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Advantages and Disadvantages of Intranet

Advantages of Intranet

1) Workforce Productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface, users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make available, anytime and subject to security provisions from anywhere within the company workstations, increasing employees' ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the users.

2) Time: With intranets, organizations can make more information available to employees on a "pull" basis (i.e., employees can link to relevant information at a time which suits them) rather than being deluged indiscriminately by e- mails. 

3) Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staffs have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization. 

4) Document Handling: Web publishing allows 'cumbersome' corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily accessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web technologies.

5) Business Operations and Management: Intranets are also being used as a platform for developing and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the internetworked enterprise. 

6) Cost-Effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintaining physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition forms. 

7) Promote Common Corporate Culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the Intranet. 

8) Enhance Collaboration: With information easily accessible by all authorized users, teamwork is enabled. 

9) Cross-Platform Capability: Standards-compliant available for Windows, Mac and UNIX. web browsers are


Disadvantages of Intranets 

1) Performance Limitations: Some applications that have been well optimized for conventional and proprietary systems create a heavy system workload when migrating them to an Internet platform or merging them with Intranet presentation; this problem will reduce with enhanced Internet technologies and continuing improvements in hardware price-performance. 

2) Presentational Issues: Some people whose experience is rooted in paper presentation want web pages to look like printed equivalents, and burden the systems and their users with unnecessary and sometimes tedious "graphics", which often get in the way of the information rather than making it more accessible and attractive. This is really a learning curve matter; at some stage the users' real needs tend to come to the fore. 

3) The "me too" Syndrome: The Internet world spawns innovations on a daily or even an hourly basis. It is very difficult when a novelty first appears to know whether it is a genuine advance or a passing fad, but some systems people cannot resist the urge to use the newest capabilities. There is also a tendency for suppliers to promote new application function that will only optimize with next generation technologies, and that can cripple the two, three or four-year old systems that most people use at any particular time.

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