The Internet has transmuted the computer and communication world like a duck egg. Today, computers are useful for communication due to the invention of the internet. The Internet has been a prominent and trendy tool for information dissemination. However, another information-sharing system that is much in demand especially among the business organizations is intranet as well as an extranet.
An intranet is a small network that is accessed by only some people of the organization i.e. it is a private network that is based on TCP/IP protocol and is accessed by the organization staff. The basic key idea behind the intranet was to provide organizations a common platform to share information and to communicate. Traditionally, information was shared manually through phone conversations, paper documents, etc. But today, the intranet has tied together different parts of the business and provides a common platform to create, share, and collaborate. An advanced technology came after the intranet was introduced.
To provide links to different pages or sites on the Intranet in order to accomplish the task, the concept of the portal was discovered.
An Intranet portal is clearly reliant on the existence of an Intranet. Therefore, it is not possible to have a portal without having an Intranet. The crucial need in today’s business environment is the capability of an individual to communicate more effectively, both internally with your staff members as well as externally with your business partners and customers. Therefore, the concept of extranet came up. An extranet is a website that uses a public network to share information with the vendors and suppliers. The intranet individually cannot perform all the functions, other components also play a major role. The internet with its web-based components collectively termed as Intranet Suite. A portal basically looks like a Web site, but it is not exactly the same as new features are incorporated which are only accessible to the members of the portal. Also called as enterprise Portal. It is only accessible to people who are authorized to it. Others can’t use the portal.
Intranet portals are basically used by big companies for improving communication, managing information, etc. but small and medium enterprises can also get benefit from having them. It is a great idea to give your intranet a distinct image and structure from your customer-seeing website. This will prevent employees from confusing internal as well as external information and also help to give the internal communications their unique identity.
What is Intranet Portal?
- An intranet portal is a gateway that unifies access to enterprise information and applications on an intranet. It is a tool that helps a company manage its data, applications, and information more easily, and through personalized views.
- A portal basically looks like a Web site, but it is not exactly the same as new features are incorporated which are only accessible to the members of the portal. Also called as enterprise Portal.
- It is only accessible to people who are authorized to it. Others can’t use this.
Types of Intranet/Web Portal
Vertical Portals: The Portal that provides access to information and services about a particular area of interest is called a vertical portal. These portals target a specific audience. Examples are:-www.w3school.com — a vertical portal as it targets computer science audience.
- www.contractor.com — a vertical portal for the construction industry.
- http://nuptialknots.com/ — vertical portal for paints.
Horizontal Portals: The Portal is also known as “mega portals,” that target the entire Internet community. The website features diverse subjects and always contains search engines.Examples are:-
Intranet Portal Benefits
An intranet portal can bring many benefits to the business if implemented successfully. For instance:
- Better communication. A good portal is a communications hub as it helps people to come into one environment and interact with each other.
- Increased efficiency:- An intranet portal can increase efficiency as it reduces or eliminate the manual paperwork.
- Accessible resources:-The intranet portal is a place where you can share, update, and edit important documents, procedures, documents, resources, protocols, and guidelines in one click.
- Best security:- An intranet portal provides a safer place to share your important documents. It can reduce the risks of sharing data by email.
Important Features of the Portal are
- News:- This section provides recent stories along with featured stories of organizations.
- Key tools:- Staff directory and search options are the essential tools .
- Navigation:- Navigation in simple words means it navigates us to the particular section.
- Key information:- The intranet can be used to display the overall company performance, the overall turnover of the company, sales figures, stock prices, etc.
- Corporate culture and values:- Rather than being only functional, the website's first page i.e. home page should provide information about their corporate culture as it would help the new employees to learn the values and organizational culture.
- Collaboration Tool:- It means all the employees or staff of the organization came together on one platform and collaborate with each other.
Disadvantages of Intranet Portal
Intranet Portals are costly as the maintenance and management can be time consuming and expensive. It is also costly when the system goes offline and then forces all the operations to be put on hold.
Secondly, a Security issue i.e. Intranet portal is reliable and secure than the internet but nothing is 100% reliable and secure. So, security issues may arise.
Hope you like the article. Thanks for reading.
