Benefits of intranets and extranets

Intranets are extremely useful as a business tool. Few of the key intranet benefits include:

• Better internal communications - intranets can act as communication hubs for staff. You can store corporate information such as memos, staff news and announcements centrally and access it at any time.
• Sharing of resources and best practices - you can create a virtual workspace and community to facilitate information storing, sharing and collaborative working. An intranet can also act as a training platform when providing online training content to staff.
• Improved customer service - better access to accurate and consistent information by your staff can lead to enhanced levels of customer service.

Advantages of intranet for business efficiency

You can improve your business' efficiency by using the intranet for:

• publishing - delivering information and business news as directories and web documents
• document management - viewing, printing and working collaboratively on office documents such as spreadsheets or databases
• training - accessing and delivering various types of e-learning to the user's desktop
• workflow - automating a range of administrative processes, including dealing with holiday requests, staff performance reviews and appraisals, meeting room and equipment booking, etc
• front-end to corporate systems - providing a common interface to corporate databases and business information systems
• email - integrating intranet content with email services so that information can be distributed effectively

It is a good idea to give your intranet a different image and structure from your customer-facing website. This will help to give your internal communications their own identity and prevent employees from confusing internal and external information.

See how to set up a company intranet.