Keeping up with the latest technology trends isn’t just for the IT guy. From business owners to marketing, HR and finance managers, the trickle-down effect of innovative technology can permeate an entire organization. Advancements in intranet solutions are no exception.Since their inception, intranets have been known as communication tools. Company intranet features help to connect staff and managers and simplify internal communications. However, they are now also a critical component of productivity and can foster collaboration, innovation and information discovery that touches all levels of an organization. From news feeds and blogs to calendars and customized user profiles, social intranet solutions are streamlining the way we work across departments.
Let’s take a look at two key departments common to most businesses, Marketing and Human Resources, and see how the top trends in company intranet features are reshaping their workflow.
Check out the following 27 essential features of an intranet to boost employee productivity and engagement.
1. Intuitive, Engaging Design
When it comes to essential intranet features, a clean, visually appealing UI is number one. A beautiful design will draw people into the site and motivate employees to come back for more. MyHub’s integration with Canva makes creating a beautifully designed intranet platform that ticks all the boxes for visual impact easier than ever.
Modern intranet solutions are easy to navigate and intuitive to use. And MyHub’s software is no exception. Logical, streamlined, and uncluttered, our intranet software doesn’t require extensive training. Employees can just dive right in.
2. Seamless Integration With Third-Party Tools
Gateway access to the digital workplace is the number one must-have for a modern intranet.
MyHub’s intranet software now has over 60 seamless integrations with other enterprise solutions. These include payroll systems, HR management software, Canva, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Workspace, and more.
Intranet users access these tools with a single sign-on for a smoother, streamlined experience. One key benefit is that Admins can sync user data across all platforms. One of the key benefits is that Admins can sync user data across all platforms. So, for example, if you add an employee to the payroll, they’re automatically added to MyHub, simplifying management.
3. Mobile Intranet
3. Mobile IntranetA mobile app is another key feature necessary for the modern digital workplace. It ensures that on-the-go and remote workers are kept in the loop. However, a mobile-friendly version isn’t enough. The mobile intranet must have the same rich functionality and relevant content.
With MyHub’s dedicated mobile app, all team members can access the same intranet features and company information from their mobile devices.
4. Updates Feed
MyHub’s new Facebook-like updates feed pulls together notifications from across the site and is an excellent way to engage employees. Employees stay informed and connected, from company news and shout-outs to internal communications and alerts.
Users can tag and follow colleagues and share updates for a truly social intranet experience. More than just a news feed, MyHub’s new feature strengthens team social bonds and involves everyone in the conversation.
5. Personalization Options
One great intranet feature is the extensive personalization options available in MyHub’s intranet software.
You can set up quick links directly from the homepage to the most popular pages, files, and websites. Our new My Favorites feature allows users to set their own preferences and quickly access the tools they use daily.
6. Branding
MyHub’s intranet software comes with over 60 pre-built templates. Creating pages is straightforward, saving you time and money. However, personalization also includes branding so you can put your own stamp on the intranet platform.
With MyHub, you can easily incorporate your company logo, preferred typefaces, and corporate colors for a unique intranet solution. Building a sense of community and pride in your brand helps create a positive company culture.
7. Drag-And-Drop Page Builder
You don’t need a college degree in programming to create your company intranet. MyHub’s drag-and-drop page builders are easy to use, so anyone can get involved. You can build your intranet page by dragging the content – image, text, or video – and dropping it into place. It’s as simple as that.
8. Notifications
Notifications are a crucial element of a well-designed intranet. The sooner workers are notified of vital information, the sooner they can take action. Timely, targeted notifications are essential for project task management in particular.
Furthermore, MyHub’s push notifications ensure critical updates get through immediately, maximizing your people’s efficiency and productivity.
9. Employee Directory
One of the main objectives behind every company intranet is to connect employees. And an employee directory is an excellent tool for doing just that.
Employee profiles help your people get to know each other on a more personal level beyond job titles. They showcase areas of expertise, work experience, latest projects, and personal details.
MyHub’s employee profiles support effective onboarding and collaboration. With advanced search options, workers can find internal experts in Excel or possible lunchtime gym buddies.
10. Communication Tools
All the best intranet platforms take internal communication tools center stage. Your MyHub company intranet has bucketloads of intranet features to boost internal communication.
Included as standard in our intranet software are the following tools designed for connecting employees, sharing company news, and keeping everyone up to date:
- Interactive blogs
- Updates feed
- News feed
- Instant messaging for group or private messages
- Newsletters
- File sharing
11. Intranet Calendar
A list of essential intranet features wouldn’t be complete without shared calendars. MyHub’s calendar tool allows you to create team or corporate calendars, coordinate schedules, and better manage time across teams. Open events, such as webinars, lunch and learns, or team catchups, enhance event management. Employees can glance at their day or week without opening a separate app.
