Intranet Glossary: terms you need to know
An intranet is a network internal to an enterprise that uses the same methodology and techniques as the internet but is accessible only to employees. Common intranet services include websites supporting corporate communications, internal collaboration and knowledge management, centralized access to various business applications, and service/self-service for employee applications like HR, finance, and IT – Gartner
Even though the intranet is a buzzword, the core concept is often shrouded in mystery which eventually puzzles a lot of people.
With lots of technical jargon, acronyms, and terminology, it can be misleading or interfere in setting up and managing an intranet. But the fact is adopting an intranet is a far simpler and easier process than most people realize.
It is very important to decipher the world of intranet and jargon bust. That is where the intranet glossary emanates into action to unravel the language of intranets in developing an understanding of the terms involved.
- Access Rights (or page permissions) this allows the intranet administrators to ensure data privacy by controlling access by staff members to individual pages on the intranet.
- Anchor link / Hyperlink Usually displayed as blue underlined text, an anchor link refers to the clickable words in a hyperlink which take you to another web page or document on the internet.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Technology that simulates human intelligence typically by learning, mimicking their actions, understand the complex situation with problem-solving skills. In terms of Intranet AI automates mundane business tasks making them data-driven, easy, personalized, and relevant.
- Analytics: Intranet analytics classifies the status of the intranet performance and helps to measure its effectiveness – it explicates whether there is an improvement, decline, or saturation at any point.
- Blogs: Corporate Blogs are about insights on the company’s Intranet features to highlight the key information, share, and communicate thoughts to their employees.
- Cloud Intranet: It facilitates employees with secure access to all networks and tools to communicate, collaborate and share effectively, working from anywhere and anytime. It is hosted in the cloud rather than on-premises.
- Collaboration: The process in which employees and teams work together to complete a business task or accomplish a common goal.
- Cognitive Enterprise search: The intranet is equipped with an AI-enabled search feature to improve search results with smart suggestions, personalized content, users’ interests, roles, and locations.
- Communication: This refers to sharing of information over the intranet. The intranet provides tools for “Top to Bottom”, “Bottom to Top” and “Peer to Peer” communications among the employees.
- Content Management System: CMS provides users to create, manage and deliver content without any specialized technical knowledge. It is equipped with many ready-to-use custom page templates to deliver the smoothest and easiest editing and authoring experience.
- Employee Engagement: Employee engagement is about the commitment towards the business goal and willingness to do their best every day, going the extra mile to finish their work in the organization.
- Employee Self-service: Often used in the context of human resources, it allows employees to access company information and data, simplify the process of applying for leave, etc.
- Information Silos: It is about difficulties to access and sharing of data and information freely across an organization.
- Intranet Administrator: The staff member with overall responsibility for the functioning of the intranet. Tasks can be shared or delegated to different teams for updating and maintaining users and content relating to specific departments.
- Intranet bot: Functions as a virtual assistant to help the employee to get information and knowledge quickly and easily.
- Intranet Governance: Refers to systems and processes set up for the ongoing management of the intranet including its content, users, structure, and purpose.
- Intranet security: It is basically to assure the confidentiality of information and security of data on the intranet from threats, viruses, and cyberattacks, and all types of data breaches.
- Knowledge Management: A smart content repository to channelize, manage and organize the data and information stored in the organizational memory with metadata and auto-tagging features.
- Knowledge Transfer: The process by which the tacit knowledge within employees’ minds is stored, shared, referenced, and used by all employees within an organization.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning empowers the intranet to learn from the past user history and provide personalized and better recommendations.
- Mobile Friendly: A mobile-friendly intranet takes internal communication to the next level through which employees can access information and knowledge from anywhere that is just compacted into their mobile device.
- Navigation: This is the process of moving from one website to another using a web browser. It’s usually completed by following links embedded in web pages.
- News: A feature common to all intranets, news pages keep employees up to date on the latest company, team, or industry news
- Notifications: These are used to advise intranet users of any important company news alerts, system updates etc.,
- Personalization: The personalization feature of the intranet recommends highly contextual experiences to users based on their activities, roles, interests, preferences, and geo.
- Single sign on: An authentication process that allows a user to simultaneously access a number of apps with just a single logon.
- Social Intranet: The engaging social features of the intranet transform the way employees interact and collaborate with idea sharing, feedback, comment, likes, and @mentions, etc.
- Tag: A label used to classify information or data on the intranet site for search purposes.
- Tagging: Assigning tags (manually or automatically) to the information/data/people on the intranet.
- Templates: This is prebuilt definition around your business needs, (think of it as a mold) that helps you build sites quickly around your company’s brand and values.
- User Management: The ongoing management of users: including tasks for adding, enabling, disabling, and deleting users, forced and automated user password resets as well as assigning administration rights to multiple users.
- User Profiles: A social feature of the intranet, which enables users to list their interests, likes, skills and expertise in a way that can be easily discovered by other users.
- Virtual water cooler: A Virtual Water Cooler is an online version of a water cooler platform for employees to communicate and collaborate to share ideas, discuss, and break silos to improve business productivity.
Conclusion
Being new to the world of intranet or planning to transform your digital workplace. This glossary will surely take out the enigma of intranets, as the above acronyms and terminology are explained in simple and easy words. Use this glossary to understand the intranet better before planning or deploying an intranet in your organization.
Being familiar with these terms will guide and throw light to understand more about intranets and their valuable features to decide more salutary while migrating to a new world of technology.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
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