SharePoint Intranet

Employee Productivity and Social Engagement using SharePoint Based Intranet

Intranets are becoming increasingly important in enterprises not only as a mean of proving information to employees but as platforms for promoting collaboration, employee engagement and enabling two-way communications between employees and management, thus, improving organization productivity and competitiveness.

As organization grow in size with multiple departments and divisions that are spread geographically, employees tend to operate in silos of department or geography as it becomes challenging to discover and manage enterprise information, engage with the global organization and collaborate on projects. Business leaders and CIO’s have started recognizing Intranets or Enterprise portals as a solution to this challenge

Simple Intranet websites have a limited use as a means of providing information, news, and articles. Using SharePoint as an Intranet platform offers some unique advantages:

• Enterprise Content Management: Organizations are continuously creating large quantities of content, which if not maintained properly could lead to multiple versions of the same content, as well as a large amount of unused content. A SharePoint based intranet provides an Enterprise Content Management system that helps maintain a single version of the documents and avoid redundancy and duplication of content.
• Social Engagement: SharePoint with its My Sites, Team Sites provides features such as Newsfeeds, Blogs etc. for social collaboration. Intranet built on SharePoint can leverage these social features and include a nice User Interface that allows users to easily interact, engage and collaborate with other employees in the organization
• Document Management: SharePoint based Intranets can serve as  Document Management systems, which enables good governance thus enabling collaborative working
• Business Processes and Workflows: SharePoint based Intranets can be integrated with SharePoint workflows, Line of Business applications as well as external applications such as SAP, remedy etc. Thus, the SharePoint intranet can serve as a single place from which the employees can access other applications or data from other applications.

iLink has developed a SharePoint Intranet Product HUB which along with leveraging the key benefits of SharePoint outlined above also provides an engaging User Interface. The Intranet product is completely customizable such that the Intranet managers, usually from marketing or internal communication department, do not need to have any prior knowledge of SharePoint and can customize the Intranet to the specific needs of the organization.

For more details on HUB Intranet please see http://www.ilink-systems.com/Services/hub-intranet

Intranets are very much on the minds of business and government leaders. According to Gartner, enterprise portals are on CIO's lists of top ten technology focus areas and Forrester Research reports strong growth in intranet development and usage.

As enterprises grow in size and sophistication, their need to manage information internally grows exponentially. Organizational departments and business units can typically span geographic locations, quite often continents, and information is constantly being produced and consumed. To retain competitiveness and drive efficiency it is vital these information silos are opened up, allowing rapid and intuitive information discovery, better decision-making and increased productivity. A well implemented SharePoint 2013 intranet can be the solution to your organizational needs

       Encourages innovation.

       Increases productivity.

       Improving the performance of the company.

Intranets are very much on the minds of business and government leaders. According to Gartner, enterprise portals are on CIO's lists of top ten technology focus areas and Forrester Research reports strong growth in intranet development and usage.

As enterprises grow in size and sophistication, their need to manage information internally grows exponentially. Organizational departments and business units can typically span geographic locations, quite often continents, and information is constantly being produced and consumed. To retain competitiveness and drive efficiency it is vital these information silos are opened up, allowing rapid and intuitive information discovery, better decision-making and increased productivity.

How do you get SharePoint to improve our competitiveness?

Regardless of the location of users, SharePoint facilitates efficient management of enterprise knowledge and simplifies how people collaborate, find and share information, enabling innovation, make better decisions and yet, retain the knowledge of the company.

Therefore, in this way, helps to increase business productivity, save costs and even improve customer service, resulting in a direct impact on the success of the company.

How do I identify if my company needs an intranet with SharePoint?

• Waste of time to locate information
• Knowledge is lost dispersed among employees and former employees
• Excessive use of email
• Lack of business process automation
• Difficulty easily works from anywhere
• Duplication of files and lack of control

Intranet Solutions

Today’s Intranet teams are streamlining processes and are working faster. A trend we saw last year that repeated this year is for teams to go live with iterative changes rather than wait to launch one new, huge intranet design. Agile or Agile-like approaches were used effectively in a development and contributed to the lower average time required to create the Intranet. The operative word here is effectively, as employing Agile is not a silver bullet; if done well, however, it can certainly streamline a project. (If done without proper design integration, Agile coding will create a disjointed, substandard user experience).

The noted trend toward an iterative process has changed the way we’ve been measuring intranet-project completion in the last two years. Prior to that, we only looked at one single release of the “full” intranet. But now, for some designs, we’re looking at iterations of the design, or even at just the functional elements that were most recently changed.

