Scenario
You’re constantly answering the same question. You can’t find a document in your email. Staff is constantly asking you to resend a form. A policy document on Dropbox is constantly being modified or deleted by accident.
Resolution
Set up an intranet site.
An intranet site is a website only your business can access. The purpose of an intranet site is to make information easily accessible. You can have many different types of information all in one location: shared calendars, policies, polls, and discussions.
Additional Information
If you’re new to intranet sites
If you’re new to intranet sites, then you want to start small. A good place to start is with a single project, because you have the most control to decide how information is organized.
As an example, let’s say you’re a member of the firm’s Sales and Marketing team. Instead of a bunch of files and folders with no instructions, you create a site for Consultations. In that site, you control the calendar, checklists, forms to email, and task assignments – all in one place!
Easy to setup templates
If you use G Suite, Google Sites offers templates to easily deploy an intranet site in a few minutes. The editor is of point-and-click variety; you don’t need any experience customizing websites or programming to get started.
If you use Office 365, Microsoft’s solution is SharePoint. SharePoint is not as easy as Google Sites, but it offers more features. SharePoint isn’t as easy as Google Sites, because SharePoint was designed for large organizations. What’s worse, SharePoint has two versions, so finding answers can be tricky.
Avoid duplication
When you setup an intranet site, the most important thing is to avoid keeping information in multiple places. After all, when information is in multiple locations people don’t know where to look. Therefore, you want to use links whenever you can. For example, if you save files in Google Drive, you should link that folder to your site. If you updated a policy, then send an email with a link to the updated policy.
