23 January 2017

Building Your Employee Portal – Intranet

Developed for an internal access to a company’s staff, an Intranet comes as a private network solution or a coordinated network that is responsible for the transfer of information between a particular company’s internal systems. The intranet unlike the internet is functional only for a particular organization and restricted for any public access. The intranet features almost the same interface as a general website, but it is surrounded by a firewall that obstructs any unauthorized public access.

Intranet as an internal network configuration of an enterprise has three principle aspects that are –

Content – Empowered with a smart content management system (CMS), well-defined intranet governance policies and smart authorization network, the intranet acts as a functional content repository. This content can be anything from any corporate information to any operation-specific information, news, or update, etc.

Communication – Intranet comes up as an effective communication channel for an organization, where the Intranet’s home page plays an important part for displaying various updates and news to the authorized staff members.

Operation – It is not the content alone, or the communication alone responsible for the success of an intranet network, but the intranet also serves as a platform for deploying the various business-specific discussions by the authorized users.

Together, these three fundamentals need to be coordinated well, so as to take maximum benefits of the intranet.

The Intranet network can empower your business with various benefits that include-

1) Workforce Productivity – From a quick access to the information to performing services related to the profile of the employee, intranet avails you a secure access for various work related roles in the organization on an anytime, anywhere basis. This improves the workforce productivity.

2) Anytime and Anywhere Access – Intranets serve as a medium for organizations to make their desired information available to their staff on an anytime anywhere basis. So that they can potentially use the information to perform various profile-specific tasks on the basis of this information.

3) Support for Business Operations – Intranets in an organization can be used smartly to develop and deploy various organization-specific  discussions that can be utilized by the staff to perform various business operations.

4) Enhanced Coordination – With an accessible stream of information to all the authorized users, there is a coordinated workflow, enabling great teamwork.

5) Real-time Updates – The intranet gives real-time updates to the desired number of users, thus forming an interconnected enterprise.

Various Beneficial Functionalities of Intranet-

• Event Management – The intranet provides an event management functionality for updating organization-specific events like company meetings, corporate activities or other fun activities. Thus enhancing staff collaboration.
• Well-managed Internal Communication Management – Presenting you with the functionality of easy circulation of information, the intranet facilitates prompt circulation of Staff News and various other announcements.
• Discussion Forum – Serving as an intuitive and functional discussion forum application, the intranet can be used to create new discussions or new forums and manage them in a interlinked manner.
• Document Management – This feature of the intranet allows you to store the various documents and circulate them for easy access by the authorized staff members. Thus increasing the productivity of operations over a particular document.
• Reward Management – Appreciation can be the best thing to boost an employee’s productivity.The Intranet provides you an interface for easy and unbiased reward management.
• Company’s Calendar – Whether you need to check the various holidays, events or due dates, you can easily switch to the company’s calendar on the intranet.
• Employee Information- Knowing your colleagues well can lead to cohesive work culture. The Intranet provides a platform to add the profile information of various employees that can be easily viewed by the staff members to know their colleagues.