intranet connections white paper - ic thrive · 2020-04-20 · intranet connections white paper...

Intranet Connections White Paper

Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 software combines core intranet and social collaborative tools, helping you to increase employee productivity, communication, adoption, and engagement. Our philosophy is to bring you ease of use in a turnkey pre‐built intranet environment. Show ROI benefits with quick deployment, ready‐to‐go applications, easy CMS, powerful search and minimal administration overhead.

Table of Contents

Intranet Overview | About Us

Core Intranet Tools

Home Page Portal

Document Management

e‐Form Builder

Department Sub‐Sites

Employee Directory

Employee Status

Company News

Employee Training Calendar

Support Desk

Knowledge Center

Event Calendars

Job Center

Photo Albums

Company Store

Contacts

Library

Active Directory

Intranet Themes

Intranet Stats

Social Intranet Tools

Open Publishing

Company Blogs

Suggestion Box

Social Profiles

Quick Polls

Comments & Ratings

Discussion Boards

Multi Media

Employee Bookmarks

Alerts & Subscriptions

Buy and Sell

Recipes

User Branding

Added Benefits

Ease of Use

Single Unified Search

Extranet Capabilities

Simple Licensing

Priced under $10k unlimited users

Intranet ROI

Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 Software: White Paper Page 1

Intranet Overview | About Us

Intranet Connections first went to market in September 2009. Hard to believe it has been 10 years! There have been some major shifts to enterprise 2.0 and intranets in that time. We have been incredibly fortunate to have amazing customers join our Intranet Connections family over the years. Some of the following are brand names and continue to use our software to date: NASA Langley Research Center, we have 14 Mayo Clinics across the US, Sears Canada, American Furniture Warehouse, YMCA, US Navy, Department of National Defense. We have 100’s of credit unions and a strong following in Healthcare. Feedback from our customers drives how Intranet Connections has adapted to emerging technologies, and ensures that your intranet is one built for employees. Ease of use and simplicity are our hallmarks – simple to use, simple to administer, simple to manage, and simple to license and upgrade. Our #1 value add is one‐on‐one personalized support and customer service that is top notch.

Core Intranet Tools

Home Page Portal

Highlight newsworthy and relevant information Add / move around home page widgets ‐‐ Intranet Content Feeds ‐‐ RSS Feeds ‐‐ Blog Feeds ‐‐ Photo Album Slideshows ‐‐ Logos/Graphics ‐‐ Quick Polls ‐‐ Code Widgets ‐‐ Latest Discussion Topics ‐‐ Videos ‐‐ Employee Birthdays ‐‐ Employee Anniversaries ‐‐ and more! Add custom messages Employee Subscriptions / Alerts Design and brand the home page


Document Management

Unlimited Folders Tree or Flat View Document Tagging Versioning Check‐in/out Archiving Full‐Text Search Subscriptions Comments / Ratings Multiple File Upload Document Notes Folder Owners Folder Security Role Based Permissions Content Approval Workflow Document Home Page Widgets ‐‐ Top‐Rated Documents ‐‐ Top Tags ‐‐ Recent Comments ‐‐ My Subscriptions ‐‐ My Checked‐Out Documents ‐‐ My Approvals Pending ‐‐ My Folders to Manage

E‐Form Builder

Upload or build e‐Forms Design and Brand your e‐Forms Control Form Layout Preview as You Build Publish When Ready View Form Responses Online Control Who can View Responses Control Who can Edit Responses Workflow Routing of Responses Approval / Routing of Reponses Secure Forms Form Data Reporting and Filters Form Data Archiving


Department Sub‐Sites

Build sub‐sites for ‐‐ Departments ‐‐ Projects ‐‐ Teams ‐‐ Community pages ‐‐ Tracking customers ‐‐ Tracking competitors ‐‐ Anything you want! A snap to build, you can create sub‐sites with the click of one button, then design/brand the site, clone tools for specific use in your sub‐site, create custom message boxes, add a “what’s new” widget for advertising content, add RSS feeds, feature new site members

