What is an intranet?

Put simply, an intranet is a web site made available only to users of a secure, private network such as that used by a company. It is designed for the sharing of information between employees, for the overall benefit of the organisation. It uses the same technology and principles as a public site on the World Wide Web, but it is designed to serve only the needs of the company. Setting up and running an intranet need not be a lengthy or expensive process. Designed effectively, a company intranet can bring significant benefits.

TROPOS Intranet

The web client version of the TROPOS system is supplied with a full intranet as the means of managing users and access to the system. The TROPOS Intranet is also available as a standalone intranet system, providing all the features of an intranet but without access to TROPOS transactions.

How an intranet will benefit your company

As with many technological developments, there are plenty of companies building intranets because they feel they ought to. But there are real practical business benefits to be gained from a well-designed intranet.

• Saving time. Having essential everyday information available at the click of a mouse saves an enormous amount of time. If every employee spent just a few minutes less every day looking up paper-based information such as phone lists or copies of standard forms, telephoning others to ask questions and reading notice boards, think how much more productive your company would be.
• Improving quality. This is crucial for every company. Eliminating mistakes caused by the use of out of date procedures, forms, lists and reference material can save millions of pounds. Getting staff to follow procedures that are documented in large dusty files is another challenge. Providing instant and intuitive access to your quality procedures, use of the current version of documents and forms will eliminate this type of costly mistake.
• Improving efficiency. Information can be published instantly, with immediate access for all employees. Updated staff lists, phone directories, preferred suppliers, staff pension notices and company bulletins can all be published electronically. The intranet can be set up so that there is no technical skill needed to publish information – for example, the person who updates the internal phone directory by maintaining a spreadsheet can continue to do so, but instead of printing and copying the list, the intranet can be updated directly.
• Improving staff relations. Many companies encourage staff social activities to promote inter-departmental co-operation and to raise morale. Yet often there is little practical support, leaving a few well-meaning individuals to organise and promote social events. An employee newsletter is usually seen as a good idea but frequency of distribution is limited by production costs. Staff bulletin boards and social activities can be maintained by the staff themselves, with some gentle policing to ensure the content remains within the bounds of acceptability. This costs nothing to run, but it encourages employees to use the intranet as a source of all internal company information.
• Functional reference. The company intranet can also include divisional or departmental intranets for use at a local level. The uses are many and varied, but any information that can be held electronically and is shared by more than one individual would benefit from being held in a form of intranet library in the department. The scope of an intranet is limited only by the imagination!
• Reducing administration. More advanced intranets can be developed to have employee self-service screens where forms can be filled in on-line and sent immediately to a supervisor for authorisation or routed and controlled by workflow through the required process path to its destination. Sickness forms, holiday requests, purchase requisitions and expense claims are obvious examples. Browser-based ERP systems, such as TROPOS which allow role-based home pages to be set up allowing employees to make enquiries, process transactions and retrieve business information from a single screen, can be combined with an intranet and workflow to operate as a single seamless personal environment on the desktop. And why limit it to the desktop? With mobile personal devices the potential application of an intranet can embrace a wide range of non-office-based roles too.

Rapid Intranet Deployment – TROPOS

SSI's TROPOS Intranet is pre-configured and comes with packaged implementation services to populate it with your company's information and allow deployment in very short timescales. In addition SSI provides the full range of services to extend its use and integrate with your business systems. It includes:

• A template design which is customised to your ‘house style’
  • Multiple ‘Skins’ available through style sheets
• Security logon for the intranet 'Administrator' and content 'Moderators'
• Role definition to control access to specific areas of the intranet
• Modelling capability to test roles prior to allocation
• User-configurable chaining between pages
• Role allocation to individual users
• Viewing and Update privileges by role
• A Help System for Administrators and Moderators
• Administrator 'Home Page' content management
• A user configurable multi-level List of Contents
• User and Moderator configuration
• The contents database
• Content authorisation
• Content maintenance controlled by role including the ability to:
  • add formatted text
  • add Links to other URL's
  • add Images
  • upload to server capability
  • authorise pages
  • ability to create web content with no previous knowledge of ‘HTML’
  • Content ‘Wizard’
• Personal Role
  • end-user capability to maintain personal favourites
• A range of standard contents pages including:
  • Company Phone List
  • Forums
  • Bulletin Boards
  • Automatic “What's New”
  • Useful Links
  • Site Map
  • Search
  • Help on Intranet use
  • 'Quick Links' to other Websites and Web applications
  • Home Page image management

Supporting services

SSI can provide support services from ongoing development, content management, remote administration services to web site hosting. There is no dependency on in-house development or webmaster skills, SSI can provide managed services to allow you to concentrate on what you do best – running your business.