Intranets leaped at the chance to play a pivotal role as the most suitable communicative systems for the last several years. They are nicely welcomed by both enterprises and small companies being similar to the Internet except for their special access permissions merely to employees within the company.
Siri, what is an intranet?
An intranet is defined, best of all for understanding, as resources available only inside of the corporate network. It is implemented for internal communications mostly with different levels of permissions. There are various portal-like systems that are commonly used by enterprises to handle its operation:
- local bug tracking;
- continuous integration server;
- VCS server (Git, Mercurial, SVN, TFS, Perforce, etc.);
- local news portal;
- online user management;
- HR management etc.
Every system could be developed on a proper platform, except some narrowly specialized resources such as Jenkins, GitLab, JasperReports server, Redmine, etc. At the same time, all of them, typically enough, might become combined under one umbrella by means of Liferay.
- knowledge bases (wikis);
- documents open to general use.
Personal account features:
- profile settings;
- calendar management, scheduling;
- vacation and salary management;
- human resources tools etc.
Why do enterprises need intranets?
Corporate portals are similar to any ordinary Internet websites which principal task is to let an access to the entire information and arrange a mutual internal cooperation.
The intranet bounds together digital assets and employees by corporate ties resulted in a close-knit communication.
Let’s take a closer look at the following three C’s to gain an understanding of intranet boons.
Remember a situation in ‘Mr. Robot’, movie spoken of by absolutely all today, in which the main character Elliot Anderson was turned out. A young cyber-security engineer working on Fsociety penetrated the most secure data facility of the US having pretended to be a famous investor.
There was used a backdoor computing method to embed surreptitiously the Raspberry Pi (a full-fledged computer) into the cooling system to bypass a normal authentication in the future.
An average user can’t hack somebody’s account of enterprise system being outside the building because it requires a connection to the network (e.g., to plug in, to insert a third-party device as a flash card or disc etc.). In its turn, Liferay could serve as a resource inside the network for providing a safe operation. With the help of mature dev-ops, the intranet is easily set up by all acceptable principles.
Get more on social engineering in action watching the movie Season 1, Episode 5.
You can control all digital assets and content of the company totally. There is no need to complicate the assets access.
Imagine, a blog of the company is designed with Jive Platform. When some changes happen with a project team, it is required to delete and add a new user in order to limit or grant an access. The new user has to be registered, entered in the white list, and assigned with a set of permissions. It is a series of actions, isn’t it?
Liferay makes it much easier with an out-of-the-box LDAP (Active Directory) integration. Nothing is beyond your mind. As it should be, a center of user management is used in any corporate portal. It comes to a data storage on a hierarchical basis with dynamic fields. It enables the inheritance and permission hierarchy.
Corporate intranets are configured and set up on-site without any secondary vendor engagement. However, setting tasks might be outsourced as a part-time job for dedicated teams or individual dev-ops.
For instance, we helped a client in telecommunications field who provides high-performing Ethernet services through the wide distributor network to implement Liferay and all its dependencies. The company outsources all tasks associated with configuring system settings while all data belonging to the company. You have got there an on-demand partnership.
A part-time cooperation like that is a prevalent phenomenon of enterprises with irregular tasks. In essence, there are ten-hour tasks per week, 30-day issues per year, etc. on the subscription basis. Enterprises benefit from part-time partnering with third parties because they do not need to pay extra costs with a non-constant flow of tasks. It is important to have as a partner a qualified vendor experienced in implementation Liferay solutions with being open dev-ops in staff.
How to launch and succeed with the corporate intranet on Liferay?
Now you’ve got acquainted with three actionable C’s which accompany Liferay. We decided to list alternately the most common points companies will face in the way of active steps adopting Liferay.
Meet the Magnificent Eight
- Quiz. A vendor defines in detail client’s requirements for the purpose of challenges the company currently has and goals to achieve.
- Use ready-made. Allowing for a feature-rich Liferay set of tools, the vast majority of customer needs can be satisfied with the standard out-of-the-box solutions, the rest are singled out and planned for making custom modules.
- Colour your theme. Almost always it is something exceptional because every company has its corporate identity.
- Make friends. Then LDAP has to be friendly adjusted with Liferay. If a user is introduced into the local database access is allowed. In case the user logs in firstly then a set of permissions is generated in a split second. It is important because a centralized user management lets store all dozens of thousands of records in one place.
- Design a website, it could be put into service when out-of-the-box solutions are finished saving the time.
- Customize. Next, in turn, a tailored functional comes. A photo-video gallery for the Chilean telecom provider and a social hybrid of Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter for the global translation and localization agency are examples of remarkable custom work we’ve done there.
- Teach and train. After all tech things done, it moves to the employee training. Workshops, webinars, skype meetings and gigabytes of guides are usually offered for clients to give them a hand pioneering a new way of thinking.
- Rely on. Support services are available in accordance with a subscription plan approved or off and on tasks.
When you should set about your intranet
- The growth of staff. Companies, where the quantity of in-house personnel surpassed 50 members, have a need for a local collaborative system indeed.
- Security is of high priority. Whether it be the company with less than 10 employees, from a banking, financial, world of law, or IT security field, etc., it may demand a high level of data security.
- Working under NDA. If the client hires the vendor, he provides a VPN access for him ensuring access for employees only.
Almost every business which outsources tasks to the software providers practices signing NDA and providing VPN access to the internal resources the vendor need to meet obligations.
It must be admitted, apart from entirely specialized resources Liferay allows centralizing management almost all of business processes of the company. Actually, all you need is Liferay.
Where to find the right provider?
We won’t speak about it at great length here. To be confident firmly in your tomorrow request a company staffed with all-mighty dev-ops, Java experienced developers well-skilled with Liferay. Here at Aimprosoft, we pride ourselves on our expertise with Liferay solutions for enterprises and ready to relieve you.
If you clarified yourself the intranet is the very thing your enterprise need, then Liferay will be an awesome solution as one united hub for all principal business processes of the company. Not only dozens of success stories of our customers confirm that point, but we didn’t leave ourselves aside too – our own corporate intranet is based on Liferay.
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