Bringing Social Media to Your Intranet via Personalization, Customization, & Collaboration

Just because the company Intranet is an internal business entity, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a fun and informative place to visit. But how to create an Intranet that provides usability as well as a few fun things while maintaining a business-like demeanor? This is easily and quickly accomplished using a Content Management System that provides tools for personalization, customization, and collaboration.

Personalization means more than displaying “Hello Bella” when Bellatrix LeStrange logs on to her Intranet. It also means knowing a little bit about Bella and creating an Intranet design based on that knowledge. Bella works in research and development for LIPS Inc., a cosmetics firm based in Canada. As a part of her research, Bella starts each morning reading articles and blogs for about an hour just to get a feel for market trends. This tells us that to personalize Bella’s Intranet experience, we need to provide one or more news feeds that are in sync with her research and development role.

Personalization can take many forms; since Bella is French-Canadian, she will appreciate that her Intranet is available in both French and English. She can use her preferred language, except in those cases where an article or document is not available in her preferred language.

Studies have shown that there are major productivity gains experienced by the enterprise through small and inexpensive tweaks to the Intranet. Bella is no more interested in wading through other people’s online documents than she is in reading other people’s news; a web component which puts her frequently used documents (sometimes referred to as "favorites") right at her fingertips would help her get her job done with ease.

Other customization tweaks, that Bella would enjoy are:

• Quick Links (a way to organize both internal and external URLs) on her own personal web page
• Employee Profile (for updating her bio, picture, etc.)
• Related Documents (a way for Bella to securely store and share documents -- without giving her administrative access to the company's document library)
• Online Calendar

The idea behind collaboration is to make communication and knowledge sharing so much easier. Employees want to use the Intranet in the same way that they use the internet. They would like to use video as a training and communication tool. Imagine being able to create a YouTube style area on your Intranet?

Employees also want to interact with their co-workers both locally and globally via a Message Board or Forum. The more real-time the better as people are impatient with email and don’t have time to talk on the phone. Posting a request on a message board (while in a meeting) and getting the response on their iPhone or Blackberry (while in the same meeting) may actually close a sale or enhance a proposal -- without interrupting the meeting.

Blogs have always been popular at the management level and with the guys in IT; now everyone else is awakening to the power of the Blog as a communication and collaboration tool. Intranets can provide blogs to select employees or all employees (that’s a lot of monitoring and policing though).

Interested in creating a winning Intranet? Point Dynamics offers an affordable Content Management System (CMS) that is fast to deploy and ready to use “out of the box.”  Point Dynamics Enterprise CMS serves the needs of large and small companies with features that are easy to use; it can be installed “on-premises” and is also available “on-demand.” We would love to hear from you…find us on Facebook and Twitter. Join the conversation and see what others are saying about Point Dynamics.