What is Intranet?
An Intranet is a communication platform with features that aids productivity and collaboration. Intranets are used in a variety of ways such as Employee Portals, Customers Relationship Management, knowledge management, Suppliers Portal, Project Management, Human Resource System, Inventory, E-Learning and almost every type of business application.
What an Intranet Portal can do for your business?
Robust Document Management: An Intranet can eliminate the use of Paper in your business. This can help you cut down the cost of consumables such as Printer ink and paper. It will also save your printing equipment from depreciating, and thereby reduce carbon emission and increase your green footprint.
Communication & Collaboration: With an Intranet, employees can share documents, ideas and other forms of content seamlessly. Staff do not need to look for one file over and over again but only need to check the Intranet for the most updated version. This eliminates routine task and duplication thereby saving time and resources while keeping your workforce connected.
Automate Business Processes/ Workflow: An intranet makes your workflow more efficient, HR functions such as leave request and financial requisitions can be made on the Intranet with approvals made almost immediately. This leaves no room for bureaucracy, decision-making is accelerated, time is saved and approvals are instant.
A short story
One of our customers who operated in three rig locations had a traditional process of reporting incidents to the administrative base daily. The different rigs usually made incident reports of accidents, violence, downtime etc to the Quality, Health & Safety department. The reports were usually entered on an observation card, The cards were choppered to the base after the report had been sent via email. This method was costing the company time and money, secondly, the reports were not properly catalogued for easy reference. Tracking an incident was cumbersome and old Observation cards kept stacking up.
We deployed an Intranet Portal for them with electronic version of the Observation card. This way the Quality and Safety department were able to view incidents by date, type and levels. The company now take on-the-minute decisions on incidents as they occur. Since reports were made immediately they occurred and not a once-a-day.
Top 5 Social Intranets for a Digital Workplace
1. Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a robust system suitable for small and growing businesses. It is much more than your typical Intranet Solution, call it a business productivity software. Bitrix24 is an enterprise-level solution that comes with a Customer Relationship Management module and Video conferencing right out of the box. Other exceptional features include an extranet, quotes, invoice, Telephony, Clock in/out, Google docs/Microsoft online document editing, email integration, helpdesk/ticketing, elearning and is capped with a mobile app for both android and ios. These are not all the features but what makes it stand out for business looking to get every value from their Internet.
Cons – Lack of customisation capabilities, Some users may find interface customisation quite technical.
2. Interact Intranet
Interact Intranet is described as the intelligent Intranet, this is because of its super search feature. Its core strength is forms and Workflow, communication and collaboration. Interact also has great personalisation features
, each user can customise his/her page layout.
Cons – Document Management is not robust enough for certain businesses.
3. Claromentris
Claromentis is just right for mid-sized Companies. It has a rich set of features that makes it quite a competition. Claromentris has five modules that make up its Digital Workplace solution. These are the Intranet component, Business Process Management, Learning, Project Management and Extranet portal. Clarometris is ISO 9001which means quality certified.
4. Communifire
Communifire is a communication and Collaboration king developed by Axero Solutions. Social Intranet with core in Team Collaboration, Knowledge management and internal communications. Communifire is also very good for managing customers and other external relations. It features a Case Tracker that can be used to manage issues, bugs, support, etc.
Cons – Business Process Management may not be satisfactory to certain customers.
5. Precurio
Precurio is for small businesses with a low budget. The offering is quite basic, Precurio has a Document Manager, Activity Stream and Workflow system. It is just right for small companies. It is quite simple and affordable. The pricing for Cloud and on-premise is the same which starts at $700 for 50 users.
Cons – Lacking in features.
What Intranet solution works for You?
An Intranet can do wonders for businesses of all levels. A great intranet can drive performance, keep employees motivated, cut cost, increase process efficiency and build a new corporate culture for a company.
Why Techpoint should be your chosen Partner
Techpoint is a technology company focused on providing tools, strategy & services that drive collaboration & Productivity for businesses. Our Job is to make your business run faster, cut operation cost and keep your employees productively engaged. Call us on +234.803.590.3500 or email hello@techpoint.com.ng to schedule a presentation. You can even request for a price quote here.
Hi Owen,
Thanks for including Precurio in your review.
You are absolutely spot on – our solution will be considered “basic” for IT Managers in the big enterprise, however to such customers our value proposition to them is flexibility – an open platform they can build on and leverage for custom solutions.
As an out of the box solution, our customers are mostly in the small enterprise segment (100 – 300 employees); where the stakeholders want something very simple, affordable, but robust enough to achieve the basic things well. Their requirements revolve mostly around content management, content sharing and collaboration.
Hello Mayor,
I totally agree with you. Precurio has its demographics and its perfect for small business who dont have a large budget or complex IT department. Hope to do a review on Precurio very soon. Thanks for your comment.
Those intranet solutions you lined up there are really great ones. However just recently I found out about http://www.simpplr.com/ that did work great for me!! RALLY GREAT!
Hi Owen,
thanks for this great article!
Could you please tell me the criteria of the decision process leading to this Top 5 list? Thanks in advance!
Warm Regards,
Eri