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I came across a very enlightening article on the intranetjournal.com site titled "The Intranet Model: Strategy for Success". The article lists our four main objectives of an intranet:- 1) Communications -- e.g. News and events 2) Business Processes -- e.g. Absence Booking workflow 3) Knowledge Management -- e.g. Best Practice documentation 4) Collaboration -- e.g. Cross-department working group discussion board According to the article, early intranets were mainly communication driven, but slowly evolved to include productivity tools to encompass these other areas. Let us assess HyperOffice, a popular web based intranet software on these four counts. Communication - HyperOffice has an inbuilt email tool, as well as has the ability to publish company events, announcements and news on the group dashboard. Business Processes - They have an inbuilt database management tool, which enables users to set up automated workflows for common business processes like lead tracking, order processing etc. It may be argued that the tool lacks sophistication, but on the other hand, their target market - small businesses - don't need to set up very complex workflows, and ease of use is a very important factor for them. Knowledge Management - HyperOffice includes document storage features, and the ability to customize the structure and content of group pages from which links can be provided to specific documents. It may be noted that it is not sufficient to simply have knowledge stored away in a document repository. It is equally important to provide content around knowledge and make it more compelling for users. The ability to create customized group pages with links to documents goes a great length in acheiving this. Collaboration - HyperOffice includes the ability to collaborate on documents with features like versioning, notifications, document locking etc. They also include th ability to collaborate through wikis, a popular modern collaboration technology. All in all, HyperOffice does account for itself pretty well against the criteria of the internet model.
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