The essential features
of a good corporate intranet

Explore the functionalities that guarantee the utility, usability, dependability, and security of your intranet, while also promoting collaboration, communication, and knowledge management.

As you know, a corporate intranet is not only an essential tool for internal communication and collaboration, but also for corporate culture and even for collective and individual productivity.

Are you planning to equip your organization with a collaborative intranet, or even better, a true Digital Workplace, and do you have a precise idea of the needs it must meet?

To help you make your choice among all the possible features, Mozzaik365 presents you the essential features of a good company intranet, their uses and their benefits.

Read the following carefully!

1. Features that facilitate internal communication

Internal communication is an important vector for employee commitment and well-being. It conditions their support for the joint project and leads them to get involved in its realization.

Original ideas can help you boost your internal communication. Nevertheless, to facilitate communication within your organization, make sure you also integrate the following features :

1.1. The news wall, to share the right information with the right people

The personalized news wall is an essential feature to add to your corporate intranet.

It offers several advantages. It allows :

  • to create a real communication intranet by centralizing internal content (blog articles, posts on social networks, etc.);
  • to send the right information to the right people by targeting communications;
  • to highlight the most important messages and even start a dialogue with employees;
  • to satisfy the needs of each employee, thanks to the subscription to themes.

With the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace News Wall, it is possible to create elegant, standardized, and multilingual content and then push it to a target audience.

features for a modern intranet

The icing on the cake is that employees can react to publications and personalize their information flow by subscribing to their favorite themes. Logically, they are more interested in the content published on the company's intranets. What a way to boost their commitment!

For example, the "My feeds" component integrated into the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace news wall allows employees to subscribe to the themes of their choice in order to be offered the latest related content (web pages or documents).

1.2. The corporate social networking wall, to make your employees your best ambassadors

The social network wall is another feature that you should definitely integrate into your intranet platform. But what is it?

The social network wall, or NewsHub, is an interface on which a selection of relevant publications from different social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) is centralized in your intranet.  

The social network wall is a powerful tool. It allows you to efficiently distribute internally the external communications of your company that may be of interest to your teams.

Above all, a network wall, like the one proposed by Mozzaik365, is a lever of choice to turn your employees into ambassadors. Thanks to this feature, your employees can easily react to your external publications and relay your posts on their own social networks to increase their visibility. This is what we call Employee Advocacy.

📌 To go further, find out how the "Social media wall" feature turns your employees into ambassadors

1.3. Targeting communications to get the right message to the right person at the right time

The targeting of communications is particularly useful for the internal communication department. Thanks to this intranet feature, the communication team can indeed make content appear to certain groups of employees only. This is ideal to ensure a better reception of messages and to avoid employees getting lost in a mass of unsuitable information.

The Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace offers the ability to distribute information to specific audiences. The Event Manager component, for example, allows you to target each event according to the user's profile. Similarly, the News component allows you to push each news item to a specific audience.

2. Features that facilitate knowledge management

The knowledge produced by an organization represents a real intangible capital that should be maintained and valued.

The company intranet can be mobilized in this perspective. A good intranet includes knowledge management features.

Here are the most important ones:

2.1. Electronic Document Management (EDM), to co-construct and share knowledge

An Electronic Document Management (EDM) space is an important ally in formalizing, centralizing and organizing the (often implicit) knowledge that emanates from the company and its employees.

More precisely, this dematerialized document management tool allows to control the life cycle of internal documents, from their (co)creation to their archiving, through their modification, sharing and storage.

SharePoint is a great solution for creating a DMS, especially because it will integrate perfectly with your Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace, and Teams. Enriched by Mozzaik365, SharePoint sites make it easy to share knowledge and organize it.

The key is to be able to find them easily.

2.2. The advanced search, to quickly find the information needed to complete the work

An advanced search feature is a must for any modern corporate intranet. If your intranet is used to share processes, best practices and internal knowledge, you can't do without this feature. And for good reason: if the knowledge is documented, but cannot be found when an employee needs it, the EDM becomes unusable.

This is one of the most powerful features of the Mozzaik365 x Microsoft 365 duo!

Documents can be named, tagged, sorted, associated with metadata and authors, and then found in a few clicks thanks to a search bar and precise filters.

Advanced search saves employees time and frustration. They can easily access the information they are looking for and continually learn from their peers.

Advanced search brings two essential benefits to your intranet:

  • Free up time for your teams to carry out their missions;
  • Increase the skills of all employees, thus making them more efficient in their work.

2.2. Contribution assistance, to allow everyone to easily disseminate their knowledge

Sharing knowledge internally can be as rewarding as it is time-consuming. To encourage knowledge sharing, consider integrating a contribution feature into your intranet platform.

The contribution aid takes the form of a shortcut for creating documents from templates designed by the intranet administrator. It becomes easy to publish beautiful, clear, structured, formatted and illustrated pages. Knowledgeable people can create useful and impactful materials in a few clicks!

