Intranet Software

Intranet means a network that is generally used within an organization to facilitate the sharing of information among employees. This network uses Internet protocols and even public telecommunication systems.

Various tools and concepts used in providing Internet services are also used in building an intranet. In its earlier days there were software packages to help in building this kind of network. But now that option has given way to another new technology. This is commonly known as a web-based intranet. There are different kinds of intranet software that make interface and navigation easy, cost effective and accessible. Much of this software is available free of cost on the Internet.

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In several organizations, intranet software is not able to give desirable results. This is because at times it might not be user-friendly. Not all intranet software is like this. In fact, specific kinds of intranet software are suitable for particular business environments. So it is better to use that software which is not alien to your business environment. That is why traditional software solutions have now given way to the new, dynamic software solutions. There is certain intranet software that can be modified as necessary.

Generally, software-based intranets prove to be a costlier option in terms of money as well as time, compared to web-based intranets. Compared to the latter, the former also requires stronger internal support. On the other hand, web-based solutions are proving to be a better option, as more and more software tools are being developed to make this option viable for all. It is better to have a trial of the software you are going to use for making an intranet functional in your organization. Any snag at a later stage could lead to break down in communications that could have a serious impact on your business operations.

Intranet Software

Intranet Software provides detailed information on Intranet Software, Free Intranet Software, Intranet Extranet Software, Intranet Portal Software and more. Intranet Software is affiliated with Church Home Page Software.

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Intranet 2011 - SharePoint Intranet Design and Implementation

Intranets have come a long way since they were first created. Starting as static informational pages and merging into self-service and enterprise information portals, to the consolidated enterprise workspace platform that is known today. When developed and deployed correctly, companies can use intranets to their full advantage - creating a collaborative and social intranet environment for employees to share and manage knowledge and ideas with governance.

The big question on everyone's mind today is, 'what should I expect my intranet to do now that it is 2011 and the technology has vastly improved?' Settling for a sub-par intranet, even if it is cheap, will not necessarily give you the results you are looking for. Intranets are designed to provide your organization with an array of services to increase collaboration, productivity, and efficiency.

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Social tools and applications will allow organizations to better connect with employees and allow employees to better connect with each other. Such tools will also make it easier to recognize and acknowledge employee achievements. Also, organizations can now have a dynamic workplace equipped with the business oriented work tool and on-the-go access with mobile devices. This provides a flexible platform that will allow organizations to channel their overall goals and objectives. Intranets should also act as a self-service platform that is focused on delivering tools, applications, and information that is easily accessible to various departments and allows for collaboration. Companies can also easily manage enterprise content that is user generated using taxonomy in a digital environment.

The hope is that with intranets progressing the way they are, that formal infrastructures will integrate daily tasks and informal structures with workforce enhancements and enterprise 2.0 technologies. This will help formulate organizations that collaborate, organize, manage knowledge, foster ideas, learn, participate, innovate and work seamlessly together. This brings us to the trends and features to watch for in 2011. Intranets now provided more enhanced features for employees. Users can easily create profiles highlighting areas of interest, awards, expertise, etc. Users can also manage tasks more efficiently on a single interface that is faster and allows for greater productivity, this can also be customized to suit their needs.

Users can also easily collaborate with others using wiki's, blogs, forums, and RSS feeds just to name a few. The possibilities are really endless and having a great SharePoint intranet design will garner more participation.

Then there is the actual technology aspect of the intranet. Thanks to new technology and devices, organizations can now easily access documents and information, or upload data for others to access, 24/7 with mobile devices such as the i Pad, iPhone, and Blackberry just to name a few. The user experience has also been greatly improved with streaming audio and video. With digital dashboards, integrating capabilities from legacy systems, reporting systems, databases, etc. are accessible through a single interface.

Organizations now have an armament of tools to help meet business objectives and goals faster and more efficiently with more focused policies and procedures. Companies can now align employees to the company culture and objectives with greater emphasis on understanding and sustained development. Other improved features for content management include taxonomy based on user generated content, internationalization to improve content relevance based on language selection, translation management, and better search features.

Intranets in 2011 should be equipped with these top five features: enterprise search, mobility, social, task-oriented, and usability. These should seamlessly integrate with ageless key features and intranet functions including team sites, project portals, knowledge and community-based wiki's, content publishing, my sites, social networking, help and support tools, and manager tools. These and many other timeless intranet features allow for organizations to carry out the best practices, maintain good governance, and allow for collaboration.

