Intranet has grown beyond to serve the purpose of solving both the social and collaborative work needs of the employees. Corporates now feel it very difficult to bring-in complete attention and involvement of the employees to the intranet portal.
Legacy systems like Lotus Notes, IBM Connections, GSuite, Orgsync etc didn’t grow up along with the social needs of the Organization which resulted in a decrease in the adaption rate of the intranet. Below are some of the features in which SharePoint stands ahead of other intranet options available in the market.
Well-balanced formal & informal collaboration
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Most of the organizations reflect a tendency to assume that SharePoint intranets are for establishing formal collaboration amongst employees. This ideology has resulted in the employees moving towards third-party tools to discuss over some corporate announcements or any innovative idea for the organization growth. In a well-balanced intranet, employees will have a place to establish both formal and informal collaboration with the following advantages:
- Employees need not switch between applications for a different purpose. Thus, saving time, which will reflect in increased productivity
- Employees will have references and discussion point available at one solution/place
- Employees will manage their work activities within the intranet, thus reducing the risk of sensitive data shared through some insecure environment
Attract rare visitors
The most important challenge, which an Intranet face is, having set of users who don’t use it properly due to various reasons like lack of training, fear of security of their documents, intranet not solving their needs etc.
For example, a finance team member will be interested in looking at the share growth of the organization. So, it is important for the finance team’s dashboard to have a widget showing the latest update of the shares from the stock market. Understanding the external dependencies of the employees and trying to have a provision within SharePoint will help in attracting the rare visitors. You can even monitor these rare visitors and conduct a session to know their dependencies better.
SharePoint is not just a CMS, it is much more
Many times SharePoint is not used completely leveraging its full potential. According to a recent survey, SharePoint in most of the current deployment is been used for document management, project management for some teams with few collaborative sites.
The best practice to be followed is to take a list of all intranet applications, updates followed by employees and mapping them against your available intranet features.
Have an interactive SharePoint
The corporate are often successful in creating an intranet with business-specific features. It tends to be powerful but often doesn’t attract users and end up being boring.
Working on your corporate SharePoint intranet and adding some captive social features will keep your users engaged. This is a direct way to attract users thus resulting in higher user adoption and loyalty.
