Is the intranet still relevant?

Start researching and reading up on intranets today and you'll find so many blogs discussing intranets, many of them leaving you in confusion. Some authors talk of “social Intranets”, others value the term “digital workplace” while some suggest that the intranet is dead. But is it really? We're going to look at why the intranet has changed so much in recent years, and is now more relevant than ever.

In the past, a company deciding to create an intranet had to invest thousands of dollars customising a good looking “digital portal” to achieve the following things:

- Communicate relevant information to employees
- Improve collaboration between teams
- Search for resources within the organisation

Regardless of the company, the objectives were always the same. So why engage an IT consultancy to build a custom intranet that was not only extremely expensive, but also had a number of problems such as lack of responsiveness, limited integration with other IT systems, and complicated or restricted content management and administration.

Many companies were finding these intranet systems were going out of date through lack of user adoption and content update. Well, what's changed?

Intranet-in-a-box, built on Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into making Office 365 this thing we call the “digital workplace”. In a nutshell, it’s a place where communication tools (like Teams, Yammer, Outlook) and productivity tools (such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and Word/Excel/PPT), are all accessible in a single place. It’s a place where users can get work done in a smooth, efficient and organic way, because they shouldn’t have to go through complex processes to do so.

Intranet-in-a-box solutions, like OneSpace, are built specifically on the Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint platforms, so you can leverage all this functionality at a fraction of the cost of a traditional custom built intranet, and still have the flexibility to customise it to suit your own corporate branding and organisational goals. With all this in one place, driving user adoption and engagement, the intranet solutions of today are more relevant than ever; helping workers find, share and collaborate to increase efficiency in the workplace.

Read more on the features of a OneSpace intranet to discover how it could improve your teams productivity and positively impact your bottom line.