Top Reasons Why Companies Decide to Develop Their Corporate Site Using SharePoint

In today’s world of Social in the Enterprise, the corporate intranet needs to be much more than a means of communicating information or line-of-business applications and documents to employees. Without a strategy from the outset to provide organic intranets that change and adapt to the users interacting with it, the only possible outcome is a static corporate intranet. You see, your corporate intranet can only become successful by designing an expectation setting homepage that prompts users to click through to content. According to Nigel Williams, “An ugly intranet homepage is hard to love.” A statement that echoes well with the common phenomena around first impressions.

SharePoint allows organizations to develop corporate intranets where employees can find relevant content and engage in open communication, empowering a more productive workforce. In this post, we will explore some SharePoint features capable of transforming your static intranet into one which is search-driven, interactive and organic.

Networked Workforce

Intranets have transitioned into a social and collaborative platform but unfortunately ownership and decisions on intranet design and development often fail to involve employees. So here are two reasons for consulting with end users:

• An organization’s employees are the subject matter experts on social and collaboration; they spend their days carrying out social, peer-to-peer and read/write activities in various forms.

• The rapid growth in social media and digital communication devices has exposed employees to numerous digital devices and services readily available in the open market, a phenomenon known as the consumerization of IT.

Today, organizations have the opportunity to tap into employee expertise by first acknowledging and accommodating their existing digital, social and collaboration knowledge then assimilating this to create a technology enabled location and device independent digital workspace. Employee activity forms the organic part of the intranet; a place for organizational learning, knowledge management, collaboration and employee self-service, enabling a networked workforce with your intranet as the heartbeat of your networked future as an organization. SharePoint has been designed to help you achieve this type of intranet easily because your employees do not need any special technical or developer skills to leverage the powerful features of the product.

Content Management

Content management systems must be able to manage many different types of content in contrast with a specialized system for managing a specific type of content. SharePoint offers features for managing unauthorized access, changes and deletion of content on the intranet, while also allowing for the content to be created, edited, reviewed, approved and published in a controllable fashion. We mentioned earlier how intranets need to be organic - SharePoint guarantees just this through the excellent data storage and expansion capabilities it offers. When combined with locations for organizing content and allocating space in an optimum way, this is a really powerful option.

Search

The era of corporate intranets designed as traditional internal communications platforms has come to its natural demise because users increasingly need quick ways of accessing the right information at the right time. In today’s world of information overload, SharePoint features enable the user to gain access to relevant content either through basic search, continuous crawl or content search.

Content can now be driven by search queries, search results can be refined easily and content built outside the intranet can be pulled in to be displayed according to the user’s interests. SharePoint intranets enable the organization to empower its employees to easily find, interact and take action from content delivered through effective search functions available, exterminating the static intranet.

Portals

SharePoint dominates the enterprise portal solutions marketplace, providing well designed and highly functional intranet portals that form the information and workflow hub of the intelligent modern enterprise. Available as an out-of-the-box experience for SharePoint customers, intranet users can benefit from machine learning and content curation features, increasing the potential for relevant and personalized content experiences. Microsoft has opted to offer SharePoint customers the chance to use more and build less, increasing their chances of achieving value on instant deployment.

For example, the new ‘People Portal’ has been designed to give the SharePoint intranet a who-is-who feature with a similar experience to ‘the corporate Facebook’; allowing employees to view people and people-search in a whole new way.

Sustainability

Using SharePoint as a platform for developing the corporate intranet is highly attractive, especially because of Microsoft’s approach to its customers – introducing ‘The New Universe of Findability and Discoverability’. Microsoft is focused on enabling enterprises to focus on empowering staff to be more productive and efficient rather than spending time and effort extending the usability of their SharePoint intranet.

Building on a foundation focused on helping end users connect easily to content and expertise through engaging user interfaces, Microsoft uses roadmaps, communities and working groups to equip power users within the organization to provision efficient services for end users.

Have you already tried Infragistics SharePlus, an industry-leading native mobile SharePoint solution that keeps your teams productive on the go? Sign up for a SharePlus Enterprise demo today.