Employee Directory

Our Employee Directory really features employees with a full profile including ‐‐ Photos ‐‐ Department Information ‐‐ Contact Information ‐‐ Status Updates ‐‐ Skills ‐‐ Personal Interests ‐‐ Job Descriptions ‐‐ Birthdays / Anniversaries ‐‐ Photo Gallery of Co‐Workers ‐‐ Generate Email Lists ‐‐ Centralized & Searchable ‐‐ integrate with Active Directory


Employee Status

Track the status of your co‐workers or see the whereabouts of everyone in the company ‐‐ Reception View (all statuses) ‐‐ Status Widget (home page) ‐‐ Set Future Status ‐‐ View who is in the office … out of office … mobile access … working from home … in a meeting … out for lunch … on the road … attending a conference … on a coffee break … sick … or on vacation You have full control over the status types, can add more, remove, and change/add status

Company News

Reading up on the latest company news is a top activity on the intranet ‐‐Share announcements, bulletins ‐‐ Publish articles, press releases ‐‐ Archiving ‐‐ Set Start / End Publish Dates ‐‐ Embed Multimedia / Videos ‐‐ Add secure items ‐‐ Control who can see what


Employee Training

Employee Training is a robust and automated system for sharing training courses and managing student registrations ‐‐Advertise upcoming courses ‐‐ Register or Waitlist via Intranet ‐‐ Automated Reminders ‐‐ Track Registrants / Waitlists ‐‐ Track Open Seats ‐‐ Bulk Registrant Updates ‐‐ Generate Email Lists ‐‐ Build Reports ‐‐ Full Student History ‐‐ Embed Video Teasers ‐‐ Comments and Ratings

Support Desk | Ticketing

For smaller companies with a limited IT help desk, or for large organizations who want a centralized ticket tracking system on the intranet, our Support Desk software can help to streamline issues, track progress, capture resolutions, and report on historical data ‐‐Dynamically build e‐forms ‐‐ Create custom fields for searching ‐‐ Search Issues & Resolutions ‐‐ Admin‐Use Only Fields ‐‐ Add Private & Public Notes ‐‐ Robust Reporting ‐‐ Set up Multiple Support Desks


Knowledge Center

You can choose the authors and contributors of your intranet Knowledge Center, but it works best as an employee‐driven global center of employee knowledge. Allow employees to contribute and collaborate on frequently asked questions, tips and tricks, how‐to videos, or any other company knowledge that would be beneficial to store, share and search

Event Calendars

Our calendar tool features upcoming company events but you can clone to create unlimited calendars for unlimited uses, including resource booking or schedules. ‐‐ Add Recurring Events ‐‐ Optional Conflict Checking ‐‐ Send Custom Alerts ‐‐ e‐Invites to Co‐Workers ‐‐ Send Events to Your Outlook ‐‐ Color Coding ‐‐ Two level organization


Job Center

A powerful built‐in HR tool, the Job Center not only allows HR to easily submit and advertise new job openings but it has a robust built‐in Resume Builder. Employees can keep their resumes up to date online and in the eyes of HR and management ‐‐ Reduce recruiting costs ‐‐ Reduce training costs ‐‐ Find Talent In‐House ‐‐ Job Advancement ‐‐ Streamline Candidates ‐‐ Rate Resumes ‐‐ Store All Job Postings ‐‐ Set Start & End Dates ‐‐ Archives and Reporting

Photo Albums

Create unlimited online albums with our Photo Album tool. It is a snap to get your company photos and videos onto the intranet to share with co‐workers. Add titles, captions, notes, copyright and other meta data information for searching on photos and images. Photos and graphics will automatically be resized on the fly to create thumbnail views, and employees can rate and comment on photos.


Company Store

Company Store is for in‐house use and is a great addition to the intranet if you have merchandise available for employees to purchase, or if you need to track inventory ‐‐ Shopping Carts ‐‐ Cart History | Reporting ‐‐ Popular Items Widget ‐‐ Products on Sale Widget ‐‐ Create Custom Messages ‐‐ Search Product | My Carts

Company Contacts

Share corporate contacts such as customers, caterers, stationary supply contacts, software, and hardware vendors – any contact that aids employees in their daily jobs. Can store basic CRM data ‐‐ Company Contact Info ‐‐ Email Addresses ‐‐ Web Sites ‐‐ Social Media Channels ‐‐ Company Logo ‐‐ MapQuest | Directions ‐‐ Primary Contact ‐‐ Date of Last Correspondence ‐‐ Next Scheduled Contact ‐‐ Notes ‐‐ Flexible Fields | Re‐Label ‐‐ Email Lists


Library

Our world is working towards a greener enterprise, and the intranet can help immensely in that effort. In an ideal world our companies would be paperless, but just in case you still have books, magazines, and reference materials that employees need, our Library Check‐in | Check‐out feature catalogues your paper resources and helps you to manage and track who‐has‐what via the intranet.

