Why does your company need an intranet?

There are countless reasons and benefits to getting an intranet built for your company. I prefer to use real-world examples. There are a quite a few different situations that expose when a company needs an intranet.

Example: The first time fictional company 'MikroTekCorp' realized it needed an intranet was when they started having e-mail problems. They were a Small Business running Exchange Server 2003 with about 100 users. Exchange administrators often have to deal with size limitation problems.

When the Information Store (the Exchange "database") becomes to large, the mail server becomes unstable. Upon further research it is discovered that employees are using their e-mail as a file storage system.

'Becky' at MikroTekCorp e-mails a new updated HR form to the entire company of 100 employees. The form was 1MB, totalling 100MB added to the Information Store and 100MB travelling across the network.

Then she realized there was a typo on the form she just sent out. Becky corrects the form and sends it out again. Including the previous e-mail, you have now just added a total of 200MB to the Information Store and 200MB to network traffic.

Unfortunately the bad news doesn't stop there.

'Sally' in the Nashville office had already printed out the form with the typo. And she saved it on her desktop because it is a form she uses often. She "missed" the e-mail with the correct form and has been using the incorrect form for days until a co-worker notices.

Sally asks Becky for a new form, and Becky then has to stop what she is doing and send Sally the correct form. Unfortunately, this has happened to Becky almost 10 times today.

Let's give MikroTekCorp an intranet.

Becky updates the form. She uploads it to the intranet. Sally needs the form, so she pulls up the forms page on the intranet and prints the form. So far we are at 1MB netowrk traffic and 0MB e-mail storage space.

Becky realized there was a typo and fixes the form on the intranet. She e-mails the staff to let them know that the form was corrected and that they should print out new ones from the intranet. This e-mail is a very small e-mail with no attachment.

In that very small example you can see what kind of impact an intranet wouuld have on your network, your employees and your profit margins. In MikroTekCorp's case, their Exchange server became more stable, Becky got more done, Sally used the correct form and the network had more room for other traffic.

What you get when Semzo builds your intranet:

• In-depth business process analyzation
• Internal employee web portal that is aesthetically pleasing
• An intranet that captures the passion and energy of your company
• An intranet that is customized to save your employees time
• A central repository for company policies and forms
• Internet printing services
• Internal requests forms create standardization
• Training materials, procedures and how-to's all at your employees' fingertips