Does your intranet transform the way you work, introduce fresh ways to connect, collaborate, accomplish tasks, and support your business in meeting real-world challenges? If your answer is yes, congratulations! You’ve got a modern intranet. If your answer is no, read to find out what a modern intranet is, and why you need it.

What is a modern intranet?

A modern intranet is a central place where employees come to connect, collaborate, share ideas, and accomplish work. This is also a place where your users find answers, meet deadlines and be productive. What makes it different from a traditional intranet is that it is much more than a collaboration platform – It’s useful and relevant in helping businesses manage critical aspects of business while providing a fun, flexible and rewarding experience to the employees.

What makes it modern?

  •  It is available for you 24/7

Today, work is not something that you do only at the office, from your desk, during a specific eight-hour period, with a device provided by your company. A modern intranet keeps your virtual office always available on the cloud, and lets you take the work wherever you go. It’s where your employees get their jobs done remotely – from home, in the office, or on the go and enjoy the flexibility to work across time zones.

Since it is accessible from any device, from anywhere, your employees can access it using a device of their choice – phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. It helps your field workers have access to documents, plans, reports, and contacts wherever they are.

  • It is a central place to get work done

A modern intranet be the first place where your employees begin their day, find information they need to get the work done, and solve most of their work-related challenges. It is comprehensive and provides all the tools they need to organize, connect and manage critical aspects of the business. It works seamlessly like a unified ecosystem that integrates your Office 365 tools and other existing business applications into an engaging, convenient and user-friendly experience.

Along with automating processes and replacing manual work with intelligent tools, it also offers capabilities to better manage documents, projects, tasks, and get notified about updates. It also streamlines routine and multi-stage approvals like time-off requests, purchase requests, reimbursement forms, and performance appraisals.

  • It promotes collaboration

For a lot of businesses operating globally, investing in an enterprise communication and collaboration tool indispensable. A modern intranet can be one of the easiest ways to improve collaboration across departments and connect the systems they use, resulting in a productive and streamlined employee experience.

An intranet makes it easy for global teams to communicate ideas and have discussions and meetings, share calendars, and stay up to date on their progress. Further, it facilitates document management, content management, enterprise social network and process automation. It creates an ecosystem where all the relevant tools are interconnected to create a single environment where users communicate, collaborate and complete tasks.

If you are on Office 365, you can leverage its social features within your intranet as below.

  • Yammer is an enterprise social network that helps you connect and engage across the company.
  • Skype can be used for instant messaging, conferencing, and calling from a single, easy-to-use interface.
  • Exchange Online provides easy access to your business email, calendars, and contacts on your PC, phone, and web browser.
  •  SharePoint is a powerful tool for your collaboration, document management, business process management, search, business intelligence and overall business needs.
  • It is an integrated hub

A modern intranet solution integrates and connects work-relevant tools to create a central location for productivity. A place you can log on at anytime, anywhere and “go to work”. It helps you distribute information, manage documents, automate processes, track projects, collaborate & communicate securely, and much more.

SharePoint and Office 365 based intranets are powerful platforms that seamlessly connect your business applications with external systems and create an integrated hub that brings all relevant tools in one central location. There is no need to sign in to separate applications for your email, document authoring, project management, forms processing, and collaborating; you can connect with your favorite apps from your intranet with a single sign-on. So far if you are using any other platform such as G suite then you can also migrate g suite to office 365 to enjoy full-fledged benefits of it including Yammer, SharePoint, etc. If you need a more advanced platform then you can try out Azure services from Microsoft.

  • It is not complex

A modern intranet is simple, intuitive, and offers a great user experience. An intranet built on Office 365 is hosted on the cloud. It’s quick to implement, allows for free updates, and puts no extra burden on your pockets. Further, it takes the stress away from your IT team as the changes and upgrades are maintained and managed by the vendor.

A lot of business still employ different tools for different processes. While these tools serve their individual purposes, they can cause clutter, duplications, and hinder the productivity challenges they are there to solve.

A modern intranet consolidates all your separate tools by providing them on one platform and also integrates with unique business systems, thus bringing everything and everyone, in one central location.

  •  It is ready-to-go

Building an intranet from scratch or customizing means spending a considerable amount of time, effort and money. Further, it needs constant upgrades to prevent it from becoming obsolete.

A turnkey intranet on the contrary sets up quickly, easily maintained, and requires little or no IT skills for its upkeep. It may also provide you with ready templates that can be easily customized.

Some intranets provide loads of ready-to-go functionalities like Employee Management, Forms Management, Performance Management, etc. These features come built-in as a part of the ready-to-go Office 365 Intranet package, so you can start using these features right after setup.

  • Scales as you grow

A modern intranet provides ample flexibility and scalability, so as your organization grows and changes, the intranet can grow with you. Whether you are a small, mid-sized or a large enterprise, your intranet should have room for growth. You should be able to effortlessly add users, locations, departments, projects, documents and features on your requirements without extra IT overhead. It allows cloud hosting making it fully scalable, ensuring it is an intranet platform that grows and evolves with you.

Conclusion

It would be naïve to think that if you implement an intranet for your company, all your problems will be solved.

A modern intranet is not just the technology you put in place, it is the sum total of the users, their pain points, and the processes you put in place to solve the issues. Each intranet is as unique as the company it caters to. So, it is important to evaluate your needs and understand what tools will bring the most value to your users. We have put together is a list of features we think any modern intranet should have, but in the end, it must be the best fit for you.