12. Automated Workflows And Approvals
Another must-have intranet feature is auto workflows and approvals. MyHub’s platform includes customizable forms, allowing you to automate business processes, workflows, and approvals. This handy feature improves the speed and accuracy of daily task management.
13. Simplified Management
MyHub’s modern intranet is more than just easy to use; it’s also simple to manage. You don’t have to rely on an IT department to handle ongoing administration. Straightforward management tools ensure that any employee or manager is equipped to oversee site administration.
14. Advanced Search Functionality
Intranet search is absolutely critical for every modern intranet. After all, if users can’t quickly find information and tools when they need them most, your intranet will ultimately fail.
MyHub’s modern intranet is powered by an advanced, smart search. Users can search by keywords and phrases, tags, and authors. Quick previews and results filtering help quickly employees find company information and data.
Furthermore, the search function supports your knowledge management efforts with enhanced information discovery. The intranet presents an organized structure for managing all your company know-how, and the smart search ensures that people can find that knowledge when they need it.
15. Best Practice Security Intranet Features
Security is one of the most important intranet features. And MyHub’s security features reflect best practices in online security.
Safeguard your confidential information with MyHub’s single-sign-on, secure socket layer technology and two-way encrypted connections. In addition, you get to control who views what pages with access controls and site permissions.
16. Simple Content Management System
Content management systems allow users to create, publish, and share various forms of content.
MyHub’s intuitive content management system empowers employees and managers to create, edit, and update intranet pages without requiring extensive technical skills.
17. Social Intranet Features
Whether it’s a thumbs-up emoji, like, or a comment, MyHub’s intranet features the social elements employees know and love on Facebook, X, or LinkedIn. Workers can tag other users and @ mentions to ensure everyone is included in the conversation. Just like on LinkedIn, workers can follow threads or trending # channel discussions.
The bottom line is that your people love social features, and they are an excellent way to encourage employees to use the company’s intranet.
18. Feedback Surveys And Polls
Employee pulse surveys and polls are also must-have intranet features. They give your people a voice and platform for sharing feedback, insights, or innovations.
MyHub’s versatile surveys tool can harvest feedback on what’s important to your staff, monitor employee engagement, or get more workers involved in the conversation. For example, an intranet survey will help you uncover what employees really think about the new benefits package.
19. Intranet Multimedia
When it comes to creating engaging content, incorporating multimedia elements is critical. MyHub’s extensive image gallery capabilities and integration with Canva mean your company intranet will pack a visual punch.
Why not add videos from YouTube and Vimeo or podcasts from Spotify? Anything’s possible with your MyHub employee intranet.
20. Kudos And Recognition
Foster a positive team culture, boost morale, and recognize your star performers with our shout-out tool.
According to the Gallup-Workhuman Recognition in the Workplace report, only 40 percent of employees report receiving recognition only a few times a year or less.
Shout-outs on MyHub’s team chat or the updates feed allow for manager-to-employee and peer-to-peer recognition. A public pat on the back fosters a positive team vibe and a culture of appreciation, with far-reaching impacts on recruitment, retention, productivity, and employee engagement.
21. Intranet Analytics
Our final must-have modern intranet feature is built-in analytics. Understanding how employees interact with the platform is critical to ongoing success.
With MyHub, you can track which employees use the software and how and when they do so. Analytics provides the hard data and evidence to continuously improve your intranet based on actual usage.
22. Simple User Management
A streamlined user management process that is straightforward and easy to implement is a must. Cloud-based intranets, such as MyHub’s, offer bulk user management tools that enable you to add, delete or disable users in just a few easy steps. There’s no need for a memo to the IT department to set the user up on the system nor the interminable wait while IT gets round to it! Instead, you’ll be able to do it yourself.
Off-the-shelf packages such as SharePoint often have a convoluted process for user management making it much more time consuming and difficult to navigate. What tends to happen in this situation is that the intranet administrator keeps putting it off, often resulting in significant delay in users being deleted in particular, which could compromise the security of important corporate information.
23. Company And Team News
One of the main benefits of a company intranet is improved communication across the organization. Company and team news features will be an important means to this end. An office intranet provides the opportunity for online newsletters, news pages, and blogs, or news feeds. These can all be customized by team function, 
geographic location or by similar job positions – whatever makes sense to your business.
Communication is one of the key drivers of employee engagement and so creating opportunities for increased communication via the intranet will have a positive knock-on effect on your employees. This will be felt even more so if you also give staff the opportunity to interact with and comment on the news items.
