The Business Value of BizPortals 365

It’s no secret that intranets and corporate portals are expensive and time-consuming endeavors. However, new cost-effective and turnkey solutions allow businesses to have a fully featured and customized intranet at a fraction of the time and cost.

Organizations, small to Fortune 500 companies, continue to invest in intranet and similar digital workplace solutions because they understand their implicit and explicit value and the importance of improving employee productivity and engagement. In its October 2017 State of the Intranet Report, CMSWire reported that 79% of its survey respondents considered the intranet to be important, very important, or extremely important in terms of their organization’s priorities.

But still, how do these companies justify their investments in intranets? Unfortunately, there is no single formula in which you can plug in your numbers to calculate the business value of intranet. It is equally difficult to evaluate the ROI of a corporate intranet (because businesses use an intranet in different ways and for different reasons). However, following a robust intranet benchmarking strategy can help you leverage the overall business value of an intranet.

Savings from an intranet can be tangible, like time saved on finding information or cost savings by reducing the burden on your HR or IT teams, or intangible, like employee engagement or improved collaboration (though there are ways to quantify this as well).

Because we built BizPortals 365 as a fully-featured intranet that focuses on and delivers business value, it would only make sense to describe the value that it provides. Below is a summary of benefits and intranet value you gain through BizPortals 365 and impacts to your bottom-line.

Get business value of intranet with BizPortals 365

BizPortals 365 is a complete business intranet. Cloud based intranet solutions for small businesses come packed with the tools your employees need to get work done all fully built-in and integrated with your intranet. It is one solution that provides you with vast and varied functionality that you would generally get with multiple products, and it integrates with your business systems to give you a consolidated solution from where you can access all your systems, information, reports, news, and much more.

Since BizPortals 365 is on Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365), you get additional features which are tightly integrated into the product, which adds more value to your investment.

BizPortals 365 is essentially a number of different tools bundled together:

1. Document Management

allows you to store, organize, version and share documents. Enterprise search capabilities make it easy to find the right information, quickly.

2. HR and Employee Management

allows you to disperse corporate announcements, publish training videos, manage performance appraisals, and encourage employees with recognition stories, surveys, and polls.

3. Project Management

allows you to manage and track your project portfolio, generate reports, assign tasks, set deadlines, and track risks and issues as well as create custom lists for any additional project tracking needs.

4. Forms Management

offers many pre-built digital forms that you can leverage to automate your approval process. You just have to activate the forms you need and start using them.

5. Social Collaboration

allows employees to interact with each other and be a part of the corporate culture. It provides a number of tools that provide different methods of communication, such as video calling or real-time messaging. BizPortal’s small business intranet is also cost-effective so that you get more out of your investment and need not to invest in multiple products that are already integrated in BizPortals 365.

Get More out of your SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 investment

Most businesses on Microsoft Office 365 use just email, Office online (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and maybe SharePoint, leaving many useful and powerful Microsoft Office 365 tools aside. Businesses on Microsoft Office 365 typically have a low adoption of Microsoft Office 365 tools that are available to them as part of their subscription.

BizPortals 365 more fully utilizes the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem with pre-built integrations with key Microsoft Office 365 tools so that you get more out of your existing investment. It is pre-integrated with Outlook to provide automatic reminders about tasks, approvals, and other deliverables; with OneDrive to give you a consolidated view of personal, department, and project documents; and with Flow to create automated processes with tasks and documents that reside in BizPortals. These are just a few. You also have the ability to use Skype to contact users directly from the Employee Directory and use Yammer and Teams for team messaging. And all through a single sign on with Microsoft Office 365. Many businesses often are not aware of these powerful tools or how to use them. BizPortals 365 is a fully-featured intranet that solves the problem by bringing in their key functionality for their most pertinent uses (for example, Flow is already built-in and pre-integrated for your office forms and ready for you to use for other workflows you want to automate).

Additionally, SharePoint is a dominant intranet platform for businesses. However, SharePoint is not always the easiest to configure to meet many business needs and not always the simplest to use for all skill levels, especially with today’s expectations for products to deliver a modern, intuitive, and consumer-grade experience. And though SharePoint can be powerful, businesses are unable to use its full capabilities.

BizPortals, on the other hand, unleashes SharePoint by adding and extending its capabilities and improving its usability and user experience. All using best practices and allowing you to get regular updates from Microsoft and us without breaking any code (why customizing your own SharePoint can be risky). So in the end, you get better business value of intranet on Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint with BizPortals 365.

