There’s no denying that SharePoint is the most prevalent intranet platform when it comes to organization and internal communications today. SharePoint and Office 365 intranets are gaining significant ground for the contemporary employee engagement and collaboration features they provide, along with traditional intranet features such as internal communication and information management.
Here at Origami, we’ve designed and built a digital workplace solution that leverages all the powerful features of SharePoint and Office 365, topped with out-of-the-box features for a truly digital, social and engaging workplace experience, that employees love!
When it comes to evaluating platforms for a new intranet solution, it’s crucial to understand the benefits of potential features, to ensure you achieve the most appropriate digital workplace requirements for your organization. Without further ado, let’s dive into the list of 7-must-have intranet features for a digital workplace solution:
1. Superior Search & Information Retrieval
Advanced Search
Origami search capabilities enable your team to quickly find the information they need. Whether employees are looking for documents, staff, resources or other organizational information, Origami lets you easily search your entire site by defining and refining your search criteria. Employees can filter search results by selecting a particular topic or ‘tag’ in their search query. Search results are displayed in order of popularity to save time and help employees to find the most relevant and up-to-date information fast.
Employee Search
Origami helps you find and connect with people across your organization with an engaging Employee Directory and SharePoint Org Chart. Connect your entire organization by enabling staff to quickly and easily find each other through predictive text search and the ability to filter information by location, department and any other parameter in Active Directory. Staff can easily add an image to their profile to help put a face to their name and contact information can be retrieved at a glance – no clicks required! Origami automatically syncs Active Directory for staff profile updates, so you can rest assured that as long as AD is kept up-to-date, the employee directory on your intranet is too!
Integrated Mobile
Enabling your employees to securely access and interact with others via mobile device is a necessity. Meaningful mobile interactions designed to fulfill a relevant goal in context are far more valuable than just mobile responsive intranet.
Origami seamlessly integrates with Office 365 mobile app providing in context experience to employees when they’re on the go. Content and functionality are tailored to provide notifications, information search and retrieval without interruptions and fitting in naturally with the user’s flow.
2. Team Engagement
A worthwhile intranet solution delivers employee engagement and social workplace capabilities for a digitally engaged workplace. Origami intranet’s team engagement capabilities bring your team together through community-building features including Feedback, Idea crowdsourcing, Events and an Employee Recognition ‘kudos’ feature.
Social Engagement
Employee engagement is all about fostering strong internal communications and a sense of authentic connection. With an interactive employee bulletin board along with the ability to comment and like news updates and events, Origami provides the channels for your workforce to express themselves and connect with one another.
Additionally, Origami helps your teams to generate innovative ideas with Idea crowdsourcing sites. Authorized users can quickly create initiative-related or community sites with Origami’s built-in templates and Office 365 teams.
Event Management
Events add a new dimension to the social capabilities of your digital workplace as employees can RSVP, like and comment on upcoming events. Origami streamlines the process of event administration and management so you can easily plan and organize engaging event invitations. With integrated Office 365 capabilities, Origami enables you to easily schedule events, push updates and manage event attendance with automatic syncing to everyone’s Outlook calendar for seamless attendee management.
Employee Bulletin Board
Take the employee bulletin board out of the office kitchen and onto your intranet with Origami. Enable your workforce to collaborate and share updates on an interactive employee bulletin board that promotes authentic engagement. Unite your entire organization regardless of everyone’s physical location and start to shape a culture of inclusivity and connection today.
3. Internal Communications
An engaging digital workplace solution serves as the backbone for disseminating internal communications and organizational news, while also empowering employees to interact with the latest news updates.
User-Generated Communications
Origami promotes all forms of lateral, cross-team and user-generated communications via the employee bulletin board, crowdsourcing/idea generation hub, comments and polls, all serving to empower your workforce to contribute to their digital workplace.
Organizational Announcements
Workplace communications are much more powerful when they’re relevant and targeted. Company News and Announcements are the heart of your digital workplace communications. Origami keeps everyone in the know with the ability to easily group and filter news and events by region, location or team to provide a personalized content experience to users. Origami’s pre-built internal communication capabilities keeps your workforce up-to-date with timely organizational announcements.
