Designing Portal Sites for Business Success

In today’s world, many organizations are moving towards the digital workplace at a brisk pace, and intranet portals are turning out to be a feasible solution to these organizations as it allows information to be quickly disseminated to dispersed employees.

Why there is a need to design an Intranet Portal Site?

Every organization wants to quickly distribute required information to employees so they can drive a common internal business process more effectively and create a sense of community.

Essential intranet features to consider before developing an Intranet Portal Site:

Faceted navigation

Over the last decade  faceted navigation has turned out to be one of the most significant search innovations. A faceted navigation model leverages metadata fields and navigations and provides useful options for clarifying and refining queries.

Meaningful design & streamlined interface

A well-designed intranet site is one which has a simple structure with the option to create a dramatic effect on end-user’s experience. A meaningful design focuses on both form and function. Moreover, user interface should be streamlined and relate to its functionality.

News, alerts, announcements.

It’s very easy communicate when all your employees work in one office, but communication becomes very difficult when you have more than one offices and even more difficult when you have employees working remotely. A corporate intranet site is a one-stop shop to find all of this information, either personalized to the user, or accessible via a menu link for each location.

Collaborative features

It is essential for an organization to provide a forum where users can participate and discuss new ideas among people with similar interests. An interactive news feed helps users keep current with people and content through real-time micro blog messages and status updates.

Document sharing

A corporate intranet portal which allows employees to share documents freely and easily with an individual or a specific group of users(team). It’s an added advantage if your intranet portal provides additional capabilities to upload the documents to a repository with tracking mechanisms.

Employee profiles

Employees are the most important assets for any organization, hence it is very important for an organization to know about their staff. One of the great things about employee profiles is that it allows an opportunity for employees to recognize their co-workers. The photo on an employee profile will help put the right name to the right face. Employee profiles often list a person’s area of expertise, helping people find the right experts.

Automation of  internal processes like leave approval, purchases and travel expenses.

In today’s modern enterprise environment, one of the key elements many strive for is the paper-less office. Inclusion of workflows in corporate intranet portals will automate the business process from the simplest process to highly complex processes. For many businesses, such automation can save both time and money. It would be an added advantage if our corporate intranet portals provide an opportunity to automate some key business processes.

Expertise Search system to help employees find contents.

The success of a good intranet portal heavily relies on how fast the contents can be found. A relevant search result often creates confidence among employees. Implementation of an intuitive search allows employees to find related contents like contact information, specific events, benefits, and more with a single query.

Access through mobile devices

In-order to achieve higher level of productivity and collaboration many organizations would like to allow their users to access their internal portals sites through mobile devices.

To talk to an expert about creating your own portal site for your company contact Datavail.