Active Directory

Manage users and groups in one location and have single user login with our Active Directory integration and real‐time sync Intranet Connections pulls up‐to‐date employee profile information from Active Directory and ensures that the contact information is always up‐to‐date, freeing up your intranet admin from routine user management tasks Granular controls allow you to limit the sync to particular OUs of a single domain, or populate from multiple domains in a trust relationship You can even pull in AD managers for the "who reports to who" feature of the Employee Directory

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_employeedirectory.cfm


Intranet Themes

Manage users and groups in one location and have single user login with our Active Directory integration and real‐time sync Intranet Connections pulls up‐to‐date employee profile information from Active Directory and ensures that the contact information is always up‐to‐date, freeing up your intranet admin from routine user management tasks Granular controls allow you to limit the sync to particular OUs of a single domain, or populate from multiple domains in a trust relationship You can even pull in AD managers for the "who reports to who" feature of the Employee Directory View a tour of Intranet Connections client screen snaps to show how they have utilized the Theme Builder feature to brand and create custom designs for their intranet sites

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_employeedirectory.cfm

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_intranet_themes.htm

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_intranet_themes.htm


Intranet Statistics

Intranet Connections offers you an added package for our Stats Software Tool. Stats will track statistics on your intranet activity. You can easily view who has read what item on the intranet ‐‐ Track most popular areas ‐‐ What content is being ignored ‐‐ Who uses the intranet most ‐‐ Who contributes to the intranet ‐‐ Is usage increasing? ‐‐ Track an Employee’s Activity ‐‐ Build content audits ‐‐ Build custom reports

Social Intranet Tools

Social tools on the intranet can help with employee adoption, engaging your users and encouraging a community where the goal is a more efficient, collaborative and team environment. These social tools can be disabled, or you can choose to complete control who publishes where. You can even set up content approval on sensitive social areas. While we aim to provide flexibility and encourage the use of social tools in the enterprise, we also leave you in the driver’s seat. You control everything on your intranet. Open Publishing

Our simple licensing means that you can have unlimited publishers and contributors without added licensing costs. Best of all, you have total control over who can publish where and can add content approvals and workflow Publishing forms are simple and intuitive. Our fully featured HTML editor is similar to MS Word and comes with spell check Publishers can embed multimedia such as corporate videos, and our built‐in flash player will do the rest


Company Blogs

Improve communication and collaboration on your intranet with the use of Blogs. Blogging is a great way to improve the flow of conversation between management and employees. Blogs can be leveraged to align corporate goals, build community and culture, and it gives employees a channel to respond and comment ‐‐Create Unlimited Blogs ‐‐Create CEO or Employee Blogs ‐‐ Encourage Thought Leaders ‐‐ Single or Multi‐Authors ‐‐ Add Blog Members ‐‐ Audit Tracking on Edits ‐‐ Review Blog Contributions ‐‐ Review and Approve Comments ‐‐ Content Tagging ‐‐ Built‐In Designer | CSS Styles

Suggestion Box

Social tools are all about conversations, ideas, collaboration. One Fortune 500 company implemented a Suggestion Box on their corporate intranet and had an employee submit an idea that generated millions for the organization. While this example may be like hitting the lottery, you can utilize this application to gain feedback on your intranet, to encourage employees to contribute ideas or suggestions regarding projects, marketing, product lines, etc. Enable commenting and ratings. You can also set up confidential or sensitive categories and apply a review of content and approval on submissions Suggestion Box is a great starter application in bringing more collaborative and social tools onto your intranet


