Intranet is a private network used by an organization. The primary purpose of an intranet is to help employees securely communicate with each other, to store information, and to help collaborate. Modern intranets use social features that allow employees to create profiles and to submit, like, comment, and share posts.
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An intranet is primarily used by organizations as a tool to share company updates, store files, connect employees, and to collaborate with teams or departments across borders. Most intranets are used to increase productivity and employee engagement, or to simply give employees a voice in the company.
When intranets first became heavily utilized, they were mainly used for top-down communication and file storage. Negative opinions on the effectiveness of an intranet are usually associated with top-down communication. These days, the intranet is made to allow both bottom-up and top-down communication. Top-down is necessary to get employees aligned with the company vision and mission, where bottom-up communication is unmissable for real employee engagement. The best intranet system embraces and allows management and the employees to communicate in an organic fashion. Ultimately, the use of intranets improve productivity.
Whether cloud-based or on-premise intranet, using an intranet has many benefits. One of the biggest benefit is to allow your company to connect securely across locations and time zones, anytime and anywhere. It is an effective tool for easier internal communication and to bring employees together. Depending on your company security, this means 24/7 access to your organization’s digital environment.
Agility is the new century’s buzzword for business success. Adapting fast means acting fast, acting fast means communicating fast. An intranet system brings your company together, no matter where they are. It allows everyone to communicate what’s necessary for greatness – from the CEO to the janitor. Add integrations with your most-used business apps, quick adoption, a user-friendly interface and security, and you have a winning intranet platform for a more agile business. All you need is a web-browser and internet access.
Want to know more about cloud-based intranets? Read about Google intranet solutions and how they can benefit your organization.
A successful intranet includes some essential features that make it a valuable channel for communication and collaboration. Some of the features are:
Your intranet platform will either integrate with existing file-sharing solutions (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or others), or have its own file-storing system.
Because you store a lot of information on your intranet, search is one of the most frequently-used features in an intranet. The best intranets don’t just search across information in pages or posts, but also in file names.
When you have a large organization, finding the one person you need can be a challenge. Almost all intranet platforms have a people directory – the most useful ones are auto-generated. Here you can search for people across location, job title or even skill set, depending on your intranet solution.
A page builder tool is essential for static communication, but it can do much more than just inform. Automate your onboarding journey, house your brand assets, make wiki pages or set up a place to request IT assistance.
Modern intranet systems allow you to directly work on documents, spreadsheets, slides or other frequently-used apps in your productivity suite. Rather than just linking to a file stored in the cloud, editing it directly makes conversation and collaboration revolve around what really matters – work.
Most modern intranets offer a mobile app, so you can stay connected on the go. Since work is increasingly less dependent on your device, a mobile app simply means that employees can stay engaged, wherever they are.
At the end, this is what you will truly want to accomplish with your intranet solution. Gluing a global workforce together is no easy feat, and keeping them engaged is key. A once-a-year survey just won’t cut it – you need a scalable solution to let employees voice concerns, and to listen. That’s the great thing about an intranet – with strong analytics features you will be able to measure and gauge the sentiment around your company, a specific post or an internal campaign. In other words: it truly measures employee engagement.
An intranet can be described as your company’s private, staff-only website – inaccessible to the general public through the World Wide Web. Picture an intranet as the place where employees “e-meet”, connect, work on projects, engage with the company and get to know each other. A social intranet introduces features popularized by famous social networks, meant to improve bottom-up communication.
“Intra” stands for “internal” and therefore describes the use of an internal communication tool. The prefix “intra” is also translated to “within” and “inter” translated to “between” or “among”. The meaning of company intranet is therefore: an internal communication tool that is used between employees.
The Internet is the underlying technology that enables an intranets connectivity. Intranet and internal are usually kept apart to keep the intranet secure. To access the intranet, employee’s computers need to be connected to your organization's local area network (LAN). These computers need to have web browser software for example: Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer. Firewalls are put up as gatekeepers and to provide security.
The internet is a globally-connected network of computers and publically accessible by anybody. The intranet is a local or restricted network and only accessible to people within an organization. Another big difference is that an intranet is a software as a service (SaaS) that can be bought or licensed by a company. The internet is not owned by a single person or organization but companies or governments can own certain bits.
Usually the question is: what’s the difference between Software as a Solution apps, and intranet software?
Even though some SaaS and collaboration tools integrate with other apps, you will still find yourself and your employees logging into ten different platforms before the day has even started. Isolated platforms create information silos. SaaS tools don’t talk to each other, so you are left switch back and forth between them, losing time searching for contextual information that is vital to your tasks. In the end, you lose all the productivity boosts these solutions were meant to bring.
This is where intranet software steps in. The difference between the intranet and internet is that intranet software breaks those silos down via complete integration, so you no longer have ten different logins that don’t work together. Instead, you have a complete system that incorporates all the working parts of your digital workplace – in one central platform.
The intranet is only accessible to people in your organization. An extranet is accessible to people in your organization, and select people outside of it. An extranet is useful if you have resellers; people that are involved more deeply in your organization than customers are.
There are a lot of cases on how businesses use an intranet, so we’ll link you to a few. Randstad Sourceright, a recruitment company, used their intranet to connect a global workforce. Trimble Solutions uses theirs to enhance productivity. ZPG, the company behind Zoopla and uSwitch, have never had one single source of truth for internal knowledge and communication. Now the organization has one place to access everything. Have a look at our customer success stories for more information.
January 5, 2021