Organizations from all over the world can choose SharePoint as their intranet development technology. We understand that each business has different processes and environment. Identical intranet portals are unheard of. As we have worked with many different industries, we have come across three types of intranets:
- Intranet with social capabilities
- Intranet with focused business solutions
- Hybrid intranet with social and business solutions
Intranet with social capabilities
Intranet with social capabilities is more useful for companies who are looking to cultivate their corporate culture. It helps companies to develop employee loyalty, promotes employee engagement and collaborations. In this type of intranet, the features should include:
- News
- Announcements
- Yammer (Social Collaboration)
- Events
- Surveys
- Birthday greeting service
- Blog postings from admin and individuals
- Floor plan
- Discussion board and public post
- Business trip guides
- Organization chart
- Contests
- Classifieds
- Idea Room
NOTE: To get more information about these features. Click Here
How intranet with social capabilities helps your organization?
- Providing employees’ with an official social platform to engender a sense of community. Companies can announce the news about their employees like birthdays, anniversaries, child-birth etc.
- Integration with Yammer can connect employees from different departments and offices. Thus, companies can do much more than just sending messages, storing files, announcements etc. So it enhances social aspect of your business and you can collaborate with everyone on a much wider platform.
- Some fun activities on intranet can improve employee engagement and team collaboration.
- By supporting employees’ individual hobbies, intranet offers niche to relevant communities where employees can share and discuss their interests.
Intranet with focused business solutions
SharePoint can help you digitalize and ease business processes. It can enable employees do their work more efficiently with lesser effort. Using SharePoint, companies can automate their processes while it can also work as their CRM platform.
There won’t be any pre-defined features for this type of intranet. The demand as well as the nature of the business are decisive factors, in order to implement intranet with business solutions. A variety of departmental sites enables employees to access such enterprise solutions, like: CRM and a project management system.
Intranet with business solutions can also handle training processes. Intranet helps to fortify internal learning practices and embraces training sessions, personal development center and collaboration areas for employees.
Intranet with document management system can be very useful for many companies. Although, SharePoint has out of the box document management system, but it is too basic to use. Document management system with features like check in/check out, versioning, user permissions setups, access for external users, advance search functions etc. click here to get more information about document management system’s feature and its benefits.
Tailor-made (business process based) solutions can be very useful for organizations e.g. approval workflow and digitalizing business processes. There are a couple of ways to know your requirements for such tailor-made solutions. Either, businesses will self-identify their problems and document it. Or, SharePoint consultant analyzes the business process and suggests them the best way to implement the solution.
Portals:
- Portal for HR team: HR team carries out many time-consuming and vital processes every day. HR team handles PTO requests, other leave requests and other such documents-related requests. SharePoint can help you with these and its integrated workflows can stream line HR teams every day processes.
- Personal portal for each employee: Through this portal, an employee can manage their task self-reliantly. Employees can view their payroll system, leave scores, personal handbook, frequently ask questions etc.
- Portal for IT/Networking: IT issues are time-consuming processes and IT person can get overwhelmed with petty issues. This portal can have FAQs sections where employees can see and search for similar issues. By using a request based or ticket-based system, it can prove to be very helpful and easier to maintain each request.
- Portal for finance department: Finance people can manage their tax files, compliances, contracts, purchase orders etc. As per their daily business process, SharePoint can automate it easily.
- Training Portal: Training portal can be very useful for HR team and team leaders. They can simply access, manage, and update their training documents, videos etc. They can use it for new employee joining process or for existing employees’ and their development programs. An integration with training calendar will make life easy.
- Project Portal: Project portal can keep track of project documents, timesheets, calendars etc. Businesses can simply avoid long email trails for project management. It can store each and every version of your project document.
- Portal for sales team: Sales team can manage their contacts, leads, existing client lists. Sales team can create their own document library where they can exclusively find sales related documents for each client/projects. Sales team can put their conversations/discussions with clients and also get reminders.
- Portal for marketing team: In this portal, user can store all the marketing artifacts at one place. Marketing processes can be improved using automation and integration processes.
- Custom-made portals: Businesses can simply choose this kind of portal for their unique business procedures. A business can digitalize their processes that consumes time and are manually handled.
Hybrid intranet with social and business solutions
Hybrid intranet can be developed for the companies, which are looking for tailor-made solutions or customized solutions with some social features. It will be a great problem solver for companies who want to engage their employees with integrated document management solution or some automated processes. Companies can add things as they desire, from both social and business type of intranet.
With a detailed description of the different types of intranet which are made possible by SharePoint platform, maybe it is time for you ponder over the ‘requirements and demands’ of your business; and address them from the SharePoint perspective.