All of these features are great, but knowing how to use Intranets to their full advantage is key. The information architecture plays a big role in the user acceptance of the intranet within the organization. The architecture must provide a consistent experience to all users at all times. Common categories also should be established so they can be easily and quickly accessed - HR, Company News, etc. Future company and cultural changes should also be taken into consideration as well as potential growth to include social networking, content management, collaboration, and governance policies. Intranets also need to be mobile so that users can access information on-the-go 24/7. With this, mobile technology also needs to be taken into account. Establishing support features geared toward mobile users is also critical. Otherwise mobile access will not be able to reach its full potential.

Intranets should also equip organizations with social business tools that assess and identify the social networking maturity of the organization. As different organizations have different needs and maturity levels, finding the balance of requirement and employee access is critical. A couple of things that have enhanced social networking are social profiling and tagging - they enable users to identify attributes that will help in improving their social visibility and network across the organization. Also providing for social taxonomy allow people with similar interests, problems, and expertise to find each other. Social tools also help in enhancing idea and talent management.

Intranet 2011 - SharePoint Intranet Design and Implementation

OptimusBT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is a global leader in providing Business solutions that are primarily Sharepoint based and utilize existing client infrastructure. For over 5 years, A leader in SharePoint intranet design and implementation, OptimusBT has paved the road when implementing complex, global sharepoint solutions in the areas of Sales, Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Human Resources, and others across industry segments around the world.

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Implementing SharePoint As a Sole Platform For Intranet, Extranet & Internet

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

SharePoint as a Platform for Intranets, Extranets and Internet sites

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1. Share Point as an Intranet Platform:

The following are the features that make SharePoint an ideal platform for implementing an intranet website.
• Collaboration
- SharePoint by default is an Collaboration platform aimed at improving the collaboration and communication between the internal users of the organization.
- Provides out of the box collaboration features like tasks, issues, surveys, discussions etc. that can be quickly setup and be used to publish and share information across the intranet.
• Search
- The inbuilt search capabilities provide a quick and easy method that can be used to find information residing throughout the portal without additional configurations.
- Its extensibility features allow the search to be customized to suit the organizations information targeting requirements.
- Provides inbuilt crawling and indexing capabilities, provide search results in very less amount of time.
• Self Service
- SharePoint as defined by its characteristics is a self service platform
- Users can easily create and publish information, as well as customize the SharePoint lists, libraries and pages according to their preferences
- Tools can include personalized tools or cross departmental tools that can automate the business processes across the organization from a single, central location.
• Content Management
- SharePoint's Web Content Management abilities make it possible to differentiate and manage the different types of content present on the intranet
- Using the content types, SharePoint allows organizations to build the content type framework for the information residing on the intranet and reuse the same in different locations throughout the intranet
• Document Management
- SharePoint provides document management through the document library feature
- The document libraries can be customized to include metadata that by default are indexed by the SharePoint search
- Features like document level security, advanced versioning etc. make SharePoint a powerful document management tool
- Provides easy interface to share and collaborate on documents to achieve focused goals
- Document content types provide template based creation of documents right from the SharePoint interface.

2. SharePoint as an Extranet Platform

The following are the factors that make SharePoint an ideal platform for implementing an Extranet in your organization:
• Secure Access
- SharePoint can be easily configured to provide secure access to the extranet to the external users like customers, partners, vendors etc.
- With support for multiple authentication providers, the external users profile information can be stored in separate database, and can be managed separately
• Extending the Enterprise
- With the intranet and the extranet implemented using Microsoft SharePoint, communication between the internal and external users of the organization is delivered in a seamless manner.
- Only a subset of information from the intranet that is pertinent to a given customer, partner, vendor etc. can be published to the extranet to provide up to date information to both the internal and external users of the organization.
- With the workflow engine being the same for the intranet and extranet implementation, workflows can be extended to automate the processes that are carried out between the two implementations.
- With a single platform implementation for the intranets and the extranets, SharePoint truly extends the enterprise to include not only the internal users, but also the external users of the enterprise under a single umbrella.

