Employees, partners, stakeholders, and customers have a crucial role in enterprise success. For their productivity, it’s essential that they can access the right information at the right time, communicate with one another, and streamline business processes.
Thankfully, intranet portals are thriving. They help augment bottom lines and improve service with partners and clients. An intranet portal solution offers numerous benefits to businesses, such as better engagement and customer satisfaction. However, while researching intranet portal development, there are various factors to consider – whether you want to go for an open-source solution or a custom development. An easy communication portal or an intranet portal with an in-depth knowledge base, file, and project management capabilities.
Considering the elements of intranet portal development, we have curated this article. It covers the benefits and the development cost. Here you’ll also learn how to set up an intranet portal and get the most out of it.
What is an Intranet Portal
Intranet portal is a collaborative tool that helps organizations manage data, applications, and other information effectively. They can engage, share ideas, and collectively contribute to company goals. An example of an intranet is a private website that is used exclusively by an airline company to deliver updates to its employees.
While the general purpose of an intranet portal solution is collaboration, you can even integrate different tools and social channels to improve the communication experience—for example, SharePoint intranet from Microsoft Office.
Do you Need to Undergo Intranet Portal Development?
You need a clear picture of your business requirements to decide whether you need an intranet portal or not.
A few questions to ask are:
- Does the existing solution offer an impeccable customer experience?
- Does it allow third-party integrations?
- Are your employees/customers satisfied with the service?
- Is there a lack of communication between teams?
- Do you need a solution that will simplify the business process?
If you’re unsatisfied with your existing solution, you need an intranet solution. Deploy an apt intranet portal solution to enjoy benefits such as improved collaboration and engagement, better productivity, customer satisfaction, business efficiency, document and knowledge management, etc.
Why you Need an Intranet Portal Solution
Communication, collaboration, and information sharing are the key elements to business success and productivity. An intranet portal solution allows you to organize content for departments, categories, teams, etc. It strengthens the inter-team relation, streamlines the business process, and automates manual tasks.
Here’s how:
Benefits of Intranet Portal
Improves Collaboration and Engagement
65 percent of US employees are not engaged at work. The primary reason is the lack of communication or an unorganized system. An intranet portal solution facilitates internal communication avoiding silos and miscommunication. It provides various channels for two-way interaction and helps co-workers to share information with one another effectively.
Intranet helps employees raise queries and get accurate answers to questions. It offers social options like @-mentions, comments, document sharing, notifications, etc. These features enhance communication by pulling the right people at the right time while keeping feedback contextual.
An intranet portal solution allows your teammates to edit and work together on a project in real-time. They can edit documents and task assignments with others to meet deadlines.
Apart from that, you can set up a feedback loop and gain actionable insights. You can conduct surveys and work together with your team to deliver excellence.
Increases Productivity
Online collaboration and digital workspace increases productivity by 30 percent. This productivity increases ROI and thereby saves revenue.
Here’s how an intranet portal solution helps:
It provides your employees a centralized platform from where they can carry out all their activities. They don’t need to switch between different platforms. For example, they can retrieve a customer’s information directly from the portal without switching to CRM. They can get reminders of their upcoming meetings and appointments directly in the portal.
They can share information with other teammates without wasting time on sending emails. Industry-wise announcements, shared posts, trending discussions, and topics in the organization can be viewed on the dashboard.
Streamlines Business Processes
Your company, whether it’s small or big, has a lot of information to store. In most cases, the information is stored across multiple platforms like Google Drive, local storage, email, word documents, etc. An intranet portal solution offers a unified space for all the information, making it easy for the employees to find what they need. It also provides a search feature along with self-service capabilities.
Builds Transparent Culture
87 percent of individuals want to work for a transparent company. An intranet empowers everyone to comment and like, on anything shared within the company, building transparency between execs and employees. Every employee/team across the world can share their pieces, bridging the physical distance of regions and mental distance of culture and values.
When teammates feel empowered to open up with their peers, it helps build strong relationships. This fosters understanding, leads to strong relationships of trust, and empowers employees to provide value to the organization.
Available Anytime, Anywhere
Once your organization builds an intranet portal solution, your employees and execs can log in and access it anytime from any place and on any device. Despite the geographical differences, teams can work together on a project, share ideas, and collaborate in real-time. An intranet bridges all the communication, productivity, and engagement gaps that organizations face in internal operations.
Challenges of Intranet Portal
Although intranet is a great tool for your organization, there are some challenges of using an intranet portal, such as:
Data Security
Collecting data in one place is risky. Besides, you can’t share all data with all employees. Intranet portal development companies ensure that the systems are secure, but that’s not enough. You need to implement firewalls and gateways. Set up defined policies and processes on the use of the intranet portal. Create a code of conduct for users.
To limit the access, ask your provider for a role-based feature.
Overload of Information
Too much information creates chaos. If it’s scattered, it confuses and overwhelms employees and makes it difficult to find the right document or article. The difficulty in finding content may force them to avoid the portal. Without proper categorization and organization of content, your knowledge management is of no use. It’s like having resources and yet not having a single resource.
