Organizational intranets are evolving from being an employee collaboration and document sharing platform to be a more powerful platform that incorporates the best of breed features of new generation technologies and solutions. The concepts of Mash up applications with web 2.0 technologies are being brought into the intranets to provide a single source of truth to the entire organization in a self service manner, with users given the primary focus as the contributors to the content of the intranet through collaboration tools and business solutions.

For a continuously successful intranet implementation, a clear strategy and plan needs to be created with dedicated teams to manage the intranet environment. This will allow your organization to easily identify the corporate intranet needs and implement the same in a structured and phased manner, aid in marketing the intranet as a business tool to the users, and allow them to gracefully accept the intranet in an efficient way.

The success of an intranet is totally dependent on the users as well as the ease of management of the infrastructure. It is very critical that the every piece of information from within or outside the organization must reside on the intranet which can be easily accessed by users and centrally managed. SharePoint is a ideal platform with capabilities like integrated document management, content management, extensible search, self service approach based interface and capabilities to extend the platform with the use of development frameworks which can be utilized to configure the intranet as a single source of truth for all the user communities across the organization.

Implementing an intranet and configuring it to deliver information must be the beginning of a phased approach that will transform the intranet to be a business tool for the organization. Applications and utilities should be implemented that would promote individual level, team level, departmental level and organizational level process automation. Moreover, Extranets should work together with the Intranets to provide and extended Enterprise which reaches out to the customers, partners etc. SharePoint can be a single platform that can be extended to provide collaboration and business applications that can not only cater to the employee requirements, but also to the collaboration requirements of customers, partners etc. via an extranet.

To support the informational, collaboration and business requirements of users located in offices that are sprawled across the globe, the intranet must be capable of delivering content with multi-lingual support, and truly integrate the teams across the world to seamlessly work together. SharePoint with its multi lingual capabilities and site variations provides a centralized management console with regional and localization settings, which can be easily used to deliver information to the audiences across the globe.

Microsoft SharePoint provides such an infrastructure and collaboration capabilities with innate extension and integration features, and can be effectively used as a platform to bring together distributed teams by providing centralized collaboration and process management capabilities with contextual information delivery.