Intranets

What is an Intranet?

For the uninitiated an Intranet is a private, internal facing, business network that enables your employees to share information, collaborate, and improve communications.  Well-designed and well-managed intranets support many of the day-today activities undertaken by the organisation and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of these activities.

A well designed and deployed intranet reflects the unique culture, structure, processes, staff and resources of the business or organisation that it serves.

From our years of experience we have found that a successful intranet must be tailored to fit the organisation's needs and challenges. In our opinion there is no such thing as the ultimate Intranet design.

Intranet Features:

• Document management - viewing, printing and working collaboratively on office documents such as spreadsheets
• Publishing - delivering information and business news as directories and web documents
• Training - accessing and delivering various types of e-learning to the user's desktop
• Workflow - automating a range of administrative processes
• Front-end to corporate systems - providing a common interface to corporate databases and business information systems
• Email - integrating intranet content with email services so that information can be distributed effectively
• Calendar / Scheduler - centralising these features provides everyone in the company with a central location to access this crucial information
• Address Book - Centralising this feature means that everyone knows they are looking at the most recent and up to date information
• Internal Search Engine - allows a quick find function for your users

Key benefits of an intranet include:

• Better internal communications - corporate information can be stored centrally and accessed at any time
• Sharing of resources and best practice - a virtual community can be created to facilitate information sharing and collaborative working
• Improved customer service - better access to accurate and consistent information by your staff leads to enhanced levels of customer service
• Reduction in paperwork - forms can be accessed and completed on the desktop, and then forwarded as appropriate for approval, without ever having to be printed out, and with the benefit of an audit trail

Deploying a carefully planned Intranet will enhance existing communication between your employees, and provide a common knowledge base and storage area for everyone in your business.  We have delivered solutions which provide users with easy access to company data, systems and email from their desktops.

Because intranets are secure and easily accessible via the internet, they enable staff to do work from any location simply by using a web browser.  In the current economic climate this can help small businesses to be flexible and control office overheads by allowing employees to work from almost any location, including their home and customer sites