds like blyth”)
  • First name (for example “I'm looking for Joe in Sales”)
  • Common name-variants (for example. A girl christened Samantha might also be known to her colleagues as Sam or Sammie)

Local office information

For some organisations it's important to help employees visiting an office for the first time (e.g. for a regional meeting). The following information could be very useful:

• Full address
• Contact telephone number
• Maps and a picture of the building
• Transport
• Hotels and restaurants
• Currency and time zone information

'Bookmarking' functionality

Intranets tend to be very large buckets of information and it can prove to be difficult to find the right information. As a result, many users like to bookmark intranet pages, so that they know they will be able to find them again. Allowing users to create ‘intranet profiles’ that incorporate bookmarks avoids the issues of lost bookmarks if the user is accessing the intranet from a different computer. Naming conventions for bookmarks tend to be useful and it is worth writing descriptive and helpful page titles. When a browser takes the default wording for a bookmark from the ‘Title’ tag, it will then deliver a useful description.

Managing intranets

As much as you would love your intranet to be a self governing environment, it rarely works. Allocating responsibility for the intranet to an individual or team will ensure a clear and consistent approach. This does not mean that authorship and content-ownership can not be allocated throughout the business, it just means that the intranet is governed by a strong, central team.

How intranets should treat their content

It's important that any intranet makes it absolutely clear what information it does and does not provide. It's also important that the intranet's relationship with the organisation's other information-resources should be made clear (for example, what sort of information appears on the intranet vs. what sort of information is in the document management system).

As a rule of thumb, a piece of information should only appear in one location on the intranet (although it can obviously be linked to from many different parts of the site). This will ensure that you reduce the need for keeping multiple versions of content, and can ensure that content is current and accurate. It also avoids any ambiguity over which version of information is the relevant one to a user.

Utilising ‘out of the box’ technology

It goes without saying that if there is functionality available, and it fits with the above strategies, then utilising it makes sense. Microsoft’s Sharepoint has been a de-facto for many corporate intranets, but Ixxus has been having a lot of success with Alfresco’s open source version of Sharepoint – Alfresco Share. It might be worth a look?