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The Essential Intranet Guide With 80+ Resources

Your intranet is the engine driving your internal communications; it needs to be running smoothly for collaboration and innovation to truly succeed.

But where do you even begin when planning, deploying and measuring a successful intranet?

To help, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide compiling over 80 resources – right here for your easy reference! Here’s all you need to know about intranet meaning, design, strategy, collaboration, intranet best practices and much more.

Understanding Intranet Software

An intranet enables you to securely connect your workforce to the organisation, to resources and to each other - no matter where they're working from and what device they're using.

First, let’s explore the corporate intranet definition and what role online intranet software plays in an organisation with these blog posts.

The benefits of using a company intranet

Understanding the true potential of an intranet can help you find the right modern and secure intranet software. So what are the advantages of an intranet for your workplace?

And what are the benefits of an intranet that uses intranet cloud storage as opposed to an on-premise solution? Agility, accessibility and scalability will be some of the most appealing advantages of cloud based intranet, for small business and right up to the multi-national level.

The Advantages of a Cloud-Based Intranet Solution

Trends and traps

It’s worth exploring some of the relevant corporate intranet trends of 2024 to know the modern features that teams have come to love and expect. Of course – it’s just as important to know what not to do when building a corporate intranet, so you can avoid the common pitfalls!

Knowing your corporate intranet requirements

Step one in any intranet improvement project will be understanding the exact functions and features your organisation needs for its new corporate intranet design. Here are several resources to get started when building better intranet solutions.

Supporting a distributed workforce

COVID-19 and remote work expectations have transformed the way many workplaces keep productive. Enter the digital workspace: the single best way to support a dynamic, mobile and distributed workforce.

Elcom Mobile App - Apple Store Preview Image

Planning a mobile intranet

A mobile-friendly intranet will be a requirement for almost every modern business. It’s crucial to consider whether your choice of intranet development software will support the key mobile intranet trends and features your organisation may require.

You can also take this further and bring the intranet experience into a dedicated mobile app. This enables you to deliver push notifications, real-time news and other benefits into the hands of your audience.

Elcom Mobile App

Improving your employee experience

Employee retention and productivity can both hinge around a positive employee experience. Equip employees with a great intranet, and you’ll be equipping them with the tools to stay engaged, productive, collaborative and connected within their workplace. Here’s more on how your intranet can support your employee experience.

How to Drive an Exceptional Employee Experience with Your Intranet
+ Bonus Employee Experience Worksheet
Employee Retention & Intranets: The Key to Keeping Turnover Low
How to Boost Employee Experience During a Crisis with an Intranet

How to optimise internal communications

An intranet communications plan or strategy will also be essential to help the whole team stay updated on the organisation’s goals and initiatives. Here are some posts to ensure clarity when using an intranet for internal communications.

Building an intranet business case

It might be clear that your organisation needs a new intranet, but how do you get buy-in from all stakeholders? An intranet business case helps you demonstrate the real value to the organisation – and satisfy even the number-crunchers!

Check out this detailed guide and checklist on building a persuasive business case, including productivity statistics to include.

6 Step Guide for a Compelling Intranet Business Case [Free Guide]

Choosing your intranet CMS software and provider

Your content management system, or CMS, is how you’ll update and manage your intranet. What should someone consider when choosing the right intranet CMS software? Think about future needs as well as current requirements, and plan for an organisation-wide digital transformation.

Why Your Business Needs an Enterprise Intranet

As you begin to research online intranet software and their providers, consider each provider’s reputation and their dedication to data security and support. Will they be able to guide you through customisation, deployment and ongoing improvement? Use these handy guides to assess these factors and whether the software will offer the flexibility and functionality you need.

Developing your corporate intranet strategy

The time comes to set a roadmap in place with an intranet development strategy. Where should you begin? Start with these blog posts to explore the importance of a successful intranet communications strategy and a clear structure for an intranet strategy template.

Next will be choosing the key business processes to automate and optimise. You might form an intranet business requirements checklist or document, which in turn can help your intranet provider to customise intranet functional requirements to meet your needs. Here is some information on how to go about this.

Designing your intranet

How to design an intranet site that works well and looks great? Like all design, intranet design principles incorporate two vital aspects: form and function. The resources below are a great place to begin when planning intranet workflows, functions and an intranet dashboard design that will be intuitive to use.

When it comes to visual design, including for your intranet homepage design, steer clear of buzzy intranet design trends and instead follow these best practice guidelines for long-term success.

Key Intranet Design Best Practices

If you don’t know where to begin with intranet design, that’s quite alright: your intranet provider will help guide you through this process.

Elcom Social Post Marketing Team Example

Providing social intranet tools

What is social intranet software? Quite simply, a social intranet incorporates the best aspects of social media platforms to make collaboration fun and easy. Social tools can also work wonders for employee engagement with your intranet. Explore these resources for more on social intranet software, advantages and disadvantages and best social intranet practices.

Discover how Greater Bank's award winning intranet achieved a 94% active user rate

Read the case study

Greater Bank Supporting Australians

Understanding intranet user experience (UX)

Intranet usability and the intranet user experience determine whether your intranet will be used to its full potential. So how do you create an amazing intranet experience?

Read up on these intranet usability guidelines and learn how to build a personalised intranet that employees will love to use.

Nurturing intranet collaboration

Cloud based intranet software can empower your team to connect and collaborate from wherever they’re working. So how do you build the right online environment for this to happen? These resources help you dive into exactly what drives collaboration in the workplace.

And when it comes to putting these collaboration principles into practice, these posts will serve you well.

Deploying your intranet

The time has come to launch your intranet – but first, be sure to assemble a governance team and develop your intranet governance model. This will set out every key intranet governance policy and procedure clearly, to maintain the intranet’s quality and usability over time.

If you’re looking for a sample intranet governance document or where to begin as an intranet content manager, these articles are a great start.

Another important aspect to think about will be your intranet adoption strategy, which will drive successful intranet user adoption and keep your new intranet from becoming a ghost town! Here are the four key stages to ensure that doesn’t happen.

4 Key Phases to Ace Your Intranet Adoption Strategy

Using intranet analytics for insights

Integrating intranet analytics software is a smart move, because this data can offer powerful insights into how your intranet is used and how it can be improved. Explore the guides below to link your Google Analytics and intranet site, and read up on intranet analytics best practices to unlock greater insights.

Intranet ROI and Effectiveness Screenshot

Measuring intranet success

Measure your intranet success, and you’ll be far better equipped to optimise it. These guides provide details on what to quantify and how to measure the quality of your intranet solution.

And here’s what you’ll need to know about calculating and measuring the return on investment (ROI) for intranet business cases and reporting.

Building an Effective Digital Workplace

The Digital workplace is a holistic set of tools, platforms and environments for work, delivered in a coherent, usable and productive way.

For many, the intranet is the foundation of an effective digital workplace; connecting or linking to processes and tools that employees need to do their jobs and access resources anywhere and anytime. Viewing the intranet within the wider context of the digital workplace can help to ensure it works effectively and efficiently with new and existing processes and tools within the organisation.

Elcom CMS resources

If you happen to be using Elcom CMS for your modern and mobile intranet dashboard in Australia, you can explore the latest key updates and features right here.

Getting started with your new intranet

The resources listed on this page provide a comprehensive introduction to all things intranet, but if you’re looking to take the first steps to a new intranet it can be really helpful to speak with an industry specialist about your requirements. The Elcom team would be happy to provide an obligation-free consultation at a time that suits to discuss your intranet communications strategy.

Book a Free Consultation