Part 6: Your Online Presence: Your Company’s Intranet

This is part 6 in our 6 part series—Your Online Presence. This is series of guest posts for Carrera & Company.

For our last article in this series we’ll be focusing on your company’s intranet. An intranet is an internal network that a company uses to share information and to keep a repository of information.

Whether your company is a small two person shop or a large corporation with multiple locations you can benefit from creating and maintaining an intranet. The complexity of your intranet should match the size of your company.

Small Businesses — 2-50 people

In a small business the most important aspects of an intranet is storage and collaboration on documents. For this we recommend Google Apps for Business.

Once this is installed you can manage rights and permissions (as well as email accounts and user groups) for all employees. You will have access to Documents (for word processing), Spreadsheets and Presentations. You can set up folders for different categories, like “Operations” and document different procedures in there. Multiple people can work on a document simultaneously and everyone can control their own document management (like sorting, hiding and marking frequently used documents with a star). Google Apps for Business is free for up to 50 users.

Mid-to-Large Business — 50+ people

If you need a more robust and controlled intranet you are looking at an enterprise solution—good open source solutions are Confluence and Drupal (completely customizable to your company’s needs, look and feel). Microsoft Sharepoint is another intranet solution. These systems organize and present your information in a more traditional way—with pages for departments, events, operations, etc. You can include bulletin board systems, document management and a host of other items. Enterprise level intranets are only limited by your desire and budget and can be a vital way to keep employees—veterans and new hires —informed on current events and past knowledge.

Building an Intranet

Whether you have a small or large business your intranet should include:

• Operational Procedures
• Vendor Lists
• Logos (in formats for printing, putting on the web and a style guide that outlines usage)
• Project Documentation
• List of Holidays or other days your office is closed
• Latest News for your company and industry
• Any other piece of information that needs to be shared and stored with multiple people in multiple locations

We’d like to thank Laura Carrera for allowing us to guest publish this series on Your Online Presence. We hope you’ve found these articles informative and timely.  If you missed the any article in this series you can see it here: Your Online Presence

For questions, comments or to work with us to create an intranet for your company please contact Sawaya Consulting. SAWAYA Consulting is a strategic business-to-business partner focusing on information management through design & technology. We build corporate tools, informational websites, and web applications.We are located in Salt Lake City, Utah and online at www.sawayaconsulting.com.