Know-How Exchange : Other

Hi Ketty

The content and structure of an intranet is really down to the individual company and its culture. The shape that it takes depends on what your goals are. We’ve seen companies do it “Because it looked like a good idea” and the result has been anything from an indifferent offering, through to kids playing in the sweetshop and all the way to a security and legal nightmare.

Typically an Intranet is used for a number of key purposes, but you are the one to decide which they should be. They include:

Dissemination of up to date management information

Dialogue and discussion – often through notice boards or discussion groups (The former is a free-hand place to post things, the latter is more structured where issues and questions can be raised and a thread from the subsequent dialogue can be followed.)

Motivation – an area where managers can seek to motivate staff or peer group motivation.

Training issues and access to training resources

Secure areas where limited access to company data is made available – for example, sales figures, dynamically linked to the intranet from the CRM system. Maximizer Enterprise CRM comes with its own mini-intranet, so this point is stood on its head!!

Fun areas and staff association or social activities


There are many more items which can be included but they really do depend on the views of the top management. If the chairman or CEO doesn’t buy into the idea, forget it. If the board don’t like comments which can be construed as critical, don’t go for discussion areas. If the intranet is to be used for discussion and has areas of open access, it is wise to nominate someone as a moderator. Apart from the obvious legal implications of posting things which are defamatory or racist, they also have the opportunity to rescue the career of someone who has had one too many at lunch time!

Security is a big issue on an intranet – both the IT level security and data security. An intranet server can have massive administrator level rights and any weakness over the intranet can allow someone with malicious intent to circumvent all your usual network security.

Then there is the security of sensitive information which is presented on the browser for internal consumption. An example of this is a posting on the notice board asking for comment on a rumoured deal or take-over. Within seconds the information is all over your company and despite the technical safeguards you can build in to prevent people printing or emailing the intranet content there are dozens of ways round them. You should contact an independent, registered and qualified security consultant to advise on this aspect.

The intranet can facilitate group working but in general it is wise to use additional tools with a better level of security built in. If you want to collaborate in a large organisation or between geographically distant offices, you should add to the infrastructure a VPN and some secure collaborative software such as Groove.

Intranets can be of great benefit to a company, especially when they combined with or facilitate the use of other software tools.

One last point – unlike your website, certain areas of the content of your intranet needs to be very dynamic – not just those areas which link to live data in other applications, but the stories and management information areas. Postings from the board of directors, which don’t change for months will convey the impression that little is happening and it will sap morale. The implication implicit in this is that keeping the damned thing up to date is going to consume a lot of someone’s time, so you’ll need to build a cost / benefit justification for implementing an intranet.

Hope that this helps


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions