Why You Should Make the Shift from Your Old Intranet
Intranet is in the heart of many mid and large scale enterprises till date. Intranet portals helped the organisations manage applications, collaborations, data and information through the customised way for more than a decade now. The amazing solution with secure, restricted and cost effective solutions work as repository, applications portal, a search engine within the organisation, content creation and many more. Intranet Portals are web-based tool, that is, a customised interface that dynamically pulls all information from servers into a single page within the organisation.
However, in today’s rapidly changing environment and technology growth or changes, it is very common to see the things becoming outdated at a speed of fire. Do you experience the less employee engagement in your once overcrowded intranet portal or do you see the repositories do not get updated or hold documents anymore which we once used regularly? This is the time to rethink about your old intranet portal.
Reasons Your Old Intranet Portals Fail
Technology is evolving at its fastest rate. New methods are arriving daily in the online landscape. These methods or technologies not only refines the way how we work but also makes the old technologies look degraded and vulnerable. So, if you are yet working with the old intranet portal software, it may have many drawbacks for you, your employees and your business. Have you ever thought about the reasons of failure of old intranet portal? Why it can’t match up your current requirements? If not, just do it today.
Here are the common issues that make our once popular intranet portals outdated these days:
1. Unable to Adapt Changes:
With today’s highly increase internet usage, information availability and increased the productivity of the workforce, your intranet portal is unable to adapt the changes with the time. As a result, employees do not find it relevant to use the system for their day to day activities anymore.
Intranet portals that were developed previously had a simple presentation layer and focused on gateway concepts. But time has changed now. With increasing demand of peer to peer collaboration, flooded information, content raising like wikis, tags etc., it really takes a lot to maintain and manage your intranet portal that increases costs.
2. Not Easy To Find Information shared:
While working on a project, employees open the menu items with specific requirements in mind. If they are not able to locate their desired result, they will hit the search button right away. But searching the whole system does not solve the purpose of having a menu and it doesn’t help them understand the directory structure and where it is located.
Also, the information shared by the peers should be easily found within the system by the team members. If your portal does not have a project or department specific smart search option, employees will get puzzled to find right piece of information among the information jungle.
3. Not Able to Automate The Business Processes:
Businesses are driven by workflows. Workflow is a series of actions, tasks, involvement of groups or departments to complete a task. Workflow processes involve data entry, forms, signoff, handoff of documents, customer and vendor communications, approvals, order processing, invoicing etc. With these huge number of steps involved, processes are becoming complex and paper-based processes are becoming more prone to human error.
If your intranet systems and workflow tools is unable to work together to automate these processes to meet the demand of your organisation, departments will be discouraged to use such an outdated and tedious paper-based processes.
4. Mobility is Not Considered:
This is an era of wireless communication. Desktops are not the only device that is considered in workplaces. With the increased usage of different mobile devices, all kind of wireless devices are in use in the office infrastructure.
Your intranet device should support wireless infrastructure too. If it does not, then the whole system cannot be used by teams with diverse teams. Moreover, data within the intranet portal should be accessible 24/7 from anywhere and anytime these days.
Considering the increasing use of mobile devices and their prominence, old intranet portal is just not enough to handle the whole thing. It can’t allow your employees to work from home, it can’t allow you to check the urgent files while travelling, and many more such things. So, do you think it can deliver high efficiency as needed in current scenario? Obviously, not.
5. New Features Added Increases Costs:
New intranet vendors and open source systems are coming up with cool functionalities and features that needed to be added on the top of the core system. That requires a huge number of changes done to the old portal system or act as a ‘patch on’ the top of that system. Maintenance and development of these features comes with increment of costs, price tags and annual maintenance charges.
Also, the infrastructure of an old intranet portal system requires web servers, application servers, database servers, data center, cost of power, employees, administrators etc. Therefore, to invest on any new requirement or change on the top, can be costlier and management can be reluctant to invest too much again and again.
6. Difficult to Track and Implement the New Features:
Approval process for the funding can be lengthy for implementing new features on an old portal for most of the companies. Once approved, after the implementation, some departments are so comfortable with their old system and processes that they take time to track the changes of processes with the new feature, while other departments may adapt the changes sooner. As a result it can be expensive and difficult to move the business forward and leaves the system unused again even after huge investments.
What You’ll Get out of A New Edgy Portal
So, the shift from your old intranet portal is now confirmed from the discussions and debate above. The beautiful thing about going forward towards the new age software portals is to get out of the box design and features in your system. The vendors are becoming creative to develop new systems and the competition is cut-throat to choose the best among many available in market. You can visit Precurio directly for assistance. With our new age technology and system, you can get the unmatched features that suit best for your organisation.
● Document Management and Sharing:
The document sharing has become more flexible with new portal of intranet. Starting from viewing documents on web browser without the need of downloading any document to offering a lot of document formats including PDF, GIF, PNG, JPG etc will encourage your employees use your new portal more and more for document management. Automatic version control, ease of document sharing, access management for user restrictions and provision for comments and discussion enriches your portan like never before.
● Business Process Automation:
Easy workflow automation, feature for customise and build forms according to your needs, user-friendly interface and powerful reporting feature will help you with end to end business process management with ease of use.
There are many tasks like invoice handling, client servicing, resolving, process tracking, and revenue management. All these things are quite cumbersome and time taking when done manually. Collaboration, communication and automation are required to help in this case. Using old intranet portal software can’t help efficiently in it, right?
● Sites for Departments:
You can create segments on the basis of different departments, teams or groups within the company. The benefit of this that user can easily find their relevant information without crawling in the whole system.
● Tools for Peer to Peer Collaboration:
Team collaboration has never been so easy like the new intranet portal. There are collaboration tools like chat messengers, commenting and tagging throughout the system and can be used whenever is needed.
● Mobile Intranet:
There is provision for use of any device on the intranet and can be accessed from anywhere and anytime. There was a problem with the old systems that they were not supportive towards wireless devices like laptops, tablets etc.
The other services and features of the intranet portal include Task Management, event Management, Discussion Forums, Team Rooms, Content Management and much more.
So, are you ready to accept the changed scenario and thus the needs of your organisation? If yes, then here are some points to Remember While Choosing the Best Intranet Portal:
- Provision for customization to suit your requirements
- A great post sale and customer service support
- Should match with your specific industry
- Consider the size of your organisation
- Terms and Conditions for Payments according to your requirements
- Features that match your organisation’s needs
Conclusion
You can plan to move out of your old portal systems to get a new feature rich one that will help your business move forward easily and smoothly. Since the new systems are SAAS based, cloud based and even appliances based, the need of huge investment on infrastructure becomes minimal. Cool and edgy features and services of the appealing new intranet portals are making the systems worth a try.
