Hugo Nunes • Published on July 23, 2024 • 6 min read
A company intranet is a private, internal network designed for use within an organization. It is a central hub for communication, collaboration, and information sharing among employees. Unlike the Internet, which is accessible to the public, an intranet is restricted to authorized users within the company, providing a secure environment for sharing sensitive information, documents, and resources. Essential features include employee directories, project management tools, internal messaging, and news updates, all aimed at streamlining operations and enhancing productivity.
Table of Contents
Intranets vary company by company, depending on size, industry, departments, and other factors. But while there is no one-size-fits-all layout for intranets, they typically have some or many of the following elements.
Home Page: This is the first screen an employee sees, and it typically displays company news and announcements, messages from the CEO or other executives, and quick links to important resources for easy access.
Employee Directory: Here the employees can find contact information for all team members, lists departments and teams for better organization, and organizational charts to visualize the company structure.
Document Management: The intranet stores policies and procedures, provides access to templates and forms, and allows for document storage and sharing among employees.
Collaboration Tools: Intranets can provide team workspaces, project management, and discussion forums and chat rooms.
HR Resources: A self-service HR portal can turn your intranet into a valuable resource for employee and HR team alike, housing employee handbooks, benefits information, and integrated systems for time-off requests and tracking.
IT Support: Similarly, IT communication can be funneled through an intranet, via help desk tickets, troubleshooting guides for common issues, software downloads and updates, and disaster recovery if you've been hacked.
Training and Development: Intranets can contain learning management systems (LMS) for training programs, training schedules, and e-learning modules.
Event Calendars: A company calendar within your intranet lists company events and meetings, highlights holidays and important dates, and allows employees to book conference rooms. This often is displayed on the home page.
Feedback and Surveys: An intranet can capture passive feedback via suggestion boxes, or active feedback through regular surveys. Performance feedback tools for evaluations are often integrated into the platforms.
Social Features: An advanced intranet can house employee recognition programs, include social feeds and blogs to keep employees engaged, and highlight interest groups and clubs for employees to join.
Search Functionality: A universal search feature with advanced filters and categories helps employees find information quickly. As you can see, an intranet can be stocked with crucial information.
Now that we have a baseline for common elements found within company intranets, let’s look at examples of six common types.
A project management intranet is an internal network designed to streamline the planning, execution, and monitoring of projects within a company. It serves as a central platform where your team members can collaborate, track the progress of their projects and tasks, and manage project-related documents and files.
Project management intranet example made with Softr
In this example, the application’s homepage shows logged-in users an overview of the projects and their tasks. The main screen shows general information about the ongoing projects, displaying a card for each project. These cards include essential details such as the project name, status (e.g., Complete, In Progress, To Do), due date, and budget. This layout allows team members to quickly assess the status and priorities of multiple projects at a glance.
Below this section is a Kanban block with a general overview of the user’s tasks. Tasks are categorized by statusinto stages like To Do, In Progress, Review, and Complete. This visual organization helps team members manage their workload efficiently by clearly defining the status of each task, and the user should be able to drag and drop these cards to update their stages. For example, the Prepare Copy task under the To Do column specifies the associated project, Product Hunt Launch, and the task’s description: Create briefs.
From the menu on the left side, we can navigate to other pages like:
A project management intranet, similar to the one shown in this example, is an essential resource for your company to streamline your project workflows. This centralized platform facilitates project and task management, boosting collaboration, accountability, and efficiency among your team members. Though it is highly effective in usability and core project management functions, it’s based on a template, and potential enhancements could include greater customization and deeper integration capabilities to support complex projects or larger teams better.
A knowledge management intranet is an internal network designed to streamline knowledge management and collaboration within a company. It is a central repository where team members can create, organize, and share information, enhancing overall productivity and knowledge sharing.
Knowledge management intranet in Notion
In this knowledge management intranet example, built on Notion, the homepage provides an overview of the most used and popular pages. Each category contains essential details and quick links to frequently accessed documents and pages, allowing employees to find and access the information they need quickly.
Additionally, the homepage features a search bar with advanced functionality. This feature enables users to locate specific documents or pages by typing keywords, significantly enhancing productivity by reducing the time spent searching for resources.
The homepage links to categories or directly to pages within the knowledge management intranet that serve as the primary content areas where detailed information on specific topics is stored. This comprehensive repository ensures that you are well-informed and can navigate to these pages to view and edit existing entries or to create new ones, ensuring that the knowledge management intranet remains current and comprehensive.
Individual pages should be created whenever new information, procedures, best practices, or project documentation needs to be documented and shared. This ensures that all relevant knowledge is systematically captured and made accessible to all employees.
Knowledge management intranets, like the one shown in this section, can be an important resource for your company's information management. This company intranet example facilitates document and information management, boosting collaboration and efficiency among your team members.
A training intranet is an internal tool platform designed to manage and facilitate training and development activities within a company. It serves as a centralized hub where employees can access training materials, track their progress, and register for upcoming training sessions. By making resources easily accessible, an intranet enhances the overall effectiveness of the company's training programs.
