Developers and designers of apps and games know all too well how time consuming it can be to come up with a bespoke tech solution. And as your business grows, finding tech solutions that will help you manage your business as well as connecting and collaborating with your freelancers and remote workers will be increasingly important. Even if you are currently a sole operator it’s worthwhile thinking sooner rather than later about how prepared you are for the next phase of your business. In this article we look at how a cloud intranet software could be the flexible option that your business needs to take you to the next level.

Advantages Of Intranets

Intranets are a tried and tested tech solution that offer a range of business benefits particularly in the context of small companies. These business benefits include:

• ease of communication
• improved opportunities for collaboration
• better management and sharing of organizational knowledge.

Even businesses with very small numbers of employees have found that an office intranet offers multiple benefits. This is especially so for developers and designers who typically have teams of remote freelancers or contractors working for them, often in different cities and sometimes even different continents.

Let’s look in turn at each of these benefits in detail.

Ease Of Communication

Even if your colleague is sitting in the same office as you it can be hard to take the time out of your schedules to have a team meeting and catch up on business news. In the early days when you are so busy developing your app or game, seeking prospects and undertaking all the marketing and management of the business yourself, it can seem like an impossible task. Fast forward six months when you have a couple of freelancers on your books working out of Europe and it’s easy to see how internal communications can quickly become an issue.

A cloud intranet will ease that whole process of internal communications, ensuring that your team members and freelancers stay connected. News feeds, interactive blogs or intranet newsletters are a great way to have those conversations with remote staff that traditionally would have taken place in a team meeting or while brewing a coffee in the office kitchen. With the right intranet design, everyone is kept up to date with key company news and events. And because the intranet is cloud based it can be accessed 24/7 from a smartphone or tablet. This means that the employee can keep themselves updated at a time that fits in with their schedule or that makes sense to them locally. You won’t need to set up a 4am Skype call to your colleague in London to update them on a new product! Instead you can share all the details on the intranet.

Improved Opportunities For Collaboration

As your business grows so inevitably will your need to collaborate with others. It could be a video producer to develop a YouTube promotional video or a copywriter to draft a blog article. Rather than emailing these collaborators and having the nightmare of managing links and attachments, simply set up a shared workspace on the intranet. Access to the workspace is controlled by a series of site permissions. And within the workspace collaborators can brainstorm ideas, share insights and feedback and even simultaneously work on documents in real time via the embedded suite of Google Apps. The beauty of the intranet is that collaborators can be certain that the very latest version of the Google Sheet, Google Slide or whatever it maybe is held on the intranet. And once the source document is changed, it is automatically uploaded to the intranet. You will never need to email a link or document ever again. And so as well as being a great time saver, it also does away with the potential to mistakenly access an out-of-date version.

Better Knowledge Management

As your business develops so too will your need to manage organizational knowledge and the intranet is the perfect repository for all that company critical information. And so if a staff member wants to find out the policy on using the company’s branding, maybe it’s to check on commissioning guidelines, or perhaps it’s simply to find out about the vision and values of the business – whatever it may be the company intranet is the place to find all the answers. What’s more, the combination of an intuitive navigation and menu together with an advanced search functionality means that users will quickly and easily be able to access the information they require.

Quick Deployment

There’s one final advantage that a cloud intranet offers and that is quick deployment. Solutions such as MyHub’s utilize pre-built templates that can be customized to your branding and requirements. Developers and designers know better than most that designing tech solutions is a slow and painstaking process, but with the template approach all the hard work has been done.  Not only has the functionality been tried and tested by many others before you, the cloud intranet also comes with a number of features and pages that are applicable to most businesses: from corporate calendars and news feeds to document management systems even quizzes and surveys. And so with an intranet template all these great features are already there just waiting for you to customize. And customization doesn’t just have to encompass your company colors and logo either. It can also mean that additional pages or modules that make sense to your business are added.

The bottom line is that with a cloud intranet you can have a professional looking, fully functioning intranet up and running within a matter of hours. And so your business could be reaping the rewards of improved internal communication, better collaboration and enhanced knowledge management sooner rather than later. What’s more, a cloud intranet is a flexible solution that will adapt and grow alongside your business. And with a fixed monthly fee that includes unlimited data and an unlimited number of users, it’s also cost-effective and provides that all-important cost certainty that is critical for any small business.

Discover for yourself what a difference a cloud intranet could make to your business with an online demonstration or 14-day free trial. Get in touch with the expert team at MyHub today.