As an Intranet Manager you may not have the ability to quickly change the intranet functionality available to you however it is a crucial part to the effectiveness of your intranet. Within this blog we’ve listed 8 of the ideas that intranet managers from many different organisations shared with us and that they felt were important. To get the full list of intranet functionality suggestions as well as other ideas to deliver an effective intranet, download our free guide on how to manage your intranet.
1) People search
An intranet is all about connecting people and sharing information. Any successful intranet needs to have an easy to use people search, which returns a completed individual profile highlighting roles and responsibilities and a getting to know you area, where the reader can find out more about their colleague’s outside interests.
2) Resource booking
It’s common intranet functionality to enable colleagues to shared resources, traditionally these are simply rooms and equipment. Resources should be expanded to enable colleagues to book anything. For example if a colleague wanted to hire a dog walker, anyone that enjoyed walking dogs should be flagged as potential helpers.
3) Application link
An effective intranet should include links to other applications, making the intranet THE place colleagues go to.
4) Team spaces
Creating an engaging intranet means reflecting the changing way colleagues are working. Today, project based working and sharing information are important aspects of people’s roles. The intranet functionality needs to reflect this by creating areas where colleagues can share information with others in a project team or wider and have the ability to comment on this information.
5) News/announcements
The perfect intranet functionality would remove the email culture of most organisations. A great way of achieving this would be through publishing all company news and announcements to the intranet.
6) Contribution from mobile, anytime, anywhere
The ability to produce content and upload from any device is must have for engaging colleagues and encouraging content contribution. Mobile working is now seen as intranet functionality that staff are beginning to expect.
7) Add media without using the media library
Following on from written content, great intranets enable everyone to be able to select media without having to use the official media library for certain types of content, such as microblogs. It saves time and encourages participation as the contributor can take and use their own photos and video.
8) More visual content
Enabling colleagues to create more visually led content would help end users engage with the content more.
Creating engaging intranet functionality means reflecting the changing way colleagues are working. Today, project based working and sharing information are important aspects of people’s roles. Intranet functionality needs to reflect this by creating areas where colleagues can share information with others in a project team and have the ability to comment on this information.
If you are considering how intranet functionality can impact your intranet, take a look at the full list of suggestions from the intranet managers that contributed to our discussion. You can read what they said by downloading our guide.
