Intranet portal is a hub where employees collaborate to work, store and share. Sometimes more than a hub, portals come with essential add-ons that drive day-to-day business operations. In short, they equip employees with tools essential for success. The portal establishes unified communication among employees. Then information distribution and knowledge transfer becomes faster. Therefore these portals increase employee engagement, decrease centralized governance.

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Intranet Solution for Employee
Engagement

2. Today, technology is extending beyond the workplace boundaries. Extremely competitive
ŵarketplaĐe edžperieŶĐes draŵatiĐ paĐe of ďusiŶesses. EŶterprises todaLJ saLJ a ďig ͞YE“͟ for
real-time collaboration, work on the move and increased productivity. Simple innovative
solutions and quicker customer support wins repeat customers.
EŶterprises look forward for waLJs to eŵpower their eŵploLJees. VirgiŶ’s fouŶder saLJs ͞The
way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers͟. True, providing
employees the right tools, allowing them to Interact, Share, and Create will bring in greater
Employee Engagement. A greater employee engagement always will have a big positive
impact. This is where a simple solution like Intranet Portal comes into play. It drives
employee engagement to a whole new level all-together.
What is an Intranet Portal?
Intranet portal is a hub where employees collaborate to work, store and share. Sometimes
more than a hub, portals come with essential add-ons that drive day-to-day business
operations. In short, they equip employees with tools essential for success. The portal
establishes unified communication among employees. Then information distribution and
knowledge transfer becomes faster. Therefore these portals increase employee engagement,
decrease centralized governance.
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Basically an intranet portal addresses the following business needs.
 Team/employee storage
 Real-time team collaboration
 Group and division portals
 A big organization might have large number of divisions; it is possible to have intranet
portals for each division.
 Enterprise services
According to Ted Schadler of Forrester Research Inc., ͞ǁhat’s driǀiŶg the Ŷeed is the groǁiŶg
trend of distributed organizations, the rising number of remote workers, and the upsurge
of business-to-busiŶess teaŵs͟

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Key benefits of Intranet Portal
The following are the key benefits having intranet portal in organizations.
 Highly scalable solution, for example few intranet portals support 100,000 + users
 Unified communication platform
 Single URL and Sign-on features
 Integration with Microsoft office suite of applications
 Enterprise content management
 Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
 Personalization driven UI and navigation control
 Highly optimized search capabilities within the portal
 Seamlessly host in the cloud
 Enterprise application add-ons
 Provide Mail alerts
 Create Discussion boards
 Disaster recovery and backup functionality available
With an Intranet portal, employees can find everything happening in the enterprise, in one
place.
Bringing Greater Transparency: Intranet portal
And everyone has a role to play. Most enterprise portals today have flat governance
hierarchy to accommodate all voices across the organizations. Most of the case studies on
Intranet portals reveal more decentralized governance approach or management hierarchy.
Opposite of what happened in the past years, where for example decisions were more
centralized such as create, communicate and policed by the higher management. While now,
with these state-of-the-art portals everybody can communicate, listen and share. Greater
Eŵployee eŶgageŵeŶt ŵeaŶs ͞More participatioŶ, ǀital opiŶioŶs aŶd effectiǀe decisioŶ
ŵakiŶg͟.

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How does an Intranet portal actually work?
When enterprise has an intranet portal, it helps its employees in multiple ways. As told
earlier, intranet portal is a team workspace. It encourages teams to work seamlessly but
more effectively.
Few scenarios where Intranet Portal is highly recommended
Sr.No Description
1
Let us consider a project team, where developer works from home while the QA works
from office. And there are multiple QA teams who will have to test the same codes.
Developer is done writing codes. It is definitely not secure to send those precious
development packages through email. Now with intranet portal, seamlessly upload
those packages to the portal. QA teams pick it up from there and begin testing: Simple,
Secure and Quicker.
2
Create, work and store business presentations on the intranet portal. Work on the
move, edit from anywhere, and share with all your team members. For example, if the
business presentation has multiple slides from various sub-teams, each of the assigned
members can work on it directly from intranet portal.
Tip: Teams also get to know about document revisions and all the document attributes.
3
Project management dashboards, track the progress and keep all the stake holders
informed. Develop story boards for the brainstorming and discussions on projects.
4
Make the portal as the team landing page and keep it updated with latest and necessary
information relevant to the team members.
5
Simple useful applications add-ons such as time-tracker sheet, travel, expense reports
and HR related applications.

