Uses
Why is an intranet useful for my business?
Intranet platforms are effective ways for companies to store knowledge, connect people, find and store files, share company updates and collaborate in teams, departments, or groups – everywhere in the world. Most intranets are used to increase employee engagement, make an employer brand more visible or to simply give employees a voice in the company.
Effectiveness
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, intranet software 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 software embraces and allows management and the employees to communicate in an organic fashion.
Curious about the existing types of intranet?
Get the comparison guide
Uses
What is the benefit of using intranet software?
Whether cloud-based or on-premise, access to an intranet means access you can engage with your company and collaborate with your colleagues, anytime, anywhere. Depending on your company security, this means 24/7 access to your organization’s digital environment — at your desk, your house or even on the beach.
Communication
Agility is the new century’s buzzword for business success. Adapt fast means acting fast, acting fast means communicating fast. The best intranet software 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.
Possibilities
What can an intranet do?
Share files
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.
Search across your organization
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.
Find people in the people directory
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.
Build pages
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.
Collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and slides
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.
Mobile access
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.
Promote employee engagement
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.
Intranet
Frequently asked questions about intranet software
What is the definition of an intranet?
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.
What’s the difference between internet and intranet?
Short: the internet is publically accessible. An intranet is only accessible to people in your organization.
The slightly longer version: the internet offers a lot of Software as a Service (SaaS) tools to accomplish your business goals. An intranet should function as the place that brings them all together.
What is intranet software?
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.
What is intranet and extranet?
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.
How is intranet used in business?
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.