Building Intranets and Portals Using Drupal

OPIN's Drupal Intranets & Portals Web Development Services

An intranet is an indispensable tool in improving communication and providing centralized, simplified access to information. As your organization grows, the benefits of having a central, available source for finding information increase.

An intranet mitigates the communication problems that arise in larger organizations. Building your next intranet portal with a highly flexible, scalable, and secure web building platform like Drupal will ensure you will have the most powerful solution on the market.

At OPIN, we have vast amounts of knowledge in understanding and building ambitious global Drupal intranet solutions. We can tell you first hand that the amount of work involved in designing a new intranet or redesigning an existing intranet is minor compared to the time needed to maintain an effective intranet over the longer term.

For this reason, intranets tend to go one of two ways after launch - they either stagnate with few new features added over time or become masses of unstructured content created in a random fashion. This typically continues until the next redesign is announced.

Our goal is to provide you with an effective solution that will not require later redesign, and will allow for easy maintenance to facilitate further development. While intranets do grow organically over time, there needs to be a refined structure to keep huge volumes of information organized.

The Benefits of OPIN's Drupal Internet Distribution

Our world-renowned systematic approach to building ambitious Drupal intranet solutions will improve the structure of the site and will ensure that staff can quickly find what they need. We will deliver an efficient solution that will drive usability and efficiency across your entire organization.

We are more than confident in our abilities to improve the following:

• Communication that reaches your employees and improves engagement

• Customer service and efficiencies by your employees having easier access to tools and resources

• Document management in an effort to reduce your time locating relevant files

• Employee collaboration and knowledge sharing

Intranet Reboot: Areas to Tackle to Revitalize Employee Engagement

Information workers these days tend to use their desktop computer or laptop to access the portal or intranet of their companies. However, employees who use mobile devices for the same reason are reportedly more satisfied.

Around 65% of them who use a PC to access their organization’s intranet say that the experience is satisfactory. Out of those who use a tablet to access their company’s intranet, 73% are said to be satisfied.

The percentage of satisfied employees who use smartphones, on the other hand, is 78%. As such, here are six key areas you must tackle when rebooting your intranet.

Employee experience must be the center of attention

The first step in rebooting your intranet is doing away with what intranet managers believe employees require to complete their work and focus on what employees actually require to perform well. Notifications and communications must be tailored to specific audiences. You must also look for platforms allowing preferences and personalization. Pay attention to findability - search, intuitive navigation, and smarter recommendations.

Redefine the purpose and mission of your intranet

Intranet communication and content must be clearly scoped in order to avoid duplication of content in other management systems, sites, or applications. Doing so will not only improve the relevance and build trust but also ensure that content owners are clear regarding their obligations.

Reduce obsolescence by deploying a flexible, modular, cloud architecture

The difficulty in maintaining and upgrading on-premises systems that are older and highly customized can lead to poor intranet experiences. Feature and security updates are delivered regularly by cloud intranet platforms, thus ensuring easy scalability for intranet managers as the organization grows, be it organically or through acquisitions and mergers.

Ease of search and navigation

Invest in platforms that have a robust information architecture for easy search and navigation. Labelling, tagging and metadata must be invested in to eliminate user frustration and enrich pages and documents. Understand the execution of queries by users and deploy analytics to determine where queries have too many or too few results that can be useful.

Creation of value for employees

Machine learning, AI and similar intelligent content services can help in saving a lot of time due to the mining of common activity patterns. In turn, better connections and recommendations are delivered across content and people. The search and navigation experience can be significantly enriched via automated data extraction.

Taking the mobile-friendly route

When it comes to common tasks, avoid the intranet from turning into a simple launch page. Instead, common actions must be broken up into mobile-friendly apps. Content must be designed in a componentized manner so that it can be easily consumed on smaller devices.

Why OPIN for Your Next Intranet Project?

OPIN is an established digital agency with staff distributed across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. We are a diverse collective of 35 innovators, planners and doers, continuously reimagining digital products and practices to help clients communicate with their audiences in the most impactful ways. 

With over 200 projects for 120 clients, we have successfully delivered websites, intranets, and mobile applications across a wide range of industries. Our teams leverage that experience to ensure we are bringing the best and most innovative approaches from each sector.

For nearly a decade, our agency has partnered with clients interested in developing the most advanced digital products, ranging from global intranets to internet-enabled smart meters.  As a result, our teams are at the center of some of the most ambitious and award-winning Drupal projects.