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Intranet Portal: Greatest Source of employee engagement
For employees, intranet portal in itself can be the greatest source of information. Naturally,
with employee-centric portal, enterprises can initiate communication between their
business and employees. The communication between employees themselves can lead to
more efficient distribution of information.
Empower employees to
 Search, manage, create and deliver information used daily in their line of work
 Clearly communicate and extensively collaborate with colleagues
 GaiŶ froŵ fellow Đolleague’s edžpertise and ideas. Get a glimpse of their working
methodologies in real-time
 Create workspaces for specific projects and able to review the progress
 Gather information relevant to roles and information recommended by colleagues
 Get easy access or alerts on happenings/events/meetings relevant to teams
Bottom line: Enterprises can foster innovation through sharing of ideas and look forward
higher operational efficiency
Intranet Portal: Diverse Adoption on the rise
Educational institutions are also using intranet portals. These portals aĐt as ͞oŶe-stop shop͟
for all academic related information and administrative processes. The aim of these portals is
to provide students and staff with all the required information. Enable them to get access to
services, and perform administrative tasks in a unified system.

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The Market leader: SharePoint intranet portal
Microsoft’s ŵarket research tells us that ϳϴ perceŶt of FortuŶe 500 coŵpaŶies are
SharePoint Intranet portal users.
Now we know why it is called the Market leader. SharePoint portal is one of the most
powerful intranet portal applications. It offers more features than any other intranet portal
available in the market.
Key features of SharePoint portal
 Highly customizable
 Runs in the cloud
 Microsoft office UI
 Office 365 or Server Deployment
 Automation of workflows to enhance productivity
 Easy to use, and configure
 Integrated Templates
SharePoint is present in 80% of the Fortune 100 and plays a prominent intranet role in
about 70% of knowledge worker intranets (either powering the main intranet portal, or
delivering associated collaboration sites and/or document repositories).

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How are enterprises using SharePoint Portal?
In the biggest organizations, not only do enterprises use Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or
Microsoft SharePoint 2013 to collaborate and talk with colleagues, it is also used in
communicating with external associates. While project collaboration creates a need for
check-in/check-out document management, file-share is still popular. The problem is that,
although documents are stored by default in the database, the fact that they can no longer
be seen directly makes some users uneasy.
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/sharepoint-2010-used-mainly-for-collaboration-
enterprise-content-management-to-grow-aiim-says-011815.php - Image courtesy and
above information marked in red in page 4

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Way Forward: Collaborate and Communicate
Employees using intranet portals collaborate and achieve goals without actually meeting
each other. Other plus for the enterprises is the additional cost savings. Customization and
social tools are being viewed as a standard offering of the intranet portals. Further, the
evolution of Mobile enterprise portal is being considered as the next-step in real-time
collaboration.
With enterprises moving towards a digital workplace, intranet portals are regarded as the
transformation hub of the organization, offering valuable information and applications.
Intranet portal has become lifeline of employees and a key driver of productivity.
Conclusion
Let’s face it. .NET aŶd custoŵ softǁare deǀelopŵeŶt is a ŵatch ŵade iŶ heaǀeŶ that
goes hand-in-hand to create win-win situations for all stake holders involved.
Microsoft .NET and custom software development will lower the development
timelines, maintenance, deployment costs and offer greater return on investment in
the long run.