This way of working is potentially more practical for an organization producing an up-to-date and useful design. The development challenges may seem less daunting with an iterative approach, and the ability to see working results sooner may be more gratifying too. As improvements occur incrementally, employees are generally happier too, which can help with employee retention.

A possible setback of an iterative approach, of course, is if the way employees do a task is changed out from under them (as it happens too often),  and leaves them less productive and likely disgruntled. Thus, as designs iterate, it’s important that employees be able to still accomplish tasks without difficulty. No employee should wonder what mystery version of the intranet will appear each day when logging in. Their top tasks, global navigation, and core content sections should be designed early and stay static. This will help provide the concrete foundation that users need.

Feature Trends

As for the user interface, intranets often take a cue from web design, but in some areas intranets lead the way. Strong trends in intranet features this year include:

Responsive Design. Like last year, responsive intranet design is significant again, Organizations overcame the usual concerns around intranet security and offer employees access to expected content in varying ways.

Search Filters. The most common new trend on intranets, this year is faceted search. Search technology and planned content management with descriptive keywords make this feature work for the users.

Hover effects for immediate information about search. Intranet designers today focus on getting employees more information faster with less user effort. Content on pages is more thorough, yet concise. Rather than clutter pages, designs make use of hover effects to display more information before a user makes a commitment to click and follow through. Most commonly, pausing the cursor over a search result displays more information about that result item.

Federated Search. This is just a borderline trend as only a few organizations are doing this, offering search capabilities that effectively query multiple knowledge repositories, thus removing invisible awareness barriers often found on intranets. A word of advice: make the searches in the various areas good before attempting to federate.

Flat Design. Bevels, shadows, and elaborate framing effects seem to have become about as necessary as the human appendix, at least for this year.

Carousels. As in recent years, carousels have a prominent presence on the intranet homepage. In Design Annual fashion, the way these organizations present the navigation and content further progresses carousel design for intranets.

Company Performance on Homepage. To inform and motivate employees,

Megamenus. Also seen in years past, megamenus are helping employees discover layers deep in the hierarchy with a simple waive of the mouse.

Clever Use of Video. Today’s intranet designers recognize the potential and power of video. And they are moving away from the idea of limiting how or when video can be used on intranets.

Fat Footers. Display of large footers at the bottom of intranet pages, giving employees one more chance to find what they need when down there. These oversized footers, separated from the main content area with a different background colour and containing distinctly headed sections, are an expected and obliging anchor on intranets.

Some Intranet Examples from the Middle East:

1.    ARAMEX launches global Intranet

Based on Microsoft platform, intranet forms part of ARAMEX world-wide advanced technology strategy: forms basis for new customer service roll out

Amman, the international express and freight forwarding company specializing in the Middle East and Indian Sub-Continent regions announced it has launched its globally available intranet based on advanced technologies from world leading software company Microsoft Corporation. The global communications system will, in the future, form the basis of the company's extranet, a service that will give ARAMEX customers and suppliers access to the company's globally held information resources.

The new intranet system will operate as the single communications medium that gives ARAMEX staff all over the world immediate access on all of the company's operational, administrative, and customer related information.  It also provides information about the industries and markets that the company services. The development comes about as a

2.    Atlantis the Palm's intranet system

Atlantis The Palm, Dubai launched its intranet system, Aquarius, in February last year to streamline communication across the resort’s various departments, which employ more than 3000 people. With phase one now well and truly under way, the team is concentrating on building and launching phase two, which will feature a more interactive platform that will also foster independence among team members.

Rationale and Objective: The concept of an exclusive Atlantis intranet system was initially introduced to Atlantis team members in 2011. After receiving feedback on the ‘communications’ section of the hotel’s employee engagement index, the management team began working on improving communication within and among departments and diversifying the feedback channels at Atlantis. Comments received as part of the survey also indicated that shared drives were no longer the solution for communication across a large team, which led to the IT and employee marketing teams working together towards building the concept of internal system, Aquarius.

Another goal was to provide up to date content –to make sure that all the information that we’re giving out is current because this is the main concept of the intranet. Then of course, the third was to be Atlantis branded, to create the same look and feel that the main website of Atlantis has, so that people can relate to it.

3.    Saudi Food and Drug Authority

“Bawabaty” ( بوابتي ) which means my portal in Arabic, is highly customizable; giving employees powerful tools they need to do their work, and the freedom to do it in their own way.