Social Profiles

Social profiles are part of the Employee Directory and include employee photos, employee birthday and company anniversaries, and it's an area where employees can publish personal information about themselves, their families, interests, hobbies, and links to social sites. Having a social aspect to an employee profile helps to build community

Employee profiles can also feature job descriptions and specific skills to aid in finding the right person to answer your questions

As with all Intranet Connections tools, you choose what type of content employees can enter. You can change the social fields to store different data altogether on an employee profile

Quick Polls

Build quick polls and launch them onto the intranet home page

Employees can cast their votes and all responses are tallied instantly, showing a visual chart view of responses

Administrators and poll builders will be able to see how everyone voted, and you can even email the poll results

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_employeedirectory.htm

http://www.intranetconnections.com/features/feature_employeedirectory.htm


Employee Comments and Ratings

Enable employee comments and ratings within the various tools to give voice to employees, but as the intranet manager you can gain valuable feedback and insight relating to your site content ‐‐ Easily Enable | Disable Comments ‐‐ Easily Enable | Disable Ratings ‐‐ Decide on Anonymous ‐‐ Choose a Moderator for Comments ‐‐ Choose between Private | Public

Comments and ratings are a great way for employees to participate and share their own thoughts and opinions. You can slowly introduce this feature by enabling it on specific applications or none at all – your choice!

Discussion Boards

Discussion boards are often a very popular forum because of the conversational tone and collaboration between colleagues

Creating threaded conversations can benefit teams and projects, and can even help to reduce email and chat conversations

Threads and replies are archived and searchable. Employees can subscribe to topics of interest and will be notified via alerts and email of replies


Media Embeds

Intranet Connections makes it easy to embed audio and video files within your intranet content ‐‐ Media embed from HTML editor ‐‐ Super Easy for Publishers ‐‐ Streams live with our Flash Player ‐‐ Upload Training Videos ‐‐ Post Webinars ‐‐ Share Employee Recognition Videos ‐‐ Embed a CEO Message | Home Page ‐‐ Share Snippets from Conferences ‐‐ Embed Media into Blogs Embed media anywhere on the site where you publish content with the HTML editor. Super simple and an effective social way to communicate and share information

Employee Bookmarks

Just as valuable as your browser bookmarks, Intranet Connections allows for employees to bookmark favorite intranet content and areas of interest

The bookmarks widget can be placed anywhere on the intranet home page or on the menu listing, where it is always visible as the employee navigates the site

Super easy to bookmark (every page has a bookmark icon) and employees can create links to their favorite internet sites as well


Alerts & Subscriptions

Provide quick and easy access to site subscriptions. Users can set site and/or email alerts on ‐‐ New Content ‐‐ Updated Content ‐‐ Advertised Content

The Alerts widget on the intranet home page provides one click to subscribed content and allows employees (or admins) to filter site content based on their daily tasks, interests, departments, or projects

Buy & Sell

Surprisingly one of the more popular apps when first launching the intranet is the Buy & Sell. A social tool that allows staff to post for sale items and other classifieds. The Buy and Sell can also be used for sharing babysitters, neighborhood restaurants, or any other networking information that could be useful for employees


Sharing Recipes

Another engaging social feature is the Recipes area, where employees can post their secret family recipes, share good tips and recipes from the internet, search for recipes A‐Z, bookmark favorites, handy quick print and option to email a recipe to co‐workers. Even a holiday calendar and comments/ratings

User‐Defined Branding

Intranet Connections has a robust Theme Builder Tool where the admin can choose from professionally designed themes, or create brand new themes to match corporate branding. Building a consistent design for the intranet is an important part of the user experience. But we go a step further ... employees have the option of putting in their own design touches creating a personal view of the intranet. The overall theme will stay consistent, but employees can update font size (for those who need larger fonts), font type, and they can add color enhancements to the existing theme to make it their own (this option is disabled in the admin site by default).

Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 Software: White Paper Page 18 Added Benefits

Ease of Use

Simple and Easy to Use – these are the hallmarks of our intranet software. We strive for simplicity without limiting functionality. Intranet Connections is simple to install, has simple licensing (one cost, unlimited users, admins, publishers), is simple for employees to use and contribute to, simple to find content (no more than three clicks to content), and our software is simple to manage and maintain. Rapid deployment means saved costs. Simple = less headache, less cost, less training = quick implementation!