Interactive and Modern Layouts
Internal Communication is about delivery as much as it’s about the message that’s being conveyed. With this in mind, your organization needs an intranet that’s trusted by its staff members to truly augment organizational communication. Origami provides built-in interactive and modern layouts for your communications and announcements. Content authors have the flexibility to choose the right template depending on the message type, enabling them to truly engage staff in important communications.
4. Knowledge Management
Workspaces
Experience the power of a collaborative intranet solution with Origami’s departmental workspaces. A workspace is basically an online community where contributors work together and have shared visibility into each other’s projects, documents, tasks and deliverables. Separate workspaces are key to an organized digital workplace where related content, documents and discussions are partitioned and kept together.
With pre-built intranet templates, you can create as many project and site directories as your business needs in no time. You can have workspace sites for teams and/or departments like IT, HR, Finance, Legal and more, while saving your intranet administrators and content managers significant time setting up and managing workspaces across your organization.
Origami takes the work out of endless email threads with a centralized, searchable and efficient knowledge hub for project-specific content and communications, along with built-in search and tagging capabilities. Access policies, procedures and documents fast, with Origami’s best in class intranet knowledge management capabilities.
With built-in security features, Origami also makes the security and administration of your workspaces a breeze. You can grant or restrict access to any specific collaborative project, team site or content with the right permissions and security privileges
Employee Tools & Resources
Move away from the burden of paperwork and streamline your tasks with support from Origami. Enable a full set of services on your workplace resource site with access to information such as a new hire toolkit, technical request submission, expense submission, vacation booking, form and procedure finder and more.
Give your employees instant access to the documentation, policies and procedures required to perform their roles with Origami’s Policies, Procedures and Forms Directory.
5. Document Management
A truly digital workplace solution improves your team’s productivity and never gets in the way of getting work done. That’s why your digital workplace must have enterprise-level document management capabilities. Origami facilitates document organization, collaboration and sharing across your workspace with document management capabilities powered by Office 365 and SharePoint.
Document Search, Preview and Sharing
Your staff will love how easy it is to find and access documents they’re looking for with features like site-wide search, keyword tagging and document favoriting capabilities. Document access and sharing on Origami is secure and document search results appear in order of popularity giving employees fast access to the most relevant documents. Intranet managers can manage authorization and access to documents and files with role-based security, making them visible to authorized people only.
Document Governance, History and Version Control
Enable staff to collaborate on the same, most current file without the hassle of multiple document versions and multiple emails. Origami gives you full visibility into all changes to a document over time with document history and version control and the ability to revert back to an older version if necessary.
6. Employee Recognition
A modern digital workplace is social by default, and for that your intranet has to be people-centric. Origami helps you shape a people-centric workplace culture with employee-focused communications. Promote and encourage employee retention with engaging employee features such as the employee recognition ‘kudos’ feature, which enables staff to recognize fellow employees for a job well done and broadcast their kudos to the entire organization
7. Trusted Digital Workplace Experts & SharePoint MVPs
A fully functioning and engaging digital workplace solution is no easy undertaking. The last thing you want is to roll out a bland intranet or one that results in low engagement and adoption rates. We understand the importance of an engaging digital workplace that ticks all the boxes and our experts are here to support you in promoting the new technology as well as supporting you during the organizational culture-shift to a digital workplace.
With so many intranet project implementations under our belt, we help organizations get up and running fast with our proven intranet for Office 365 delivery framework. Our digital workplace experts and SharePoint MVPs work alongside your team, making sure we deliver a fully-functioning intranet that is tailored to your needs in as little as 6 weeks.
Origami’s guided project delivery process covers all elements of a successful intranet project including the facilitation of defining intranet requirements, content design and mapping, intranet branding, configuration, testing, rollout and ongoing support.
Culture Builders & Business Enablers
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Director of Product at Origami. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.
Our vision at Origami for a modern digital workplace solution is more than just an intranet. It’s a business enabler and culture builder. It’s a facilitation platform that brings together everything your team needs for helpful, relevant and engaging workplace experience. Origami’s pre-built intranet with its suite of productivity, collaboration and communication features helps your team to stay productive and engaged while getting work done.
Book a demo today to see how Origami’s pre-built intranet platform folds and shapes to your unique business needs and supports your employees.