Time Management and Costs
Another challenge is time and cost. Most intranet providers suggest a quick, ready solution. However, every organization has different challenges. Their goals, purpose, employees’ expectations, and working are different. Hence, you should go for custom development. It takes time, and the cost is higher than ready-made solutions but has numerous long-term benefits such as tech support, flexibility to expand, updates, and more.
While choosing an intranet vendor, ask about their development process, demo, additional services, charges, etc. You can even request a quote before you decide on a portal.
Want to know how we help you with Intranet Portal Development?
How to Set Up an Intranet Portal
An intranet portal set up depends on the benefits you want to harness. Understand your requirements and create a coherent, feature-rich intranet portal solution by following the steps below:
Step 1: Define Business Objectives
Before you build an intranet portal, make sure all the stakeholders are in for the proposal. Build a team of stakeholders who will supervise the solution selection process.
To simplify the selection process, pre-define your business goals and intranet motives. It will help you decide the requirements, features, and technology.
Step 2: Explore User Preferences
Your employees will be using the intranet. Hence, their inputs are essential. They will suggest ideas and help in intranet development. Conduct surveys, ask for feedback, create a pilot group that will act as a mediator between the employees and the development team.
Step 3: Develop Intranet Portal Solution
Reaching this step means you have chosen the solution provider and readied the list of features and requirements. Complete the development process by sharing your ideas with the team, considering their inputs, and undergoing development.
Step 4: Pilot Test, Roll Out, and Measure
Once the solution is ready, ask the pilot group to test it and get the alterations done. After the group is satisfied, launch it in the organization. Make policies for intranet portal usage. Assign responsibilities for handling, content creation, and governance. Measure metrics for success, engagement, analytics, etc. Address the improvements required in the long term.
Key Components of Intranet Portal Solution
While setting up the portal, here are some technical elements that you need to consider.
Custom Development or Off-the-Shelf
An out-of-the-box solution is for companies that don’t need customizations and are comfortable with the solutions and the services offered. However, most companies have unique requirements and thus may require custom solutions considering the security and potential stability.
On-Premise or Cloud-Based
Some companies prefer on-premise storage as they believe it offers better security. However, setting and maintaining it requires a lot of effort, time, and cost. Cloud-based, on the other hand, offers businesses a wide range of services. It saves their time from maintenance and helps save cost.
Customized Functionalities and Integrations
It covers the features and the third-party plugins required in the intranet portal solution—for example, payment types and social channels.
Maintenance and Support
Any intranet portal solution requires constant updates to stay relevant and offer continuous improvements. It should notify you of the system updates before the actual process so that you can plan your business continuity. Also, you will need technical support that helps you in the process. Hence, look for a team that offers tech support.
Apart from this, adoption, training, and technologies are other key components of intranet portal development. A team with extensive knowledge of portal development can guide you properly. If you would like to know more, you can connect with our team.
Costs of Custom Intranet Portal
It depends on various factors such as operations, maintenance, space, setup, and more. To identify the approx cost, you need to consider the total cost of development.
- Infrastructure Cost
Intranet portal will require hosting, maintenance, etc. If you choose on-premise hosting, you may need a physical space for the server. The number of employees also affects the cost.
- Subscription Cost
Though cloud-based solutions cost less than on-premise solutions, the subscription fee will add up to your budget. It depends on the subscription package you choose, the duration of the subscription, and how much your business scales after the subscription.
- Setup Cost
It includes the development cost along with features and additional resources that you add to your solution. The development cost of an intranet portal depends on various factors like the location of the development team, total hours required to develop solutions, technologies, etc.
- Training and Onboarding Cost
Training ensures that your team can utilize intranet portal solutions without any difficulties. For that, you need to train your IT support team so that they can train staff members to raise tickets and find solutions using knowledgebase and reduce the number of request queries. This organization-level training requires time and money.
Hence, the cost of an intranet portal is not just related to the development. It covers the entire cost of ownership, from tech support to company size. Thus, it’s difficult to know the exact cost of an intranet portal solution in one go. The intranet portal development company can give you a rough idea of the development cost in the initial stage. Rest, all the components, you need to figure it out.
Why You Should have CRMJetty as your Development Partner
CRMJetty is a hub of portal solutions. It has a wide range of industry-specific knowledge and experience in developing custom solutions. We believe that every organization is unique and help maintain the uniqueness by developing a portal solution tailored to your business requirements.
Choosing CRMJetty means you get:
- Custom Development: The intranet portal solution will be built from scratch with the technologies, features, and integrations you require. It will be a flexible solution that grows along with your business.
- Rich Features: We provide all the features you and your employees suggest, considering how well they fit in the solution and the market trends. You will also get other trending and futuristic features in your portal.
- Training and Support: After launch, we will provide you with extensive training over the intranet portal solution functioning. You will also get a limited-time free support post-launch.
There’s a lot more we can do for you, and to know that, you can reach us.
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