Single Unified Search

One of the problems emerging from social 2.0 tools and various information silo’s within the enterprise is that employees are having difficulty finding what they need – which wastes time, money and is frustrating for the employee. The power of Intranet Connections is that we give you the core intranet tools plus the social 2.0 intranet experience all in one central intranet portal for under $10k.

Having all of these tools in one consolidated location, your employees now have a single, unified source to search for the information they need to do their jobs better and more efficiently.

Extranet Capabilities

We have many clients who are using Intranet Connections as both an intranet and extranet environment. You can create an intranet to serve your employees and build an extranet for customers – within a shared content environment. Security on Intranet Connections is highly flexible, and logged in users will only see what they have rights to view, whether they be employees or your customers or outside partners.

Simple Licensing

We didn’t want a sliding scale for licensing that will continue to drive your costs upwards as you grow your intranet. With Intranet Connections, you have a one‐time cost and you own the software. It resides on your servers or we can arrange for third party hosting; our licensing model covers all users – now and into the future. You can have unlimited publishers including all employees if you so choose. You can have unlimited administrators, and delegate ownership of department sub‐sites and other areas of content without any additional costs.

Priced under $10K

The initial purchase cost for Intranet Connections is $8500US. This is a one‐time cost for the software. An annual maintenance fee will begin upon your second year with the software and includes email and telephone support, as well as all upgrades and enhancements to your intranet site. Annual Maintenance is priced at $1450US (subject to change). Our intranet software development roadmap is driven by you, the customers, and you will have access to our intranet communities, extranet web site and our highly skilled and personable customer service and support.


Intranet ROI ‐‐ How To Gain ROI with Intranet Connections

Reduce the time it takes for employees to find company documents by placing them all in a central location on the intranet ‐ with a unified, single advanced search and full‐text searching The intranet can go a long way in attracting talent and keep them with you. Build community and corporate culture. Give employees the tools they look for in collaboration, networking and increased job satisfaction, and watch your turnover rate decrease Reduce the management of your intranet, stop the bottleneck of restricted publishing and let everyone contribute themselves, rather than tying up an IT or HR person to publish content Huge costs are incurred when recruiting and hiring new employees. Use the Job Center on your intranet to fill positions internally with people who already know the policies, flow and culture of your business Retaining your employee's knowledge beyond their employment is a soft cost that may be hard to quantify, but can provide huge gains for the company in the long run With buying out‐of‐the box, you save on not having to hire contractors, you can deploy quickly, you have minimal training to get employees up to speed, and you never have to worry again about finding, building, or maintaining new features and applications Encourage employees to share cost‐saving ideas, or new revenue streams, for the company via the Suggestion Box. You never know, a million dollar idea could come from one of your employees

Reduce time and paper costs by having employees use electronic forms, route them to supervisors or designated management, sign off on them and store the form results ‐ all electronically via the intranet Building a custom intranet is expensive. Use a rapidly deployed intranet that essentially manages itself, rather than hiring someone to create and manage an intranet for you. Free up resources to work on other projects that are valuable to the company If every employee saved 15 minutes a day in productivity by using the intranet; finding information they need quickly and efficiently, how much cost savings would that be? Automate and streamline the management of courses and student registrations by putting it all on the intranet. Free up the time of a your training manager to focus on course material, video how‐to's and bring on new projects Create a leaner and more efficient IT help center by encouraging employee to use the intranet Support Desk tool, where they can submit issues, and track the status of their tickets Intranet Connections supports the Active Directory single sign‐on model for intranet access. Push employee HR information into Active Directory and synchronize the data on your intranet. Create a focal point for information coming from other sources in the enterprise Provide better service to your customers by arming your employees and sales teams with streamlined information at their fingertips, and keep them current to industry news through RSS feeds


Contact Information

SQBox Solutions Ltd. 230 – 1000 Roosevelt Crescent North Vancouver, BC V7P 1M3

Phone: 604‐924‐9770 Fax: 604‐924‐9740

General Enquiries: [email protected] Customer Support: [email protected]

Web Site: http://www.intranetconnections.com/

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.intranetconnections.com/