Company Intranets Keep Employees on the Same Page

Adapted from original article by Mie-Yun Lee

If you want to share a document company-wide, do you e-mail it to everyone? Perhaps you make dozens of paper copies instead, giving one to each employee and filing the extras away. Or maybe you save a master in one of the various shared directories on your company network and hope that people will be able to find it.

As your business grows, you'll need to find a more efficient way to share data. Your employees should have one-stop access to company information such as HR forms, internal job postings, project time lines and contact databases. If you don't want workers to have to follow a breadcrumb trail of e-mail attachments, bulging paper files or folders strewn around the company server, you need an intranet.

An intranet is a Web site that can be accessed only by authorized people. It can provide a central location for corporate information you want to keep internal. Most importantly, its HTML interface can organize documents, create context and enable interactive elements like bulletin boards and feedback forms.

While an intranet's pages look similar to those of a typical Web site, you don't need Internet access to have an intranet. Your internal site can be stored entirely on your own servers.

You can set up and maintain an intranet yourself or hire a consultant to show you how. You'll need a server (or a PC configured with server software) and intranet software (off the shelf). And maintenance can be a cinch -- updating a simple intranet is easy if you know basic HTML. Some expansion software allows complex tools like group calendaring, databases, and bulletin boards as well.

If you require a highly customized intranet, however, you may need to hire an IT person. If you don't have the resources for a full-time IT person or to develop and maintain an intranet on your own servers, a good alternative is to outsource. Finding a Web-based solution is cheapest, as long as you have reliable Internet access.

An online solution can offer an "instant intranet" with online storage, document management, contact directories, discussion boards, announcements and polls.

Establishing a central information center early on will avoid a communication breakdown as you grow. An intranet can help you keep all your employees on the same page.