Here again, the Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace can be taken as an example. The "contribution aid" component allows users to feed the Content Management System (CMS) with article templates.

Turn your intranet into a Digital Workplace

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3. Features that facilitate internal collaboration

Internal collaboration is essential to the smooth running of a company. Fortunately, a good collaborative intranet can promote teamwork. For that, it must nevertheless include, at least, the following functionalities:

3.1. The company directory with photos, to facilitate interactions between colleagues

Not surprisingly, the company directory with photos is also one of the best features to integrate into a modern corporate intranet.

This component allows you to easily find the contact of a collaborator by simply searching by surname, first name, department, country, project or even by skills.

The ideal way to identify an internal expert on a subject and get in touch with them in one click!

3.2. The Personal Dashboard to enhance individual productivity

The Personal Dashboard is really the dashboard of your employees on the corporate intranet. It centralizes everything that each of them needs to work, inform themselves, communicate and collaborate with their colleagues. It is the first page that employees log on to in the morning, and it serves as a reference point for navigating the Digital Workplace throughout their day.

For each worker:

  • A real saving of mental load and time;
  • A more comfortable use of the intranet;
  • And a greater ability to collaborate with peers.

These benefits have made the Personal Dashboard a must-have in the Digital Workplace, prompting Microsoft to launch the Viva Connection module, which allows you to create dashboards in Teams.

This individual productivity space can also be created by juxtaposing SharePoint and Mozzaik365 Web Parts. With the latter, intranet administrators can set up dashboards tailored to each employee profile. They select the relevant features for each business and make them available only to the targeted populations. User data is then fed into the Web Parts (emails, meetings, tasks, etc.) to create a real work tool for everyone.

3.3. Integration with Teams, to facilitate collaboration within project teams

Integrating your Teams channels into your corporate intranets is a Must Have to facilitate teamwork.

By integrating the Teams collaborative work application into your Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace, you can give your employees easier access to information about their current projects. Notifications, tags, document editing, your intranets will be at the center of collaboration.

Conversely, allowing users to access the intranet from Teams will create a rich, seamless experience across all the company's platforms.

💡 To go further, find out how to Optimize your project management with Teams & Microsoft 365.

The features that make your intranet a useful, practical, reliable and secure site

As we have seen, a modern corporate intranet must be useful, practical and reliable, but it must also be secure! Some features and functions are essential to reach this goal:

4.1. Integration with Microsoft 365, for an all-in-one platform

A good corporate intranet is a digital workspace that brings together all the important tools for employees and ensures a smooth and seamless flow of information for them. This tool must therefore offer an optimal user experience.

The integration of the intranet software in the Microsoft 365 environment is the key to ensure that all the applications useful to your employees fit together without friction. Mozzaik365 allows you to create a true Digital Workplace integrated with Microsoft 365. An indispensable tool to facilitate your staff's daily life!

📌 To go further, discover 7 reasons to base your IT strategy on Microsoft 365

4.2. Features to enhance the accessibility and adoption of your intranet

Some discreet features can be game changers for the inclusion of all. Indeed, some employees face personal challenges that can be obstacles to the adoption of the intranet. Your intranet must make content accessible to all, regardless of users' language level, visual or auditory abilities or how much they are at with computers.

Here are some features to include to make your intranet accessible to all:

  • Make sure you have a translation solution in your platform;
  • Choose a solution such as Microsoft's "Accessibility Checker" to ensure that all content meets accessibility standards;
  • Subtitle videos and transcribe podcasts posted on the intranet so that hearing is not a barrier to accessing information;
  • Create a platform that is beautiful and simple enough to be used by all levels of computer science;
  • Don't forget mobile responsiveness, so that people on the ground can access the content even if they don't have a computer.
Sharepoint intranet's features

4.3. Hosting in the Cloud, for more security and better accessibility

To be completely practical and ensure data security, a good corporate intranet should preferably be hosted on the Cloud, i.e. on servers accessible via the Internet.

The reason? The Cloud makes your intranet platform accessible from any device and from anywhere in the world, by simply logging into your Microsoft account. In addition, Microsoft ensures a very high level of security, frequently renewing its standards in cybersecurity.

With SharePoint company intranets, your employees can securely connect to their workspace, continuing their current tasks even when they are not on your premises.

Good to know : as an Add-in, Mozzaik365 preserves the security of the environment, as it is proposed by Microsoft. Indeed, no client data is visible or hosted by Mozzaik365.

The essential features of a good corporate intranet: the last word

You will have understood, to be fully satisfactory, a company intranet must be equipped with a series of essential features intended to ensure its usefulness, practicality, reliability and security and also to facilitate collaboration, internal communication and knowledge management, according to the needs of your company and your employees.

Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace offers all the best features expected of a modern corporate intranet. 100% secure, intuitive, and with a striking design, our solution adds no less than 50 features to SharePoint and Teams. Enough to meet each of your organization's needs!

🎁 To go further, discover 4 original ideas to boost your internal communication

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The essential features for a modern intranet