At this point, you don’t need an explanation to understand how beneficial social media is for businesses, right?. Unless you are living under a rock, you must have seen multiple ways businesses use social media to boost their user base and market.
The same social networking element can be applied to many other aspects of business as well. For example, you can build a social community inside your organization to produce the same level of communication and engagements. In this article, I am going to introduce you to one such platform that is highly beneficial for your business; Intranet!
So, What Is An Intranet?
An intranet software is similar to social media in some ways. The social element is right there in the intranet as well. We can look at the intranet as a social community to communicate with your colleagues, share ideas and knowledge, access documents from anywhere, and collaborate on them with people from across the globe in real-time. It’s an all in one platform that can be customized to cater to the needs and nature of your organization.
That’s just a broad explanation of intranet. But, you still may be a bit skeptical as to how an intranet software fits within your organization. Like I said before, an intranet comes in handy in an organization in several ways such as
Communication
Documentation
Collaboration
Engagements
So, let’s see how an intranet impacts these areas.
Bolstering internal communication
Many companies still use emails for internal communication. Considering the pace of today’s businesses, e-mail isn’t an ideal platform for instant internal communications. You will end up wasting a lot of time checking emails and responding to them. This is especially impractical in the case of time=sensitive messages. If you don’t pay attention, you may miss some important messages.
An intranet can be customized to facilitate a stable internal communication in an organization to inform the staff about plans, goals, announcements, and updates through instant messages, private messages, blogs, comments, etc.
Work From Anywhere, At Any Time
An intranet is a centralized online hub of a company’s information and applications. As I mentioned before, Intranet is where the staff communicate with one another, share news and updates, plan events, and so on. This centralized system makes it easier to bring people from various locations and time zones together and build a collaborative working atmosphere. They can access all the necessary information from your document management system, files, and resources from anywhere, at any time.
Collaborating Seamlessly
Many projects often require the hand and input of multiple employees. But if the information and instructions aren’t readily available, other employees can’t do much about it either. Intranet brings all this information to our fingertips. So multiple users can bring their personal touch to documents and development activities like writing and coding on a real-time basis.
Engaging Employees
The timely pep-talks and appreciation for efforts can motivate employees to be more engaged in their office activities. There should also be a strong incentive for them to share their ideas and opinions confidently. Intranet gives employees these opportunities through blogs, social sites, private chats, like buttons, and so on.
Conclusion
Although the idea of intranet is exciting to contemplate, implementing it in the right way requires a lot of planning. There are some open-source intranet platforms such as eXo Platform, BuddyPress, Quaive, PBworks. But if you want a more comprehensive solution, SharePoint is a great option for you. You can find many SharePoint development companies around you.