Save time, resources, and costs with a ready-to-go intranet

There are some advantages to building and configuring your own intranet. You can customize its user interface to match your requirements a 100% and you can incorporate all the unique features, functionality, and integrations your employees and business needs.

But all of this costs time and money. Time for planning, building, and updating the intranet, and cost for hiring developers (if you don’t have them in house) and using your IT resources for support and maintenance. Also, customizing an intranet fully to your needs often has diminishing returns as the intranet cost often outweighs the need and benefit.

BizPortals 365 is a turnkey, ready-made, and easiest intranet solution that meets 80% – 90% of your needs out-of-the-box. And it can be customized to meet the remaining 10%-20% at a fraction of the cost and time. It doesn’t require any special skills or IT resources to setup and maintain. It is quick to setup and is cost effective, which translates into a quick ROI with minimal investment and with minimal support and resources needed. And since the cost of the product includes regular upgrades, you essentially get cost-free technology and feature updates.

Save costs by replacing and consolidating your existing tools

Many businesses, and even teams, over the years use and accumulate a number of solutions which they use for different purposes. For example, a separate document management tool, project management software, chat and communication apps, etc. Oftentimes different tools are used for the same purpose within a team (i.e., some members of a team use one communication tool, some use another).

Apart from causing overload and being expensive, each tool will have separate logins, require staff to be trained, and need periodic maintenance and upgrades. Also, now information is not in one central place. This results in a loss of productivity, increase in costs, and more burden on your employees and IT.

As mentioned, BizPortals 365 is an industry-leading intranet solution that provides many tools and solutions built into one comprehensive business intranet allowing you to replace and consolidate your existing tools. It also integrates with other enterprise systems (CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc.)

Increase employee and business productivity

BizPortals 365 provides complete business value of intranet by automating processes, making search easy, supporting knowledge sharing, and improving employee collaboration.

BizPortals 365 provides a central and systematized repository for storing, organizing and searching through all business content. It makes all information available in one location, thus eliminating the need to move from tool to tool. And since it is well organized it quantifiably reduces time spent on searching for critical information and documents by making it extremely easy it easy to find documents, contacts, projects, forms, tasks, etc. – everything an employee needs to do work and be productive.

BizPortals 365 also provides tools to automate your business processes like approvals for forms and documents, generating reports, collecting data, providing reminders and notifications for task completion and approval requests, etc. You can also automate and bring in workflows from different systems, such as ERPs, CRMs, Sales and Finance, and generate better visibility with graphs, charts and reports. This reduces manual, time-consuming work and frees up time to perform more important, high level tasks – those which impact the bottom line. And the time saved is quantifiable.

Reduce the burden on your IT

As mentioned before, BizPortals 365 is a fully-featured & ready-to-go intranet on Microsoft Office 365. It is easy to setup and is up and running within a few days, not weeks or months. Our implementation and customer’s success team do the setup and ensure that you are up and running quickly and successfully so that your IT team doesn’t have to be involved at all. And best of all, you can access all its features and functionality as soon as it is setup.

BizPortals 365 is engineered to be simple and requiring minimal setup, no maintenance, and no training. It minimizes your overall IT dependence keeping your focus more on growing your business rather than your IT and software costs.

We also provide regular product and feature updates to ensure that your intranet is always up to date, so you don’t have to worry about having old and obsolete tools.

Reduce the burden on HR

HR is usually inundated with tasks involving employee management.

Employee management includes a lot of activities like keeping staff updated about news and policies, answering questions, planning training activities, implementing new processes, doing payroll, and managing vacation requests, etc.

BizPortals 365 gives you the tools you need to keep your staff informed, connected and engaged. It provides easy access to HR information, announcements, policies & procedures, digital forms, calendars, and training opportunities. It also provides a repository to store all HR related documents and important contacts, and allows you to manage employee performance, their goals and KPIs, and provide real-time feedback.

Conclusion

The business value of intranet is evident from the various tangible and intangible benefits.

BizPortals 365 is unlike a typical small business intranet solution that focuses solely on delivering business value. It brings in critical aspects of your business, powerful collaboration and productivity tools, and reports, executive dashboards, and workflows from your existing business systems – all in one unified experience.

It is a go-to portal to search, find, and access the information and people you need to get work done. It is where your knowledge sharing and intellectual capital reside. And since it is on Microsoft Office 365, it leverages the best and most recent technology and upgrades, which helps reduce time wasted on busy work through better organization and automation, improve workplace collaboration and communication, increase productivity, and modernize the way your business works.

If you need more information or want to see BizPortals 365 in action, please visit our website and schedule a demo, or email us at bizinfo@bizportals.com.