Does Your Social Intranet Software Have What It Takes?

Whether you already have your intranet in place, or you’re just in the planning stages, you need to know how smart your intranet software is. If you have definite goals for productivity and ROI, you need to be sure that your intranet software can handle the job.

You can tell you have smart intranet software if it has the following characteristics:

Dynamic and Informative Home Page – Just like your website’s home page, it helps if your intranet home page is dynamic and informative. Visitors to your website decide whether to visit other parts of your site based on the information they find on the home page. Your intranet home page is very similar. Intranet users have an easier time navigating if the home page makes the most frequently needed information easily available. Intranet software that allows you to design a dynamic home page allows you to make sure it is always easy to use.
Content Management – Content management is one of the main functions of your intranet. Good intranet software must have powerful content management tools. Your content creators have to be able to easily upload and organize documents and content and users have to be able to find what they need without difficulty.
Page Management – Unless you actually employ web designers, you can’t expect your employees to create attractive and useful pages with complicated software. Your intranet software needs to make page management simple.
Integration with Office software – It makes no sense to have intranet software that doesn’t integrate with your office software. It is vital that your intranet software be easily integrated with your office software. For most businesses, this will be Microsoft office. Easy integration with the software you use makes it easier to accomplish your goals for establishing your intranet, specifically sharing ideas and content.
Polls – While not as critical as some of the other characteristics, ability to utilize polls can be quite helpful. When it comes to getting your finger on the pulse of your company, there are few better tools than polls. But polls can be complicated. Distributing and collecting forms and counting the results is tedious. Asking employees to complete a web-based poll is unreliable. Intranet software that lets you improve your response rate and make it easy to tally results.
Groups – Intranet software that lets you set up groups for your employees. Your employees are already divided into groups based on their jobs. Smart intranet software allows you to create a place specifically for each group so your employees have a place to get together and share tips, tricks and information.
Themes – Allowing your users to personalize their space on the intranet is fun, but more than that, it gives users a feeling of being connected to their space. Studies show that users who are able to personalize their digital space are more likely to use it and use it more efficiently.