3. SharePoint as an Internet Web Site:

The following features make SharePoint the ideal platform for implementing your organization's internet sites
• Site Customization and Branding
- SharePoint provides a build once, use many times option using ASP.NET Master pages and page layouts
- SharePoint Themes allow customizations to change the look and feel of the site to meet your organizations branding requirements
• Content Management
- Content authors need not wait for the site administrators to publish content.
- Content can be published in a pre defined format, requiring no help from the web designers
- On the screen rich text editors to format the text on the fly
- Supports standardized look and feel across the web site without much effort
- A structured hierarchy makes it easy to maintain and manage the sites and content on the web site.
• Web Communities
- Inbuilt templates for blogs and wikis allow user communities to be created on specific topics on your web site that can be used as an effective feedback mechanisms on your solutions and product offerings
• Rich Media
- SharePoint supports rich media like images, videos, flash files etc.
- Can be easily streamed over the internet with minimal customizations

Implementing SharePoint As a Sole Platform For Intranet, Extranet & Internet

OptimusBT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is a global leader in providing Business solutions that are primarily sharepoint based and utilize existing client infrastructure. For over 5 years, OptimusBT has paved the road when implementing complex, global sharepoint solutions in the areas of Sales, Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Human Resources, and others across industry segments around the world.

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Out With the Old - Rethinking Outdated Intranet Portal Models - Part I - Introduction

Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. "Traditional" intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don't cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.

The collaborative efforts of the open source community have also delivered new products into the marketplace, driving the cost of software down and injecting healthy competition into the portal industry. On top of new features and pricing models, new hosting options such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud hosting provide organizations additional options to consider when building or upgrading their portal. All of this spells opportunity for Intranet pros looking to make changes.

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In the later sections of this four-part article, we'll take a look at some of the specific software vendors and new platforms that are reshaping portal price tags, but before we jump into the specific products, let's take a look at a recent, real-world example of how much the climate has changed and how big the impact can be to a company.

In 2006, I was involved in an Intranet project for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company with an employee base of around 25,000. After identifying the requirements for the portal, the search for a suitable software package led the project team to three real contenders: BEA Systems' Aqualogic portal (now Oracle WebCenter), Sun Microsystems' SunOne portal (now defunct), and the Vignette Intranet portal (now part of OpenText). All three offered a customizable presentation portal, content management system, search, forums and emerging blog/wiki functionality. However, each solution also required significant server hardware to be purchased and resources to be devoted to the maintenance of the hardware and the application. After the final solution was selected and the appropriate hardware was purchased, the pricetag for the selected software and hardware tallied up to more than million. Take note that the selected solution was the least expensive of the three.

Now, flash forward to 2009. I recently had lunch with the current manager of that specific Intranet solution and he and I were discussing the changes to the industry and the merits of both open source and hosted (SaaS) solutions. Knowing the price tag of the original solution and the annual software maintenance fees (20% of initial software costs), it took some simple math to come to the conclusion that he could take the annual maintenance of about 5,000 and easily replace the existing system for a hosted solution costing about ,000 annually.

With the less expensive solution, he would get:

A 37% reduction in software costs (0,000 dropped to ,000) in year one. A 93% reduction in annual software maintenance costs (0,000 dropped to ,000) in the following years. A reduction in hardware costs, allowing 0,000 in hardware to be re-purposed in the enterprise or decommissioned. No employee headcount required to maintain hardware, so reduced costs in employee overhead. The SaaS vendor would now be accountable for a 99% server uptime (No more outage calls at 3am when the servers stop responding or a load balancer fails). Continued evolution of the product since the annual maintenance buys him product upgrades from the vendor. New Web 2.0 functionality offered by SaaS vendors that isn't offered by the current vendor. So basically, this Intranet Manager gets more functionality for his users, a stable platform that allows him and his team to sleep at night, and a significant reduction in annual software costs that makes him a corporate hero with the Accountant and Execs!

A second option that we discussed was looking at a lower cost software vendor or an open source solution. In these situations, he would still reduce his annual software licensing costs significantly, but would still require the hardware and headcount to maintain it. The ROI, however, is still positive in year one due to the huge reduction in software maintenance fees.

Obviously, the ROI for this organization is magnified by the size and extensive software/hardware requirements of the company. However, it's likely that any Intranet portal built on the traditional perpetual software licenses/standalone hardware model could benefit from a review of the existing system and an analysis of potential replacement technologies. So, before you cut that next software maintenance check, take a few moments to think about how much you're paying and where you might get some additional bang for your buck.

Out With the Old - Rethinking Outdated Intranet Portal Models - Part I - Introduction

Check out part II of this series where we'll take a look at some of the existing replacement platforms that could positively impact your Intranet bottom line.

Sean R. Nicholson has been working with Web Development, Intranet portals, document management, and content management systems for more than 10 years. He has worked with large and small companies, including independent consulting firms, non-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 & 100 companies.

If you're interested in Intranets, check out great articles about portals, Enteprise Content Management, Internal Communications, and Social Media in the workplace at his blog at http://www.intranetexperience.com

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Intranet Development - Intranet Portal For Your Company

The primary function of an intranet is that a company can share data and computing resources with employees. An intranet is ideal for teleconferences and group working. An intranet uses HTTP, TCP/IP and sundry internet protocols and generally is much like a private internet. In some larger enterprises users are permitted access the public internet within their intranet.

