The modern Age Enterprise
Today, India has the highest number of young people (10-24 year olds). This statistic is poised to be strengthened by 2020 when the average age of an Indian resident will be 29 years. Combine this fact with the massive proliferation of new age technologies (mobile, cloud, social media channels), and what you get is a very aware young Indian segment who has his/ her own voice, opinion, feedback, priorities, preferences and views.
This holds true for the corporate employee of today too. They work only on their terms of preferred flexibility, better social connectivity, and wider autonomy. They prefer a committed phase of learning and knowledge that will in turn, drive higher profitability and better revenues for the company.
As today’s youth know how to collaborate for success, it makes complete business sense to offer them a balance of context, social-work-life equation and let them augment their productivity. Social intranet software can meet the needs of today’s employees.
Engagement – Expectation vs Reality
Today’s article looks at what is the expectation versus the actual enterprise situation when it comes to enterprise intranet solutions and how the gap can be closed with social intranet solutions. The way information and knowledge is stored, shared, accessed or retrieved, needs to be made simpler so that users can build his/her own connects within the company.
Also the various aspects of an employee’s professional life (meeting, documents, mails, working files etc.) need to be available side by side their social life (personnel details, images, location, music and books).
What drives Employee Engagement Today?
All these points call for a strong social collaboration and enterprise intranet solution that offers the best of both worlds and ensures a sensible work-life balance. Such a system needs to display three key characteristics –
1. It should be extremely easy to use and navigate
2. Users should be compelled to use it without any other options available to them
3. It should be light, productive, and free of unnecessary bells and whistles
In short, it should appeal and engage for maximum success. Some of the ways employees can be hooked onto such a system if it -
1. Provides holistic management of internal and external documents
2. Allows context based personalization
3. Socializes the workplace with intuitive interface
4. Promotes self-learning
How Liferay can be used to develop Social Intranet Software
Liferay is the leading provider of Open Source enterprise portal and social collaboration software. With 1 million+ deployments and 100,000+ community members, it has been a long time favorite of the industry for smart solutions customized to your company. Its solution stack covers –
- Responsive Websites
- Intranet and Extranet
- Idea and Knowledge Management
- Collaboration portal, Ecommerce portal and other customized portals
Some of the competitive advantages offered by Liferay include –
- Ready for the demanding and scalable enterprise of today
- Lightweight and agile
- Holistic platform
- Open Source architecture offers dramatic cost efficiencies
- Seamless integration with existing IT systems
These advantages are primarily driven by these attractive set of features available on Liferay:
- Simple UI that derives maximum efficiency from employees, with a very small learning curve.
- OpenSocial Integration lets you create and deploy Open Source solutions and products based on the Liferay platform.
- It is ready for mobiles and smartphones, devices that drive Internet today
- Multi-language support for over 40 different languages ensures a worldwide and truly international coverage.
- Ensures full compatibility with Apache Solr, the Open Source standalone enterprise search server with REST-like API.
- All content and knowledge access is based solely on what the user is entitled or authorized to see or share.
- Improves social collaboration amongst enterprise users, irrespective of the geographic distance or other challenges
- Provides deeply customized content to users based on audience targeting. This bumps up the engagement level to an altogether new high
- Who does what? Where? When? How? These questions can be easily monitored using the activity tracking facility incorporated within the Liferay portal platform
Case Studies
We look at three different case studies that showcases our expertise as a leading Liferay based solutions provider:
a. Social Wall – Helps employees to get a social perception of IT. It allows social media-like message posting for various events, status updates, and link sharing. It helped boost the engagement and user satisfaction and improve retention among employees.
b. Gamification – It combines social and context with people on a game-based collaboration system. It helps to transform social activity to productive collaboration and enhance engagement.
c. Idea Management – All tools, ideas and innovative thoughts, are added to a single repository. This can be used across divisions for ideation and deliberation. It helps rapid search, quick access, and overall better utilization of time spent on the system.
CIGNEX strongly believes that Intranet should be “Intranet for People”. Hence it focuses on ‘context’, ‘social’ and ‘people’ using Liferay, a technology that is flexible, innovative, agile, offers freedom and quality to build the solution.