Training intranet example made with Softr
In this training intranet example, based on a training management template, the homepage provides an overview of all available training sessions. Each session is displayed with essential details such as the title, date, time, duration, meeting room, assigned departments, and the employees who have completed the training. This layout allows employees to find and register for relevant training sessions quickly. One key functionality of your training intranet should be filtering content, allowing you to show or hide training sessions based on the user’s role and department, among others.
Each card on the homepage leads to unique training pages for each course or session. These should be created whenever new training programs, workshops, or classes are introduced. PThese pages should include comprehensive information about the training objectives, content, and outcomes. This ensures that employees clearly understand the benefits and importance of each training session, encouraging participation and engagement. The session’s content can be text, documents, or videos.
By leveraging a training intranet like the one shown in this example, your company can effectively manage and track training programs, ensuring that your employees have access to the resources they need for professional development. This centralized platform not only boosts training efficiency but also fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement within the organization. To further enhance engagement, consider aggregating the training intranet with other HR-related intranets your company is using or planning to use. This can streamline the training process and provide a more cohesive user experience for your employees.
An HR intranet is a dedicated internal platform for optimizing human resources tasks and boosting employee engagement within a company. It consolidates all HR-related data, making it readily available to employees and HR staff. Standard features include employee directories, benefits details, payroll systems, performance evaluation tools, and onboarding resources. By offering a centralized hub for HR activities, an HR intranet increases operational efficiency, lessens administrative workloads, and enables employees to manage their HR needs independently.
HR intranet example made with Connecteam
In this example, this HR intranet made with Connecteam, includes robust chat functionalities for both individual and team interactions, which facilitates seamless communication across the organization. The reward and recognition features allow for the acknowledgment of employee achievements, significantly boosting morale and fostering a positive work environment. Additionally, the intranet simplifies the process of requesting time off, making it easy for employees to manage their leave and reducing the administrative burden on HR staff. An efficient employee directory ensures that staff can quickly find and connect with colleagues, further enhancing collaboration and productivity.
An HR intranet, similar to the one shown in this example, is vital for facilitating HR processes within your company. This centralized platform enhances communication, improves access to HR resources, and boosts employee engagement. While it excels in usability and essential HR functions, it has limitations regarding advanced customization and integration capabilities, especially if your company already uses other intranet platforms. Additionally, some users might find the initial setup process challenging, particularly if they are not tech-savvy.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) intranet is an internal network designed to optimize how a company manages its customer relationships. It consolidates all customer-related information, giving employees quick and convenient access to contact details, purchase histories, and communication records. This integrated platform ensures consistency of data and boosts the efficiency of customer service, sales, and marketing teams.
Notable features of a CRM intranet include:
It enables tracking sales pipelines, managing marketing campaigns, and using analytics tools to monitor performance and identify trends. These capabilities facilitate quicker response times and more personalized customer interactions, enhancing sales and marketing efforts by providing a comprehensive view of customer activities and engagement.
CRM intranet example made with Softr
In this example, a CRM intranet built with a sales management template centralizes all customer data into a single system, combining information on companies, contacts, and deals. This CRM also lets your sales team register all their customer interactions. This will enable real-time updates and seamless access across departments. The system allows the creation of customizable dashboards with charts and profound analysis, workflow automation, and detailed analytics to gain insights into customer behaviors and sales performance.
Its intuitive and user-friendly design ensures accessibility for users with varying levels of technical expertise, reducing the learning curve and improving adoption rates. However, an isolated CRM intranet may hinder communication processes, particularly between sales and post-sales or support teams. This can create silos and impede the flow of crucial information. Implementing a unified intranet that integrates CRM functions with other business processes can address this issue, ensuring smoother communication and collaboration across all departments.
Creating a custom intranet tailored to your company’s needs can significantly enhance communication, collaboration, and productivity. With Softr, you can build a powerful, user-friendly intranet without needing extensive technical skills, and it can be very cost-effective compared with subscribing to multiple platforms to have a comprehensive intranet.
With Softr, the possibilities for customizing your intranet are endless. Whether you’re working on a complex project or managing a large team, Softr’s deep integration capabilities and customizable templates are designed to meet your needs. Choose a template, modify it using Softr’s intuitive interface, and tailor your intranet to match your project’s unique requirements. You can even integrate it with other essential business tools and existing intranets to create a unified workflow. Customize the layout, color scheme, and branding to reflect your company’s identity and ensure consistency across all pages.
Enhance your intranet’s functionality by integrating it with other tools your company uses. Softr supports seamless integrations with Google Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, SQL, and more. This means you can have a unified intranet where all necessary functions and tools are connected, eliminating the issue of isolated systems that can hinder communication and collaboration.
Additionally, you can use Softr’s robust user management features to control permissions, control who can see each page or block, and ensure that your intranet complies with your organization’s security policies. Softr also enhances data security by providing server-side filtering, ensuring sensitive information is protected and accessible only to authorized users.
Use our company intranet template and customize to your team’s needs.