HOW TO SET UP AN INTRANET

By MASSAWE ARKADI

Any business, regardless of its size, can benefit from creating a simple company intranet to store important information and documents.

ü  Planning an intranet
There are many important questions to consider when planning an intranet, including:
what size should it be
what functionality should it have
how much will it cost

ü  who will be using the intranet – eg all staff or specific teams or departments

ü  what will you use it for – eg file storage, collaborative working, bulletin board, etc
what type of documents or databases will it feature.

ü  what content will it hold and who will create, publish and manage it.

ü  Look at your requirements carefully to make sure your investment is worthwhile. It might help to speak to your staff and see which features they would find most useful in an intranet.

Technical considerations for intranets

ü  Once you define the functionality you want, look at the technical aspects of developing an intranet. Think about things like:

ü  how will it look and what templates will need to be devised.

ü  what content management system will you use.

ü  what other applications it needs to support.

ü  what security precautions need to be in place.

how much bandwidth you will need
The biggest consideration will be whether to create and host your intranet in-house or go with an alternative solution, such as cloud hosting, external hosting, or 'pay as you go' and commissioning solutions.

BENEFITS OF INTRANET

If implemented successfully, an intranet can bring many benefits to your business. Some of the main advantages of an intranet are:

Better internal communications - intranets can act as communication hubs for staff. Corporate information such as memos, staff news and announcements can be stored centrally and accessed at any time.

Sharing of resources and best practice - a virtual workspace and community can be created to facilitate information storing, sharing and collaborative working. An intranet can also act as a training platform when providing online training content to staff.

Improved customer service - better access to accurate and consistent information by your staff can lead to enhanced levels of customer service.

Business efficiency and intranets
Your business' efficiency can be improved by using your intranet for:

publishing - delivering information and business news as directories and web documents.

document management - viewing, printing and working collaboratively on office documents such as spreadsheets or databases.

training - accessing and delivering various types of e-learning to the user's desktop.

workflow - automating a range of administrative processes, including dealing with holiday requests, staff performance reviews and appraisals, meeting room and equipment booking, etc.

front-end to corporate systems - providing a common interface to corporate databases and business information systems.