Intranets act as a mode of communication between people working in an organization.
Sharing information, uploading or downloading data, communicating and collaborating with peers are just some of the best features of a good intranet.
Agreed that an intranet may have the potential for security risks and building it is a bit expensive and time-consuming, but with proper planning and execution, overcoming these will not be a problem. Moreover, the issues can be overlooked when compared with the many advantages intranet provides to an organization.
Let’s understand how well has Intranet been useful in many organizations:
- Increased employee productivity
- Collaboration between employees was great
- Simplified decision making
- Data was very well streamlined
So, how does the Office365 SharePoint come into the picture?
There are many intranets out on the market currently. But, only some of those are successful while the others are a huge failure. This is because many organizations focus on advancing their intranet technically. This may be a good thing from the administration’s point of view, but a user may view it differently. To a user, it becomes very confusing and uninteresting. This eventually prompts them to start looking for other alternatives. Ultimately, the intranet will become oblivious.
Having an Intranet, that is not only technically advanced but also offers a great user experience, has become a challenge. This is where the Office 365 suite steps in!
Office 365 has many great features. But SharePoint is the biggest advantage of it. Using the O365 SharePoint’s new framework as a platform, a completely new, versatile and user-friendly version of the intranet can be built. Not only that, it can also be customized, based on the requirements and needs of an organization. SharePoint features, ‘‘team sites’’ and ‘‘communication sites’’ are all the necessary tools needed to build an intranet.
But, what exactly are these team sites and communication sites?
A team site is a link between a team and the projects they are working on. It allows to store, create and manage files. Collaboration using these files is another feature of the team site. Activity feed, quick access to different applications that are used every day, links to some important files and documents etc., are provided on the home page of a team site.
A communication site, on the other hand, can be created by anyone from an organization. It creates a site collection that can be accessed through mobiles and displays information dynamically. It has a few built-in designs which help users to get started faster.
The main difference between the two sites is that a team site allows collaboration between a group of people while a communication site acts as a bridge to share information with others. Along with these two features, a new framework called the SPF(x) is introduced recently which comes with a brand-new set of features. It is instrumental in building a new, modernized intranet that is highly advanced but very user-friendly.
Intranet & Office365 SharePoint
O365 acts as a platform which helps many realize the dream of building an intranet that is technically advanced providing great collaboration amongst employees and completely user-friendly. When O365 SharePoint’s features are utilized to the full extent, an intranet with the following features can be developed successfully:
- Out of the box features
Using the features of O365 SharePoint as the foundation of a new intranet, a completely new, modernized intranet can be designed. This intranet can have as many features as required and it can have features that can vary from all the departments of an organization. For example, an HR department’s requirements are different from those of a development team’s requirements. So, it is only sensible to design both the departments as per their requirements.
- Customization
Using team sites and communication sites, it is possible to design an intranet that is entirely customizable. Users should be able to add a feature to a department, make a certain feature accessible to either the entire organization or only to a few members of it, allow information to be shared among teams, upload documents that can be viewed by a team etc., without any difficulty.
- User-friendly
No matter how advanced the intranet is, how easy it is to collaborate or how simple it is to share information if navigation is difficult, users immediately start looking for an alternative to it. Designing an intranet that is efficient and very user-friendly is possible with the O365 SharePoint. With this, deploying an intranet that can be navigated effortlessly is simple.
As said earlier, there are many intranets which provide some of the above features to users. But, an intranet which provides all the above-said feature is developed by Saketa.
The Saketa Intranet Suite is a package of many advanced features and it can be customized as required by an organization. It is also a user-friendly intranet and navigating through it is very simple. Want to know more about this Intranet? Request a demo, here.
