The Easiest Company Intranet Portal Software​

What is a company intranet portal?

A company intranet portal is the place where everybody in your organization can see what's going on. It's also a digital water-cooler. Think of an intranet portal as the internal homepage for your company.

Papyrs makes it incredibly easy to set up an intranet portal for your company. No technical knowledge is required, so you can just focus on the content you wish to share.

So more specifically, what is the purpose of an Intranet Dashboard?

• It has important navigation to all the sections of the intranet. It links to everything you would expect in a Employee Portal, like HR forms, onboarding manuals, policies and all documentation forming the company's Internal Wiki. There's links to external websites and to other internal tools your company uses, too. And, of course, the dashboard should link to the different divisions and workgroups within your organization. It's a company hub to all relevant information.
• It has a calendar with upcoming events. Let everybody see at a glance what events are coming up. Papyrs has a powerful built-in calendar and also integrates with Google Calendar, so your Papyrs calendar events automatically show up on your smartphones and tablets.
• Show what's new on the Intranet. When new page and new information is added to the Intranet people have to know. So add a widget that automatically links to the most recently created (or modified) pages. Easy.
• A place for Company News and Internal Blog Posts. Make announcements, poll employees, or simply give updates on the company vision and recent achievements. The dashboard is the natural place for all this information too. It can also function as a notice board.
• Search. It almost goes without saying, but the entire intranet should be searchable. Papyrs has Enterprise Search -- it searches through files, contacts, pages, cloud documents, forms, directly from the dashboard. Results show up as you type.
• Open up the intranet with Discussions. Let everybody participate and share ideas. Let people see the most recent discussions right on the Intranet dashboard.

Why do you need to use a company intranet portal?

A question that frequently pops up is "Do we really need a company intranet for our business?" It's a good question to ask. On this page we go over some common symptoms in organizations. Symptoms that we've seen ourselves and that we hear about every day.

These are symptoms your organization may really need an intranet:

1. People have no easy way to stay up to date with the office when on the road, when telecommuting, or after returning from a holiday. Your business has to have a place where everybody can see what's going on. A place where people can check what's happened in the past couple of weeks and a place where people can see what goals the company is working toward.
2. Communication breaks down with customers, suppliers or sub-contractors. If all important documents and decisions about an external contact exist only inside an individual employee's email inbox, then that's asking for trouble. If the employee falls ill, can your company continue to function without missing a beat?
3. Documents go missing, or people lose track of which version of a document is the most recent one. Nothing is as frustrating as working the entire morning on a document only to figure out a newer version of the document exists that nobody told you about.
4. It takes too much time for new employees and interns to get up to speed. So they will continually interrupt their colleagues until they've pieced the basics together. Every organization should have a place with all policies, standard documents and general information everybody needs to know.
5. There's too much paperwork. On the intranet employees should be able to submit holiday time, file reimbursements, or book a meeting room. And it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds.
6. It's hard to keep remote staff in sync. As more people work remotely and more teams become distributed, a secure central site which everyone can access regardless of their location becomes a critical tool to make sure everyone feels connected and up-to-date.

The best way for everybody to stay metaphorically on the same page is to create a document page that contains all important information, all important discussions, decisions, documents and contracts all in one place. Then give access to this page to all relevant parties: salespeople, managers, technical staff, clients, customers, suppliers and so forth. Then just update the page when necessary and all relevant parties will be kept in the loop automatically, because good intranet software has excellent notifications.

An intranet, when set up right, will save your business massive amounts of time. It will smooth out all those unnecessary frustrations that naturally arise in today's complex organizations. By addressing these problems an intranet pays for itself many times over. Tons of people are very happy with Papyrs Intranet. Free 14-day trial. Why not give it a test drive?

How to create a company intranet portal?

The fastest and most cost-effective option to create a company intranet is to use an online intranet platform, like Papyrs. Next to saving on large upfront development costs, a ready-to-go solution like Papyrs allows you to deploy your internal portal today and get started right away, without the need for technical consultants, IT or technical knowledge. Let's have a look at the simple steps involved:

Sign up for the Papyrs trial to create your new company intranet site. After picking a name and domain, you'll be shown your new intranet site right away. Don't worry, you can always change the domain later on, including using your own company's domain (so something like intranet.yourcompany.com).

In order to get a good sense of whether Papyrs fulfils all requirements for your next-generation company intranet, the trial includes all features. That way you can try out functionality like the powerful search function, our modern page editor, version history, permissions, file sharing, notifications, widgets like calendars and checklists, navigation, news feeds, a staff directory and much more.

You don't need to be a Picasso to make your intranet look good and match your company's branding. Simply upload a banner and logo picture, or pre-select any of the banner pictures and color schemes for inspiration.

Your Papyrs intranet site comes with plenty of templates and examples to get started, like a nice visual welcome page, news dashboard, simple wiki documentation page, FAQ-style answers, file library, internal company blog post, reimbursement form, contacts database and more. If you find any of the examples useful, just go ahead and edit them and replace the placeholder information with your actual content.

Editing a page or creating a blank new page is super easy. Click New Page, or the pen edit icon, to launch the editor. We've designed the editor from scratch to make it super-easy to create all kinds of pages, from text documents to rich visual dashboards. Simple start typing your text document or use drag&drop to add whatever widgets you need for your page, like checklists, calendars, embeds, file attachments, discussion areas, online forms or much more.

After creating a first welcome page or two, it's time to start inviting the first people. We typically recommend adding people early on, so more people can start contributing and fill the intranet with useful content. The more content is added, the more people know they can find things on the intranet, start using it, contribute by sharing knowledge and so on.

Click the Invite button from the People directory to add people by email address, after which they'll get an invitation email with how to log in. You can also set the role for someone, so that depending on this role they can either just view content, edit or as admin help with adding more users and setting things up. After inviting the first users, you can dive into the Site Settings further and perhaps enable Single Sign On or allow everyone with your company's email domain to join automatically.

As your company intranet site grows over time, you might want to create subsites around certain departments, teams, projects or topics. Subsites can have their settings like access levels, banner image and menu bar. This makes it easy to scale any Papyrs intranet site, whether you're just using it with a small team of 10 people or inside a company with thousands of users.