In brief: The essential features of an employee intranet portal and three ways to build one: custom development, a subscription platform or your productivity suite.
When internal communication breaks down, productivity follows. An employee intranet portal centralizes company announcements, HR self-service tools, knowledge bases, and team collaboration spaces into a single platform that every employee can access — replacing scattered email threads, outdated shared drives, and disconnected department silos.
It can be considered analogous to a client experience, except that the clients are in-house users. It helps seamlessly onboarding new employees, keeping employees posted with current updates and information within hand reach, providing hassle-free access to employees for protected company resources, and fostering a collaborative and connected organization.
Essential Features of a Successful Employee Intranet Portal
Mobility
Today's workforce is distributed between remote working and flexible work hours. The employee portal must be accessible continually and in all places. Portal should be accessible from any standard browser and must be responsive when accessed from multi-modal devices.
Productivity Hub
The portal should go beyond the ability to show static content. The portal must be a gateway for some additional intranet applications used by the company (ERP, CRM, HR Self-Service, Calendar & Mail, Productivity Suite, etc.) seamlessly through Single Sign-On (SSO). It should provide a helpdesk (ticketing system), such that no work interruptions are faced.
Exceptional Employee Experience
The intranet portal has to be aesthetically designed, visually pleasing, and easy to navigate. They must integrate team chats and notifications that consolidate all aspects that need to grab employees' attention, including emails, meeting schedules, etc.
Customized
The employee portal pages must be distinctive for each employee. Only relevant content must be available for the employees. If the employee has a role change, then the portal must reflect the same. With proper credentials, one can access relevant portal content and the relevant sections to their department.
Easy Content Creation
Creating and managing the contents (such as news, polls, broadcasts, etc.) should be effortless, delegated, and should not require programming skills.
It is vital to know the possible ways to build an efficient portal considering both the pros and cons attached to each one of the ways.
Custom Built
Pros:
- Inexpensive
- Visually captivating and customizable
- Use of in-house skills
Cons:
- Difficult to migrate to existing system
- May need extra special handling for user provisioning
- Does not support long term enterprise
New Intranet Portal Platform Subscription
Pros:
- Aesthetically appealing
- Ready to use features
- Encapsulates modern features like organization blogs, social chats
- Easy integration to other employee productivity suite applications
Cons:
- Additional costs for directory and single sign-on
- New skills may have to be learned
- Special administration required
Building on Existing Productivity Suite
Pros:
- Ready integration of mail, calendar, chat, chatbot
- Allows external application integration via APIs
- Provides identity management platform
- Seamless administration for employee provisioning
- Reduced costs since existing subscribed software package provides necessary licenses
Cons:
- Provides less options for customization
- Certain costs are inescapable due to use of external service
- Migration to platforms may lead to re-work of portal
Why Codenatives?
- Extensive Web Design skills, theme customization, and experience with HTML5 & CSS3
- Extensive skills with popular productivity SaaS platforms such as Google Workspace, Zoho suites, and Office 365
- Expertise in writing backend for integration to almost any application and platform
- Expertise with various Identity platform solutions (Google, Azure, Zoho, AWS, Oracle)
- Solution provider expertise in popular SaaS ERP/CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, NetSuite
- Use of federated Active Directory login for Single Sign-On
- Aligned to customer objectives with proactive customer engagement
Come to us with your intranet portal needs and we assure you a seamless and thoroughly thought out solution that will reduce your pain-points and improve employee satisfaction.
Related solution: Digital Engineering — enterprise applications and workflow automation →
