Taras

We’d like to share some future thinking from Barry Smart, IT Director at Hymans Robertson.

Barry has written a terrific blog post about how this major independent financial firm has embraced the Microsoft enterprise platform to create a thoroughly modern business.

In the post, Barry refers to the Cloud as an “unstoppable force” which businesses can no longer afford to ignore or delay thinking about. He outlines how it is transforming business models and creating new ones, not just in his own sector but across every market.

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Make your first steps towards a new intranet less daunting by building a structured business case. Here’s how.

You might instinctively know your organisation needs a new intranet, but instinct alone isn’t enough to justify the time, effort and money needed to build one. To do that, you’ll need to create a compelling business case.

A business case lays the foundations for progress towards your new intranet – so if you don’t know where to start, this is it. It helps make it clear why you need a new intranet now, and how it will support your organisation in the future. And, done properly, it will open the right doors and unlock the funding to make it a reality.

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Interested in intranets and want to know more? Looking for a starting point? Read on to discover what a modern intranet can do for your organisation.

What is an intranet? Put simply, it’s an internal website for the people who work in your organisation. It lets colleagues stay up-to-date with what’s going on across your business, access the most recent versions of key internal documents, and share their own knowledge and insight.

What kind of things go on an intranet?

Intranets can hold any kind of information that is relevant to your business. Whether it’s dynamic, fast-changing information such as breaking news alerts, or more documents that change less frequently, like HR policies, it’ll be at home on a modern intranet.

An intranet can also link in to your staff directory and provide an easy way of finding the right colleagues.

Why would a business want an intranet?

By storing your information on an intranet, everyone has access to the most up-to-date information available, wherever they are. Done right, an intranet can become a trusted first port of call every time a member of staff needs to find a document or person, or simply wants to know what’s going on in the business.

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The whole world is going paperless, and it’s a vision we’re proud to support.

But we know that some people just aren’t ready to make the leap.

That’s why we created PaperPoint.

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Hiding in every organisation is a potential team of digital superheroes. Find out how to reveal the identities of your own intranet champions, and how they can help take your intranet to the next level.

Good user adoption is key to the success of any software project– but for an intranet, it’s absolutely critical. We’ve already looked at one way of driving intranet take-up – creating a solid information architecture.

You can further ensure your intranet takes off by recruiting and empowering people within your organisation to become ‘intranet champions’.

What makes an intranet champion?

Intranet champions sound like superheroes, but they’re really just enthusiastic colleagues who are familiar with your business’s structure and internal processes.

They are people who care about your intranet project, and genuinely believe it can help change their workplace for the better.

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We take a look at why it’s so important to build your intranet on a solid information architecture, and how to make sure you get it right.

Photo: Card-sorting exercise, used under Creative Commons

Corporate intranets don’t become intuitive, popular and easy-to-use by chance.

Before an intranet is built, it’s really important to determine its shape, decide what prominence to give each feature, and come up with a menu structure that works.

Rather than relying on sheer luck, you can ensure success by constructing a good information architecture that reflects how your users and business work.

What is an information architecture?

Information architecture is the process of designing a structure to hold the shared information and content that makes up your intranet.

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SharePoint 2016 has finally arrived – we take a look at some of the exciting new features.

Microsoft’s SharePoint platform has been around since 2001, and this is the first major version since SharePoint 2013 came out four years ago.

What is SharePoint?

Originally intended to provide a content management platform for creating web portals, SharePoint has now grown into a platform that has countless uses.

It now includes functionality to create intranets and extranets; manage, search and discuss content and documents; manage workflows, and implement business intelligence solutions.

It even has its own app store.

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Underused, unusable, a waste of time – for many people, these are terms that might come to mind when picturing an intranet.

We’re trying to change that perception, because we know that, done right, an intranet can have a truly transformative effect on an organisation and its staff.

It’s fair to say that intranets have had a bad rep in the past, because, in the wrong hands, they’re very easy to mess up.

For many who’ve used an old-school intranet, the experience was one of frustration – at not being able to find information, at the site being out-of-date, or even at being unable to use it on the latest browsers.

Fortunately, it’s 2016, and all that has changed. We’ve put twenty years of experience into creating our Kira intranet accelerator.

It’s a new kind of solution that brings the corporate intranet resolutely into the 21st century.

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