By Jason Bloomberg
Intranets – private web-based networks for employee use – have been around since the 1990s, but as happens with so many technologies, they have been transformed in both purpose and appearance over the last quarter-century.
Today, with the COVID-19 virus forcing many employees to work from home, there are new requirements for today’s next-generation intranets.
We spoke to seven modern intranet platform providers and found that the notion of intranet itself has been transformed. Part portal, part communications app, part collaboration tool – today’s intranets check a wide variety of boxes for organizations of various sizes in the COVID-19 era.
Not your parent’s intranet
Early intranets were essentially web-based portals that linked to corporate information and document sources. As technology improved, they linked to employee-facing applications as well.
However, this first generation of intranet largely failed, as employees rarely visited them. Even when they did surf the intranet, they didn’t stay for long, as the point of a portal was to find one’s way quickly somewhere else.
To make matters worse, developers had to custom-build such intranets, an expensive proposition that limited the ability for organizations to update the content and functions of their intranets in a lightweight, cost-effective manner.
