Your social intranet should speak for your business as a whole, which means it's important to be picky and not go with the first option that presents itself. The following tips will give you the confidence and knowledge it takes to make the right decision. Here's a list of the most important intranet features you should be looking for during your intranet search.

1. 15 ESSENTIAL
INTRANET FEATURES

2. 1. Forum & Commenting Capabilities
Forums not only display certain discussions in a well-organized
manner, they also entice users to participate and share ideas,
which can lead to better and faster solutions.

3. 2. Ideation & Innovation Management
It's essential that users are able to contribute and discuss new
ideas freely. Your social intranet should not only make idea sharing
as easy as possible for its users, but encourage it.

4. 3. Information Discovery & Smart Search
It takes effort to ensure that content in your intranet is properly
tagged, but it also takes a well-designed internal search engine to
find it. Information discovery should be as simple as possible.

5. 4. Streamlined User Interface
Your intranet’s "UI" should be as streamlined as possible. The user
interface has to do with how your company intranet is organized,
and thus directly impacts how your employees will use it.

6. 5. Clean & Meaningful Design
The design of your company intranet is one of the most important
focal points, as it can have a dramatic effect on user experience.
A well-designed intranet is clean and minimalist in nature.

7. 6. Stress-Free Deployment
Deploying a social intranet can be a time-consuming process, so it's
crucial that the company providing the software handles the
deployment process in full, or at least most of it.

8. 7. Compatibility
Depending on how your business's network is set up, certain
intranet software may not be compatible out of the box. Look for a
company that will find a solution that fits your current IT setup.

9. 8. Content Ranking & Rating
Employees should be able to tag content with keywords, rate it with
a star system, and create comments, as internal communication
and discussion are key aspects of a well-designed intranet.

10. 9. Document Sharing
The best social intranet software lets employees upload documents
to a repository or share them directly with certain individuals, and
it comes along with as few data restrictions as possible.

11. 10. Simple Administration
Look for simple administration that can be handled by employees
and those in managerial positions. This will empower users to
make smart decisions and contribute to the health of the intranet.

12. 11. Expertise Search
Social intranet software can help find “who is an expert in what”, as
it allows employees to tag themselves with certain skills. These tags
can be searched to find the right people for a task or project.

13. 12. Employee Profiles
Employees should be given the opportunity to set up profiles listing
their work experience, a short bio, content they've created within
the intranet, discussions they've taken part in, and more.

14. 13. Mobile Functionality
Many people do just as much work on their smart phones and
tablets as they do on their laptops. Accessing an organization's
intranet from a mobile device, then, is an essential intranet feature.

15. 14. Spaces & Groups
When departments have their own virtual workspaces, discussions,
documents, and content can be partitioned so that everything is
located in one place and isolated from other parts of the intranet.

16. 15. Customization & Flexibility
Perhaps the most essential intranet feature is customization. No
two businesses are alike, which makes it important to have intranet
software that can be fully customized for your organization.

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