What is a Corporate Intranet and Why Do You Need One

One of the critical pieces within a company is to have good control over the management of its tasks and internal organization. Many times, the lack of efficiency in a correct internal structure hinders communication between departments or slows down processes.

This is where the development of an intranet comes into play to help improve the organization of our company. Below, we analyze what it consists of, its advantages, and why it will be so helpful for you.

What is a Corporate Intranet

An intranet is an internal website for the exclusive use of a company’s personnel, supported by hardware and software. It can be hosted on a physical server, but, generally and with the most widespread hybrid work model, it is located in the cloud.

The main function of the intranet is to organize and make available to each employee the information they need to perform their functions correctly. Its purpose is to enable the effective distribution of internal information and the fluidity of communication between all parties.

In addition, it can integrate features typical of social networks.

The Benefits of a Corporate Intranet

The intranet brings numerous advantages to a company and can vary according to the company’s objectives. Some of the most important are:

• Time and cost savings: information is located in the same place, which greatly reduces the time spent searching for information, which can be invested in other more important tasks.
• Improved communication: it is centralized in a single environment, and the publication of announcements is faster and archived. All employees have simultaneous access or it is filtered so that it only reaches specific profiles.
• Facilitates collaboration between employees: by connecting employees from all departments, they can collaborate more efficiently and create synergies between them.
• Improves security: ensures that information reaches the specific groups that need it at any given time and is shared among them. This prevents unauthorized employees from accessing data that does not belong to them.
• It has no limitations: whether we are talking about space or time, it is available 24/7 and accessible from anywhere.
• Increases productivity: by facilitating the search for information, less time is wasted on these tasks. But it is also very interesting to integrate a ‘monitoring’ system that suggests interesting information for each employee, alerts on relevant data or newsletters.

What’s the Purpose of Having a Company Intranet?

The intranet can be considered the first internal social network, as it is an environment for sharing and distributing content of interest. It has become a solid response to the need to build a single point that houses the different information channels and processes of an organization.

It allows numerous tasks to be performed:

• Build pages: having a tool to create pages is a must for static communication, as it can be used to set up the onboarding period for new employees, record workdays, host brand assets, etc.
• Finding people in directories: if we are talking about a large company, it is very complicated for all employees to know each other, and finding a colleague can be difficult. The intranet makes it possible to search by location, job title, etc. It is also applicable to information, as search is one of the most used features.
• File sharing: the intranet has its own system for storing and sharing files, but it is also compatible with other platforms such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. It is therefore tremendously useful, whatever medium is used.
• Collaborate on files: following on from the above, having documents hosted in the cloud is much more useful for workers to edit documents, spreadsheets, slides, or applications.
• Promotes company engagement: creating a sense of belonging to a company and keeping employees engaged is a complicated task, but a tool like this facilitates the mission.

Corporate Intranet Solutions

When visualizing a corporate intranet, many companies think of a messy place, with accumulated documents that nobody uses or important information that is difficult to find.

Nothing could be further from the truth: corporate intranets have changed and evolved a great deal over the last few years. You now have access to a sophisticated collaboration platform that transforms the way your organization works.

If you are considering introducing an intranet, you should think about 3 assumptions:

1. Do I need a tool that centralizes my files and information?
2. Do I need communication tools such as chats and instant messaging?
3. Do you want to promote corporate culture, connect your people and increase employee engagement?

If all the answers are yes, clearly you need a corporate intranet. At Plain Concepts, we take care of developing the software and designing an intranet according to your demands and needs.