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Make the Transition to a Paperless Office: The Intranet Solution

Intranets are like websites that serve a business internally. An Intranet might be accessed on a local business web server, or linked from the publicly visible website hosted on a remote server. An Intranet’s purpose is to transition most of the paper based processes to a secure web-based environment. An intuitive Intranet solution can be an awesome time-saver and an office productivity multiplier in the sense that all of your business processes can be found and executed easily and uniformly.

Intranet Benefits for Business

• Save money by using less paper – Having an Intranet brings you a few steps closer to the realisation of a paperless office. Like what the email did to largely replace snail mail, transferring your paper based processes to a company Intranet can save huge amounts of paper (and printing costs) by making your documents available for download internally by your staff. It hardly needs stating these days the importance of saving paper to businesses that want to be environmentally sustainable. With all this talk of an emerging carbon economy being thrust upon us, factoring in the effect of an Intranet based office system on your carbon footprint may bring big financial benefits in the future.

• Save Time Finding Things – As they say, time is money and many of the typical components of an Intranet are designed to save time. For example, a search facility can help your staff find what they are looking for quickly. A well laid out Intranet will also be easy to navigate and your sections and categories well organised. If the information is properly organised, finding things electronically can be much, much easier than going through a filing cabinet or a stack of paper.

• Limit Access to what employees see – You can safely limit what sections of an Intranet certain groups of employees can see. This serves several purposes; keep departmental documents, processes and other content separate from other departments or divisions of the business where the information is not relevant, the information is sensitive and restricted within the company, the information is under review and not ready to be disseminated across the company.

• Virtualise Your Office – Do you have multiple office locations? Have employees on the road or working from home? A robust Intranet can make collaboration and oversight throughout the enterprise much more productive and manageable when employees can connect securely over the Internet.

• Accommodate For Business Growth – By taking your business processes and putting them in an Intranet environment, your business is better able to accommodate growth than a paper based office.

Intranet Feature Examples

Here are just some of the types of paper-based processes that can be replaced by having a company Intranet in place:

• Employee Manuals – having all job positions documented and easily accessible electronically ensures that not only is an employee informed about their own position and who to report to, but also that of all other positions within the company organisation. You may also want to present a company hierarchy flow chart to further inform your employees.

• Company Policies and Documents – It is important to make everyone in your business aware of your company policies so that they can be followed. On paper, policies can be formidable to navigate. A lot of paper, as well as reading time, can be saved by adding your policies to your Intranet.

• Telephone/Email Directory – Have all contact details within your business listed and searchable within an easy online format.

• Employee Surveys – Put a new policy to the vote or get feedback with Intranet hosted surveys.

• Newsletters – Use your company Intranet to manage and distribute newsletters both internally and externally.

• New Employee Training – There is a lot of scope for deploying training programs from simple text or video-based tutorials to fully interactive training and testing environments.

• Personalised Home Pages for Employees – An Intranet can allow for personalisation of the workspace, giving your employees the opportunity to change the layout, colour scheme or other aspects that you allow to be personalised to their taste.

• Online Calendars – calendars can be used within an Intranet environment for a variety of purposes; tracking daily activities, coordinating meetings and setting appointments to name a few.

• Meeting Minutes – Posting meeting minutes and making them available within your Intranet can be very useful for staff collaboration. You can also allow, for example, comments to be posted about meeting minutes from those not present at the meeting for additional input.

• Employee Forms – Submitting sick leave and holiday leave forms within an Intranet environment is far easier than fronting up to admin to fill out a sheet of paper. You can also ensure that the form is completed properly by making the essential fields of your form mandatory, meaning that the form cannot be successfully submitted without completing them in the correct format.

• Internal Instant Messaging – A useful feature for instant communication between employees without the security risks associated with external IMs like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or ICQ. An Intranet based IM also means that employees are not wasting company time communicating with non-employees.

Flexible Intranet Solutions

There are really not a lot of limits to what your company Intranet can do for your business. Your Intranet can be as simple as a company document repository or it can be the complete nerve centre of your internal business processes. You can even open parts of your intranet to external suppliers and clients so that they can interact with your customer service or other relevant staff.

A robust Intranet design can be flexible so that more features can be added as required and the level of sophistication is adaptable to your budget and other requirements.

I Want An Intranet Solution. Where Do I Start?

When looking for an Intranet solution, you should be looking first of all for flexibility. Your Intranet provider needs to listen to what you actually want to accomplish by having one so that your requirements are understood. They should offer features that will make your business processes easier and be able to adapt their Intranet solution to your specific needs. The solution should reflect your company branding and be customised appropriately, not look like its straight out of the box sporting third party logos. Your Intranet also needs to be future proof with the ability to expand the platform to incorporate new features as they become needed.

If your business could benefit from implementing an Intranet solution, AWD can provide a completely customised Intranet architecture to suit your specific needs that is robust and secure. Our highly experienced Intranet developers consult closely with you to ensure that your business is best served from its implementation.

Check out our Intranet Design Services page for more information