Business Objectives
Intranets and extranets are all about sharing information within the organisation and extending access to business partners and suppliers. Common objectives are:
- Better access to information. In particular, reducing time to locate appropriate business data.
- Making processes more efficient, particularly those crossing department, organisation or geographical boundaries.
- Facilitating and promoting re-use and sharing of information and knowledge.
- Enhancing company culture and improving company perception.
Ensuring Success
Successful website maintenance often depends on having an effective intranet. Regardless of the department or industry involved, most organisations have similar information dissemination needs. The key to ensuring active user participation is to provide up-to-the-minute information and plenty of opportunities for active interaction within the site.
How Enterprise Content Management Can Help
Enterprise content management builds on a number of related technologies, with the potential to bring them together into a cohesive whole:
- Change Management - the versioning and controlling of releases of documents and software.
- Corporate Portal - syndicating content and personalising its presentation.
- Document management - organising and controlling electronic document versions and their publication and distribution.
- Electronic forms - capturing information online over the web into a database or forwarding as e-mails to selected recipients.
- Groupware - electronic bulletins and forums for workgroup collaboration.
- Knowledge management - identifying, collating, and improving access to know-how e.g. online user guides, technical bulletin downloads, step-by-step presentations.
- Workflow - the ‘piping’ of work through the organisation with authorisation controls, automated activation, progress tracking etc.
Set below are links to other topics which discuss other important aspects to consider in building successful intranets and extranets:
