Group collaboration can make or break a company. Whether your office works remote or you’re just struggling to keep all internal files, updates and announcements in one place, a well-designed Intranet can solve a lot of these problems.
Not only is it user friendly, but it’s also intuitive and customizable for your IT team. However, despite all of this, business users still struggle to get their office on board and actively using it. When polled during our recent webinar, 64% of listeners said that they do not feel like their Intranet and/or SharePoint environment is living up to its full potential. So why is this?
Our research has found that some of the most common Intranet issues include a lack of social components, a search that doesn’t give users what they’re looking for, and a general lack of context from content they want to see. These can be difficult issues to tackle when no one actually owns the content or when it just takes too much time to create and add it.
This is where rolling out a proper SharePoint Intranet comes into play. Here are some key features to get your office on board.
Collaboration and Connection
Within a SharePoint Intranet, you can deploy different widgets like employee spotlights, birthday announcements that let you message the employee with a birthday directly, a quick calendar of upcoming events and even a news feed that displays questions and discussions like a Facebook feed. You also have the option to add external links for your HR portals, Salesforce, company social pages or other organization sites for direct access.
All of this, on top of additional features that come with your SharePoint site, can help your employees feel connected, drawing them back to use the site time and time again.
Streamlining New Employee Registration
Bringing in a new hire requires IT to add them into the mail system, chat system, HR portals and more. When they’re doing so manually, it can become challenging. Luckily, it can be automated through a useful intranet.
By setting up workflows on the back end, you can fill out a “make user request” with a customized form (we love using Nintex forms for this) that will notify the IT staff in charge, let them easily approve the new employee, and add them into the system. These all generate emails to each party letting them know when it’s set up and even sending off the startup link and username for the employee.
The proof is in the pudding – Auditing made easier
Within these customized workflows, you can also open workflow details that will lay out exactly what happened, at what time, and what user approved it. On top of that, if you opted to use a Nintex form within Nintex Hawkeye, you can look at dashboards detailing the average process time, how many processes were executed, and how much time IT has spent working through these.
Need even more data to backup your SharePoint Intranet’s usefulness? Nintex Hawkeye also tracks the total ROI, the money saved by IT user productivity, money saved with End User productivity, and Dev Costs saved.
Within a SharePoint Intranet, you can also create a detailed employee directory, further customize and track forms, access the site on a mobile device, and more. To see the complete, live demo from our Webinar “Ignite Your Intranet with DataBank & Nintex”, click here.
You can also follow up with live user questions on SharePoint Intranets from our Twitter Chat here where we dove a little deeper into the cloud, collaboration recommendations and more.