In addition, company intranet news feeds and newsletters will help to reduce the number of emails flying around the office which is another added bonus.
24. Advanced Security
Ensuring security and data confidentiality is an essential element of any company intranet. There are two aspects to this. The first is that you will want to ensure that the right staff are accessing the right information. Ben in the Distribution Department does not need to access sensitive company pricing information. Similarly, Jenny in Marketing should not be able to view employees’ personnel files. Access to intranet content and pages can be controlled via permission rights with user names and passwords. These can be set by team function or job position – whatever is appropriate for your business.
The second aspect is that you will want to ensure that company information and data is safeguarded against hacking or interception and that your network is protected against computer viruses. The advantage of a cloud-based intranet is that these concerns are the responsibility of the hosting company. You will not have to worry about firewalls or securing your intranet servers. A hosted online intranet is subject to multiple layers of embedded security as well as a two-way SSL encrypted connection, automatic backups, and automated updates.
With an intranet hosted on a company network, all ongoing security and encryption issues, as well as backups and updates, will be your responsibility entirely. This may be a feasible option for larger companies with dedicated IT resources, but for small to medium sized enterprises, this could be a daunting prospect.
25. File And Document Storage
Most organizations find that their company intranet quickly becomes an indispensable tool for file and document storage. An online intranet provides for bulk uploading and downloading of documents, an unlimited number of files and folders and the ability to share documents internally and externally. This means that staff will be up able to access and download the most up-to-date versions of documents in an instant. This is a huge advantage over other document management tools such as Dropbox or Google Drive where uploading and downloading can waste precious time. In addition, these platforms are weak on search capabilities which means that staff can struggle to locate the right information.
The online intranet’s user-friendly customer interface coupled with advanced search options means that staff will be up and running very quickly and will easily be able to locate the information they require.
26. Collaboration
The opportunity for staff to work together on projects or tasks in a virtual project team is another important feature for a company intranet. Overcoming differences in location or time, the company intranet can enable employees to collaborate through team and company forums.
Whether it be to brainstorm ideas for a new company product or to collaborate on producing an employee wellbeing strategy, the online intranet will 
help to reduce the need to email updates and ideas across the organization. Team members will simply log into one central intranet location and can make their feedback or comments, share files, store conversations, and reference relevant data thereby promoting connectedness and efficiency.
Increasing the opportunities for collaboration across the organization is another key driver of employee engagement and will have a welcome effect in that area too.
27. Social Intranet Features
Humans are essentially social beings. Enabling interaction between staff to share ideas, work together and give constructive feedback will improve productivity and also increase levels of employee engagement and well-being. User profiles, biographies, notifications and messaging are all company intranet features that will appeal to employees’ inherent social nature. Sharing knowledge and best practice on a social intranet will increase its value as more people access it and more importantly act on it. You will see a return on investment through these improved staff connections and relationships alone. And it is online platforms that offer the best social intranet applications and functionality.
Intranet Features FAQs
What Is A Cloud Intranet?
An intranet is a cloud-based private network accessible only to employees. Think of it as a virtual workspace. All the tools team members need to communicate and collaborate effectively are available in one central location at any time, anywhere.
What Are The Benefits Of A Company Intranet Platform?
Modern intranets offer a ton of benefits. And the top benefit for most organizations is improved internal communication. Intranets are communication hubs where employees and management can easily share news, updates, and information.
Company intranets also help increase employee engagement. Easy access to the tools, resources, and information workers need daily, combined with enhanced internal communication, skyrockets employee engagement rates.
Furthermore, intranets simplify knowledge management and sharing. A centralized knowledge hub streamlines knowledge retrieval, making the organization’s collective know-how accessible with just a few clicks.
These are just some of the benefits on offer. Find out more in our post, Benefits Of An Intranet: 50 Undeniable Business Benefits You Need To Know About.
Is A Cloud-Based Intranet The Best Option?
While locally hosted corporate intranets are an option, cloud-based ones are best.
The intranet provider is responsible for backups, updates, and data security with a cloud solution. Everything is managed for you, so there are no on-site server maintenance costs or time-consuming backups to worry about.
Furthermore, cloud intranets can scale quickly and more easily grow alongside your business compared to locally hosted intranets.
A modern cloud intranet means you can access all intranet features anywhere or anytime via an internet connection. With remote and on-the-go working set to stay, the flexible modern intranet is mission-critical to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
MyHub’s Modern Intranet
You’ve landed on the perfect page if you’re looking for the right intranet platform. MyHub’s intranet software ticks all the boxes for the top 21 intranet features and offers a whole lot more.
Check out our features video, book a demo, or sign up for a 14-day free trial to find out more and get started on your intranet project today.
