This is the time when a business decides that it needs a common platform for its employees, which can be used to bring both, the people and processes together. However, a major mistake that SMEs end up making is that they go for multiple software applications for this purpose. The result – some teams are doing most of their work using one application, while the other team finds it inconvenient to use.
Top 13 Reasons to Have a Smart #Intranet #Portal
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A major mistake that SMEs end up making is that they go for multiple software applications.
Companies can avoid this issue by having an Intranet portal that brings everyone and everything on one platform. In this blog post, we will cover what it means to have a smart Intranet portal and the top 13 reasons for a company to have one.
1. Mobile Access
Enterprise mobility and BYOD are not just buzzwords anymore. There are 1.2 billion smartphones in the world today. According to iGR, two-thirds of Americans SMEs have an official policy in place regarding BYOD.
The traditional distinction between work and personal usage of the smartphone is getting increasingly blurred. Many employees expect to have the ability to check their work emails, access documents and work outside the office and from their mobile phone.
An Intranet portal that has been built using responsive design will take care of these issues. This is a win-win for both the employee and the company, since the consumer devices available today are powerful enough to handle enterprise tasks and the company can also cut down on resources.
2. Bring social networking in the company
In many companies, social networks are seen as a waste of productive time and something to be avoided. But a smart portal that has built in social networking features can be used to enhance collaboration and keep your employees engaged within the company’s network. Yammer is Microsoft’s tool for enterprise social networking and our smart portal solution integrates it so that users do not have to leave the portal while using it.
Employees who use it get a streamlined internal communication tool instead of depending on in-person meetings and emails. Instead of getting a deluge of emails for every task and query, employees can use Yammer to speed up their work.
3. Access to Microsoft Office
When it comes to office productivity software, Microsoft Office is the undisputed champion. There is hardly any enterprise of any size and industry that does not use MS Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. With our Smart Portal, these are some of the benefits that you get:
- Access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote on up to 5 PCs or Macs per user.
- Online versions of Office including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Business class email with a 50 GB inbox
- IM and HD video conferencing
- Personalized search and discovery across Office 365 using the Office Graph
- Self-service Business Intelligence to discover, analyze, and visualize data in Excel
- Compliance and Information Protection including Legal Hold, Rights Management and Data Loss Prevention for email and files
- eDiscovery Center tools to support compliance
4. Knowledge Sharing with Blogs & Wikis
Every team can have a wiki or you can create a large-scale Enterprise wiki as a separate site. The wiki will continue to evolve with your organization and can be edited without needing any technical expertise. This will help your organization capture and collect all the institutional knowledge, assemble content from numerous sources, and share plans and ideas. You can eliminate knowledge loss that occurs due to employee turnover. Blogging and chat tools allow your employees to share information and communicate with each other.
5. Document Management
Businesses can improve their document management and handle regulatory compliance and legal requirements with the Smart Portal. Users can set up public and private permissions on files, co-author documents, tag documents and keep a track of all versions. Our solution also works as a file repository. Admins and file creators can set up who can access specific folders and share files as per requirements in the department or their team.
- Document activity dashboard
- Granular file permission
- File organization and management
- Annotate documents
- Outlook integration
- Documents are searchable from the browser
- Mobile access for documents
- Media files can be uploaded
6. Employee Directory & Profile
The admins can create employee profiles, which gives users information on other employees, including their skills, designation and contact information. Users can also search for other employees based on projects completed and other information. Such detailed profiles can be set up in minutes or imported from enterprise systems such as Active Directory. Users or admins can use the permission controls to control which information is visible to the employee’s colleagues.
7. Personal Sites
Employees can set up personal sites that give them social networking and document management features. Such a site includes a newsfeed site, an online file locker for storing and sharing documents, photos and other media files. The user who creates his site can access the admin center of that site to change and update it. This is the starting place for users who want to navigate the Intranet and access other features as well.
- Newsfeeds – Show updates to users who have subscribed to that site.
- Communities – These are site templates that give users a forum type experience.
- Microblogging – The user who has created the site can provide status updates for other users.
- Tagging and Notes – Tags and hashtags can be used to mark pages, and these tags will be seen in the tag cloud web part for that user.
- Ratings – Your employees can also rate the relevance and value of the content posted which helps other users find relevant results.
8. Active Directory Sync
Our Smart Portal is based on SharePoint technology and this allows you to sync your Active Directory Objects including users and groups to your Office 365 account. Password synchronization on top of AD sync is also possible.
9. News & Press Release
Makes adding and sharing company news quick and easy. This feature is ideal for companies with multiple locations so that its employees are on a single page regarding policy changes and other important news.
10. Pinboards
Your employees are used to social media sites such as Pinterest and you can provide them the same experience in your Intranet through the pinboards feature. Announcements such as news articles, team awards, new hires and company updates can all be put into “pin-it” type notes that the user sees when he logs into the Smart Portal.
11. Approval Process Workflow
If the approval process of project plans, proposal and other documents in your organization is ad hoc, then you certainly need the Smart Portal. Our solution gives you a structured process of asking for approvals and keeping track of them.
The workflows feature ensures that you can assign tasks, send reminders, track participation and task ownership without having to depend on just emails or having to keep sending reminders. With the Smart Portal, you can keep a track of who has approved/rejected your document with the workflow history of the document.
12. A Rich, User-intuitive Interface on Top of a Content Management System
Our Smart Portal also gives you a customized CMS interface for your Intranet. Based on SharePoint Online and Office 365, our solution enhances these products with a UI that makes the Intranet Portal look like a popular social media network/website instead of a dry, run-of-the-mill office application that employees have to use. With a customized and fresh looking intranet portal, your employees will want to use it!
Create Unlimited Pages with customizable templates – The CMS gives you the option to create unlimited Intranet pages and customize it as per your company’s requirements. Adding, editing or deleting multiple pages takes just a few clicks. You get full control over how the site will look with our customizable templates. The templates are easy to customize and require no technical or design expertise.
WYSIWYG Editor – The WYSIWYG editor lets you add text, links, photos, videos and downloadable files from a browser without needing any additional software. Users can also add embedded content from other sites. The pages can be viewed in draft mode and made live when required. Admins can also set up a comments section.
13. Security
The Smart Portal secures all your data with SSL based in-transit encryption and comes with the ability to enable/disable mobile access for users. The admin retains the right to disable access or wipe any required content, a must-have feature to prevent data loss from lost or misplaced mobile devices. The users can be limited to your office network or you can grant limited access to vendors as per requirement.
At the end of the day, an Intranet portal should help your employees make their job easier, keep them engaged in the company’s activities and increase their productivity. A cloud-based smart portal can help you do just that.
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