Passageways Blog

Selecting a partner for your employee intranet solution is a decision that will impact each of your employees for the next several years. It is a decision that requires close attention to both the product offering and the company delivering the solution. You want to make sure you make the right choice the FIRST time because Re-populating a new portal and retraining your staff after a poor experience with the first portal is a recipe for disappointment and frustration. Don’t make that mistake! 

Through our extensive research and experience the Passageways has identified ten key considerations that should be observed before choosing your portal solution. 

1. Priority #1: make sure the solution streamlines your corporate communications! Simple tools such as announcements, calendars, sign-up events and discussion boards need to be easy to create and maintain for all of your staff, not just IT. These tools should help organize information from various departments including FAQs, documents, forms and contact details. Your chosen solution needs to meets this basic requirement. 
2. What is your mission and vision? How well understood is your strategic plan? Your employee portal should allow you to keep your employees focused on the key initiatives and allow you to use unique functionality sets such as, performance dashboards to track progress. Dashboards should be broken down into department and project levels. Your portal needs to ensure your goals are well communicated and understood by your employees. 
3. A common goal among our customers is to create a search-driven self service environment. Creating and publishing de-centralized content should be encouraged. Gone are the days of encyclopedias and centralized publishing. Every department should have the ability to easily create and update information quickly, efficiently. This burden should not solely fall upon IT.   
4. Your intranet platform should enable users to connect their questions with topic experts, product specialists. Such capability requires rich and searchable employee profiles and the ability to instant message experts immediately! This project should dramatically improve your customer service and exception handling. 
5. Your intranet platform should handle the countless number of documents and vendor contracts you share regularly across the organization. Providing access to a centralized repository with the ability to perform full text search is both convenient and efficient. Consider the time savings that Google offers you each and every day. The same should be true while searching of documents and vendor information within the organization. Versioning of important policy and compliance documentation is another important capability that a regulated industry workforce needs to establish. 
6. What about social tools? Web 2.0? Your intranet platform should provide the advances of various tools such as the ability to maintain a profile, the ability to subscribe to (follow) other employee profiles, and the ability to comment on documents and on employee profiles. Activity feeds are a great way to stay in touch with updates from various team members and departments. Enterprise class social tools should allow you to switch these social tools off when required and are for employee interaction only. They should not link out to Facebook or LinkedIn. Be sure to look for social tools to be built within your portal solution as these are help to increase efficiency and engage younger employees. 
7. Your intranet platform should facilitate process automation. Expense reporting, supply ordering and event/training sign-ups should be easily handled through your intranet. All existing forms should be searchable and routed right on the Intranet portal itself. Such projects make the portal project multi-dimensional and ensures rapid acceptance by your staff.  Cumbersome processes should able to be fully integrated and streamlined within your intranet solution. 
8. Collaboration between departments is essential in every organization. Your intranet platform should allow you to streamline the way your Human Resources department connects with your Marketing department and how your Accounting department connects with your IT department and so on. Your staff should have the ability to open requests and track those requests through completion. It turns out that this is the most appreciated change we have brought about through our solutions. Bringing transparency and accountability for inter-department requests builds a collaborative (and accountable) team across the enterprise. 
9. Organizations exist to offer products and services to their customers. Ensuring that the information on these products and services is readily available to your staff is essential. Inefficiencies can be eliminated thereby ensuring your customers receive the most relevant information, immediately. Utilizing a searchable “Wiki” structure to help capture product information is fast becoming the norm for most organizations and this Wiki resource should reside on your intranet platform.
10. Your intranet platform should allow you to create virtual departments and branches. It should also allow you to create ad hoc virtual team pages for projects and committees. These team pages can be used to document knowledge that is otherwise stuck in everyone’s mailbox, network drive or their head. Tracking each employee’s contribution to organizational information is an important aspect of intranet platform progression.

We hope you find these considerations helpful in selecting the right solution for your organization.

Passageways consults with each of our customers to ensure that each customer portal is configured to reflect their organization’s culture. Your portal will become a part of your corporate identity. A well delivered project leads to employee engagement and excitement. Fun initiatives including; naming contests, organization-wide portal “scavenger hunts” or auctions on the portal are common strategies to ensure end-user participation with Passageways customer portals.   

The considerations outlined herein are essential in considering your employee intranet solution provider. Ultimately, there are three main choices you have: 

Every organization’s needs are different so there is no single direction to recommend here. However, one ought to carefully consider the many steps involved in delivering and sustaining a world-class portal solution including: installation, configuration, customization, training and partnering with a provider for support over the next several years. A good partner steps in to supplement your team as required and eliminates being at the “mercy” of your Intranet team’s priorities. With that being said; Passageways is the leading provider of Employee Intranet solutions having delivered several hundred portals across the world.  Here are some considerations about our solution for your review:

1. Passageways has been serving customers with our portal solutions since 2003. Eight years later our first ten customers, along with a number of others, continue to use our intranet platform.
2. A near 100% customer retention rate establishes how mission critical this solution becomes when delivered well and a focus on service has ensured solid reliability over time.
3. Since inception, Passageways has acquired two intranet companies. Despite our advanced offering and notable references, migration was still challenging. Old habits are hard to break and an inefficient, non-scalable platform will set your organization back by several years.

Great Intranet portal projects invariable start with organization buy-in and shrewd partner selection. Such projects quickly achieve employee trust thereby leading to greater productivity and satisfaction.  And now you have ten important considerations to help you make a great decision!

Please don’t hesitate to connect with our employees or customers to learn more about this project and its nuances. You’ll also find several valuable resources at our website at www.passageways.com and if you want to see a side-by-side comparison of Passageways feature list to Sharepoint or any other intranet package please email us at sales@passageways.com and request it.