Let’s Talk About the Intranet
Introduction
We can start by talking about how the Intranet platforms have evolved over time. The first Intranet systems appeared around the sixties when features like forums, news, chats, and email appeared for small groups. In 1994, these systems were officially named Intranets, around the same time, the Internet began to emerge.
In 1996, the company Frontier Technologies released Intranet Genie, software specially designed for employee communication and collaboration. Other companies followed and Jive Software and Microsoft SharePoint emerged, although they still followed a more traditional mindset working as a static page to access information and needed further reinvention.
With the rising popularity of social media and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms in the mid-2000s, the Intranet finally got the transformation it needed. The Intranet required to evolve and develop more advanced modules to answer and service to more complex business needs. It now included features like calendars, task and collaboration tools and became essential for employee engagement across companies.
Have you heard about Intranet 2.0?
Moving forward, the Intranet 2.0 brought social media integrations like blogs, user profiles for employees, reaction features and much more. Intranet solutions also started widely incorporating relevant SaaS tools, and two excellent examples of this are GSuite and Office 365.
Some Intranet solutions now have a particular market and focus on things like Human Resources management or dashboard development. Capterra, for example, is a marketplace vendor for the software industry. Meanwhile, Bitrix is a social knowledge management and collaboration platform that includes features like calendars, chats, data storage and much more.