Intranets

GRIPintranet is an intranet product that promotes communication and information sharing; it provides an environment designed to harvest one of an organization's most vital resources - Knowledge.

An intranet is the information heart of a company. For many companies it becomes the main way of sharing knowledge between people, teams, clients and suppliers. It does not replace e-mail, meetings or phone calls but provides a shared space for public conversations.

The first priority is the design of the home page, or the core page, this lies at the center of the intranet which will provide a snapshot of all the important current information in the company and links to all the other areas of the Intranet. We spend time analyzing the individual needs of the organization and the different needs of diverse groups and individuals. This core page will probably be different for different users and sometimes our clients will want to be able to customize the look and feel for each user. We make this straightforward by separating out the design from the functionality.

It is vital that the intranet is easy to update and we have developed GRIPelements, a suite of software that provides content management for our intranets, Web and E-Commerce sites. This maintains a consistent look and feel for all parts of the intranet and provides tools to manage documents, images and timed content.

We will design a secure login and password protection for each qualified user within the organization or outside if the intranet supports either offsite or extranet functionality. For example, you can allow customers or suppliers to browse parts of the content and upload documents, etc.

An intranet is rarely an island of information, but must remain connected with other sites and other systems and this is made possible by using tools that allow the content to be transferred. We use XML, RSS and calendaring and address standards to allow our intranets to talk to other systems in your organization. This means that latest updates to your Web site can be flagged on your intranet even if they run on different servers and use different technologies. This can be extended to third party sites allowing, the creation of industry newsfeeds that can be displayed on the intranet, pulling the latest relevant news from a variety of sources. This makes the intranet a regular destination during the day.

Forums can form an important part of an intranet and we can offer threaded or unthreaded versions to meet your requirements. We can also integrate this with your e-mail system or even SMS to allow staff to be alerted when new material is posted to the forum. Some of our clients prefer to use a Weblog approach in place of forums. These are usually written by a single individual or department but other users can comment and ask questions. We will discuss the most appropriate systems to meet your needs. Our overall approach is to provide reliable, modular systems that can grow as a company's needs change. We will help define the priorities for the system and can usually implement a first version quickly using proven software components.

You may prefer to host the system yourself or ask us to host it for you. Hosting externally is recommended if multiple offices are connected or where a large proportion of staff work from home. We can help design and implement the required infrastructure including virtual private networks, servers, databases and integration with other technologies  (e-mail, etc). We pride ourselves on our ability to support our clients through the development process. This will include analysis and design with appropriate staff and training and support as required once the system is up and running.

Our intranet technology also can be tailored to work on mobile and PDA devices. Messaging into the intranet from mobile phones has proven invaluable for some clients, others can inform a mobile workforce via a handheld PC.

Ease of use and simplicity are central to our design philosophy. Usability is about designing jargon-free navigation, information structures that aid searching and exploration and clear identification of the latest material that has been included.

To find out more about how your organization could benefit from our intranet technologies, contact us.