This is accomplished through firewall servers that are able to screen messages, both incoming and outgoing, so that company security is not at risk. When access to part of the intranet is given to partners, customers, suppliers and others not in the company, the part that is accessible becomes part on an extranet.

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Intranet Development

The first step in intranet development is to devise a strategy based on what you want from your intranet. For example, your primary objective might be to give access to company information to employees. At a later stage you might like to broaden the scope. With an intranet complete building need not be done at once. In fact building an intranet is an ongoing project adding new capabilities as you go along.

Intranet strategy should be broken into components with a distinct strategy for each department or group of users. Dissemination of company information is what most intranet applications are designed for, but an intranet is capable of far more applications.

The next step is planning, where the objectives determined in the strategy phase are prioritized. Intranet development should be approached like any other projects where the objectives are clearly defined, the priorities determined, tasks and responsibilities developed, completion dates scheduled and the plan communicated to employees and company managers.

Human-Centered Intranet Development

Intranets should be designed to bring workers closer in a collaborative effort. But an overly complicated or poorly developed system will alienate them and become counter-productive. Developers need to have a deep understanding that the end result must be a product that conforms to the natural way humans operate. Simplicity is a keyword in intranet development where users rather than technology are the key focus. A good intranet product must be intuitive, easy-to- learn and user-friendly in the strictest sense of the words.

Intranet Development - Intranet Portal For Your Company

Zdenek Hejl is internet marketing specialist at Memos Outsourcing. Memos Outsourcing is custom software development company based in Minsk, Belarus. If you demand quality business software development at affordable price please contact us. Except intranet development we also offer extranet portal development.

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Social Media and the Intranet - Is it Enough?

Alexander Wolfe (The Wolfe's Den) commented in a recent article entitled Enterprise 2.0: Confronting 2.0's Dirty Little Secret:

"At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, there's been frank discussion this week of the question average users have been whispering (so that their bosses don't hear them): Namely, what can this stuff do for me that's actually useful? In truth, though, the answers to that question are not yet completely apparent."

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Mr. Wolfe also indicates that technology enthusiasts' implicit familiarity with social media tools can be a problem as it glosses over potential usability and training issues for staff unfamiliar with these technologies.

Social media is a fast and efficient way to share thoughts and ideas - just ask anyone on Twitter. Many web 2.0 fans are seeking ways to integrate micro blogging, status updates, and video sharing within the corporate enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is here to stay and can be an effective and extremely valuable part of your internal communications, particularly as it is built around the idea of engaging employees to be an active participant and not a passive observer of the intranet. We have often blogged about the key factor of a successful intranet is employee participation, and have built the Intranet Connections Intranet Software around this concept, but do social 2.0 tools give you everything you need for a successful intranet implementation?

Missing in social media is the organization and structure that most organizations are built upon. A well thought out and presented navigation system is invaluable for an intranet. Content stored within three clicks that can easily be found, rather than unlimited levels of content with no structure that becomes buried and rarely viewed. 2.0 social tools can be difficult and complex to set up, and instead of tying into existing single user logins, many have proprietary security requiring users to remember yet another username and password. These are all challenges that 2.0 software vendors will eventually address, but there is something to be said for the established intranet that is getting hammered in the media. Core internal applications are the backbone of an intranet. They are the tools that serve the employee in helping them with their daily jobs.

How can you have an intranet without some form of document management, the ability for employees to fill out and submit electronic forms and the ability to streamline and report on those e-form submissions? An intranet can help the IT department in providing a support desk ticketing application and knowledgebase - one central area for employees to report problems and view what the techs are doing about it, or to search FAQ's and to share how-to tips, tutorials and the option for employees to register for training, share comments and rate the effectiveness of the courses.

HR also has a strong presence on the intranet with the much-discussed employee directory, which does not have to be passive but can be highly interactive and social. HR also posts policies, new hire procedures, updated medical and dental benefits, job postings, departmental news and upcoming company events.

You can't discredit these important intranet features that social conversation and networking tools cannot replace. A successful intranet deployment should integrate the advantages of social media with the core applications already proven to enhance corporate information sharing.

Social Media and the Intranet - Is it Enough?

Carolyn Douglas is the CEO and founder of Intranet Connections - Intranet Software (http://www.intranetconnections.com) a fully customizable out-of-the box intranet suite of applications designed for ease of use, simplicity and affordability.

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