Corporate life is increasingly moving into the digital space. Employees of companies interact using various cloud services and tools that facilitate collaboration, simplify remote work, and significantly optimize business processes.
Creating a corporate portal is a logical step towards business digitalization. Since most processes in modern companies take place virtually, why not combine them into one space? In essence, a corporate portal is a digital office, a comprehensive work environment that contains all the necessary resources and information for both individual and teamwork.
The implementation of such a portal is simplified by the fact that there are ready-made out-of-the-box solutions that can be installed and launched quickly enough. One of these solutions is SmartPoint Intranet, whose functionality can be flexibly customized to the needs of the organization, and whose implementation – from deployment to testing and launch – takes only one month. The design of the corporate portal can also be customized to match the company’s style.
Not just a corporate website
Initially, corporate portals served as an internal website that published news and other information for employees, created document databases, forums, etc.
But gradually, portals have evolved into platforms for corporate data integration, business applications, collaboration tools, and task management. For a company, such a portal is an opportunity to combine organizational processes and gather everything necessary for cooperation in one place in a structured way. For employees, it is an opportunity to get a single point of entry to all the information and tools they need to perform their tasks and work with colleagues.
What does a corporate portal consist of?
A corporate portal may contain such components as News, Organizational Structure, Office Map, Employee Handbook, Calendar of Events, Media Library, Library, Knowledge Base, onboarding materials, sections dedicated to the company’s mission, corporate rules, etc.
In addition, the portal makes it possible to create workspaces for individual teams, as well as personal digital offices for employees. In addition, it contains tools for managing employee productivity, tracking task completion, and recording working hours. Let’s take a closer look at some of the components.
Personal workspace
Having your own office is not a luxury when it comes to a portal account. Each employee can customize their personal workspace to suit their needs, so that they have everything they need at their fingertips and can conveniently interact with the entire organization’s information infrastructure from a single window.
For example, SmartPoint Intranet includes a calendar where you can schedule meetings with colleagues and view both your own and corporate events. You can also create a personal knowledge base here. In the account, employees can easily find information on their payments, find out how many vacation or sick leave days they have left.
A set of services makes it easy to apply for days off or remote work, create a request for the purchase of equipment or office supplies, or for access to certain portal resources. All this significantly saves both the employees’ time and the time of HR specialists.
Task Manager allows you to view the list, status, and deadlines of your tasks, set tasks for your colleagues, and find out what stage of completion they are at. Moreover, you can manage your account remotely from any device that has access to the Internet.
Team workspace
SmartPoint Intranet allows you to create separate workspaces for different departments or projects in order to optimize teamwork. Such spaces accumulate all the necessary resources for teamwork. It contains a library of documents that team members can work on together, news related to that particular department, presentations, links to useful articles and videos, and more.
At the same time, team areas in SmartPoint Intranet can be organized in different ways to meet the needs of teams. For this purpose, there are several flexible templates to choose from with the ability to add various elements, such as a tool for generating and storing ideas. All this allows you to customize the most convenient environment for effective teamwork.
Organizational structure and employee directory
Visualization of the organizational structure allows users to see how the organization is structured, what departments it has, and how they are subordinated. The structure can be displayed in two ways: as department branches and by employee.
To find a specific colleague by name, you can use the employee directory. This directory is a set of cards with a quick search function. Each card contains a photo and personal information of the employee, as well as buttons that allow you to chat with or call them directly from the directory.
Integrations for more efficient collaboration
For any organization, it is very useful to be able to integrate all the IT resources it uses into a portal. In this way, an internal corporate portal can serve as a single point of authentication for employees to access and work with all these resources in a single interface.
You can integrate email service, messenger, CRM and ERP systems, HCM and LMS solutions, use data stored in different locations on the company’s network in a centralized way, and more. After logging in to the portal, the user automatically gets access to any corporate resources, if their role allows it. For additional protection of all these data and systems, you can configure two-factor authentication when logging in to the portal.
Since the SmartPoint Intranet corporate portal is already integrated with Microsoft 365, it greatly simplifies the work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and other platform tools. For example, you can create a new document for collaboration directly from the portal workspace.
Since employees constantly use the messenger to communicate with colleagues, the integration of SmartPoint Intranet with Microsoft Teams is very convenient. You can pin an entry button to the portal on the quick access panel in the messenger and work with it directly in Teams.
Thus, you can use Teams as a single window for working with the entire IT infrastructure of the company. At the same time, your teams in the messenger will match the teams’ workspaces on the portal, and the documents stored in the messenger’s team channels will be synchronized with the documents of the corresponding departmental workspaces on SmartPoint Intranet.
In addition, in such portal elements as the organizational structure and employee directory, you can see the status of each colleague in Microsoft Teams and directly from these sections write a message, make a call, or schedule a meeting, which will be displayed in all calendars—in Teams, on the portal, and in Outlook. All this helps to avoid unnecessary links in communication.
What benefits do companies get from implementing a corporate portal?
We have already mentioned some of the benefits that a corporate portal provides to companies. For your convenience, let’s list them and add some other equally important ones.
Increasing employee productivity
The corporate portal provides employees with convenient, quick access to all the information, documents, and tools they need for their work. As a result, employees save a lot of time searching for and switching between different systems and services and can focus more on their tasks. Integration with email services and messengers simplifies communication, which also contributes to employee productivity. In addition, task management tools help organize both individual and team work and track its results.
Strengthening corporate culture
With remote and hybrid work schedules, it is especially important to maintain employee engagement and a sense of involvement in corporate life. This is one of the tasks of the portal. Thanks to the news feed and event announcements, employees will always be informed about important events, and the media library with photo and video reports will allow them to get acquainted with corporate events that have already taken place.
Reducing staff outflow
Thanks to integration with LMS solutions, the portal makes it easy to organize employee training and professional development, while minimizing the workload of the HR department. Access to the knowledge base and corporate library on the portal also contributes to employee growth. Providing ample development opportunities is one of the key tools for retaining the best specialists.
Reducing the cost of onboarding new employees
Having a portal also greatly simplifies the onboarding process, making it more comfortable and efficient. And again, with minimal involvement of the HR team. After entering the portal, a new employee can read important corporate news, event announcements, a calendar, view a categorized knowledge base, see the organizational structure, etc. In addition, you can organize a series of training courses so that the employee can consistently and systematically familiarize himself with the organization of processes in the company, rules, and other important information.
Process automation
Thanks to the integration with Power Automate on the SmartPoint Intranet portal, you can automate business processes, such as document approvals. If your approval chains are complex and extensive, you can also use the SmartPoint DMS solution to make the most complex approval processes easy and fast.
Hub of corporate life
In the era of digitalization of business and hybrid work schedules, a corporate portal can take on the function of a full-fledged center of company life. Combining all the processes and resources of an organization in one virtual space greatly simplifies employee interaction and increases team efficiency.
It also helps to cultivate a sense of team unity, regardless of whether employees work in the office or remotely. If you want to learn more about the benefits and capabilities of a corporate portal, request a consultation from SMART business experts.
