- Marwen Mema
- June 21, 2017
Why & How You Should Federate Your Business Apps Under Your Intranet
With the high accessibility of digital work tools, the rise of low maintenance cloud computing and the evolving work culture and digital nativeness of newer generations of workers, companies today find themselves dealing with an increase in the sheer number of work tools.
Sales teams use CRMs, customer support teams rely support ticket systems, finance and human resources people use financial management and human capital management software, and the list goes on.
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Communication is no longer only done through email but also via instant messaging, videoconferencing, company forums and enterprise social network systems. Documents are shared through content management systems and cloud file storage solutions. In this regard, it is even not uncommon for different teams throughout the organization to be using duplicate tools that actually overlap in their purpose.
1. Why this matters today?
While many of these unfederated tools may work fine in isolation for the teams using them, your organization as a whole—should it be affected by this phenomenon—has not yet achieved an effective digital workplace. It is still stuck in one phase of the evolution of digital work where the focus is still on tools and features under separate varying contexts instead of on your overall employee experience.
Digital transformation is happening to an extent whether we are aware of it and actively leading it or not. This multitude of often great tools is a result of such transformation but it can easily get stuck at that state of total disconnectedness and lack of any organization-wide vision as to what digital transformation means to the organization and what long-term benefits it should bring to it as a whole.
Letting this multitude of tools thrive with no such strategy in place further nurtures organizational silos in which your teams would remain trapped, which in turn result in problems relating to poor knowledge management, decreased employee alignment, lower innovation potential, higher total costs of ownership, etc.
So what are the main measures that we feel can be taken in order to pave the way to a more unified digital workplace?
2. Choose your gateway
A first consideration is to have a clear idea about what will be the one official umbrella under which all of your business apps will be federated and presented to your end users.
Many organizations may lean toward using their dusty old traditional intranet portal site for this. That may not be the best possible scenario at hand though since we’re seeing that there’s a handful of important things that traditional intranets fail at today.
At eXo, our experience leads us to believe that modern digital collaboration tools and culture should be at the heart of your intranet, and that your intranet is the backbone of your digital workplace.
For this reason, we estimate that the ideal gateway to your business app would be a collaborative intranet platform.
3. Ensure a single entry point
Single Sign-On allows your users to login only once in order to access all the different systems they need at work. Having less accumulated time spent by employees trying to remember or, sometimes, recover or reset their passwords reduces frustration and makes for a better and quicker collaboration process.
It also allows your system manager(s) to deal with a centralized authentication management. This improves the effectiveness and speed of disabling or removing user accounts for example.
This extends beyond internal digital workplace solutions to reach the context of external-facing digital experience solutions as well, such as customer or partner portals. Ensuring a friction-free single entry point to the portal and all the needed business apps therein improves your customer or partner experience.
So make sure that your chosen intranet or digital experience solution does comply with your Single Sign-On needs.
4. Explore deeper integrations where deemed necessary
Federating links to your business apps under a collaborative portal where everyone knows to look is a great starting point. But sometimes your employee experience can be further streamlined through tailored integrations of your business apps to your collaborative intranet’s aggregated, personalized and user-centric experience.
Below is a small selection exemplifying potential deeper integrations to your digital workplace environment:
- File storage integrations for synchronization with existing file storage systems that you currently do not plan to replace.
- Remote calendar synchronizations
- Email integrations
- Video conferencing integrations
- CRM integrations
- Business process integration
- Search integration for searching from your intranet in different external sources.
- Activity stream integration for seeing an aggregated feed of activities taking place in different external systems.
- Notification system integration for receiving notifications from other systems on your intranet.
- And so on…
So make sure you choose an intranet framework that is highly extensible, and then pick (or invest in creating) the integrations that will add business value to your digital workplace and your employee journey.
Moving forward, it helps to then maintain control within your streamlined digital workplace on which business apps are actually being used and which aren’t, work to gradually decrease any potential duplicate tools and always keep the best tools for the job.
In this previous article, we share a few experience-driven tips on how to achieve that.
Discover the new generation company intranet
FAQs
What is an intranet?
intranet is a term used with abundance whenever the subject of internal communication and collaboration is brought up which makes defining it a bit challenging. In its simplest form, an intranet is an internal website for your organization. It is used mainly for top-down communication where employees can access corporate news, policies and announcements.
What are the different types of intranet solutions?
To gather a thorough understanding of intranets and their different types, let’s walk through its history from the early days up to now:
- Intranet Portals
- Enterprise Social Netwrok (ESN)
- Intranet 2.0
What is the difference between intranets and extranets?
The main difference between intranets and extranets lays in the target audience. Intranets typically target users from a specific organization whereas extranets is the hub that can group users from multiple external organizations ranging from partners and suppliers all the way to clients
➝ Discover the real difference between intranet and extranet
What are the benefits of intranet solutions?
Different types of Intranet solutions from the early days up to the intranet 2.0 (commonly referred to as digital workplace solutions) bring a host of benefits to businesses of all sizes and industries. Below is a list of benefits often associated with intranets:
- Streamline internal communications
- Connect employees and eliminate silos
- Foster collaboration
- Improve knowledge sharing
- Recognize and reward employees
What are the different strategies for a successful intranet adoption?
Here are three different strategies for a successful intranet adoption:
- User focus strategy
- Global community management strategy
- Private communities focus strategy
- Tags: Digital workplace, intranet, Tips & Tricks
I am a product marketing manager for enterprise software solutions at eXo Platform. My role involves supporting and leading marketing and operational activities for our digital collaboration platform.
My contributions to this blog revolve around the exciting and fast-paced world of enterprise digital transformation, team collaboration, open-source technology and making the most out of eXo Platform.
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