Intranet Portal Development

Organization leverage a secure intranet for a variety of reasons including sharing internal company information, human resource functions, document management, collaborating on sales proposals and marketing campaigns, internal forecasting and reporting, automating internal workflows, and providing team sites for collaboration on special projects.  The company intranet mirrors and helps shape the culture and productivity of an organization.  With branding, creativity, and social features, the intranet has become the company water cooler with the latest and greatest information.

While each organization is unique, there are some common best practices when designing an intranet portal.  Critical decisions need to be made regarding the taxonomy, governance and customizations to match how a company is organized and functions.  It’s also important to provide a high level of self-service when it comes to content management.  Properly deploying features for search, document management and retention, and social collaboration also requires experience to ensure the site can be administered effectively.  Brainspire has used a variety of platforms to build company intranets including SharePoint / SharePoint Online, custom solutions with a variety of 3rd party plugins, and other content management systems (CMS).

Brainspire applies our Development Framework to developing custom intranet portals with an iterative approach to ensure each client’s site meets their prioritized needs and are maintainable, thriving and dynamic to support the business for years to come.   For example, a large, Denver based oil and gas exploration company hired Brainspire to customize a SharePoint intranet for their organization.  Spending some planning time up front with a few key people in the organization, Brainspire mocked up the new intranet site, paying close attention to how they were organized, their internal processes and department features including security, document management and an executive dashboard page.  The site taxonomy and governance policies were finalized and a few creative branding templates were presented for the final decision.  An initial production site was released quickly with iterative pages and features being added in the following months.  Content was migrated from various shared drives to create a vast amount of organized, searchable content.  While training sessions were provided across the company, the site was so intuitive to use that most employees opted out of the sessions.

Portal & Web Applications - FAQs

Why do companies use portals?

Aside from giving customers complete visibility of their interactions with the company, customer portals make purchasing and making payments available 24/7 to customers, and businesses have more ways to generate revenue. Portals can be used to save time on responses, solve user problems, and communicate with organizations while providing custom content and streamlined customer service. Customer analytics are also easy to gather and use based on secure information provided through portals. Given the above-mentioned benefits, it's easy to see why portal solutions can be cost-effective in the long run.

What is the business value of intranets to organizations?

In terms of business value, intranets encourage productivity and communication within an organization. Intranets, as a centralized corporate information system, help improve the productivity of employees, provide relevant content to users, and give support for remote or mobile workers while adapting to the organization's needs. Modern intranets help organizations foster communication, so teams can hold open discussions, individuals can exchange knowledge, management can stay in touch, and departments can provide updates.

What is the advantage of having extranets for an organization?

The key benefit of using extranets is that organizations can communicate and transact in a more controlled and secure environment which prioritizes privacy while providing the flexibility for the users to access business information 24 hours a day. It also reduces errors since order histories are recorded so that they can verify payment and balances, and also process orders from suppliers and distributors simultaneously.

What are the differences between intranet, extranet, portal, and internet?

Extranets facilitate communication with clients and vendors, while intranets allow employees and colleagues to collaborate in a virtual space - most of the time without the involvement of external parties. Recently, extranets have become interchangeable with portal solutions that can be integrated with third-party systems that allow for interaction with external stakeholders. All of these solutions are different from the Internet, which has the capacity to grant all users access to all resources available.

Explore Our Areas of Expertise

  • Custom Application Development
    Custom Application Development
  • Data & Business Intelligence
    Data & Business Intelligence
  • Portals & Website Applications
    Portals & Website Applications
  • Application Integration
    Application Integration
  • Mobile Development
    Mobile Development
  • Cloud Based Software Development
    Cloud Based Software Development
  • Software Security Services
    Software Security Services
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Custom Application Development

Brainspire Solutions creates full stack custom software applications that perfectly match your company’s needs. Why settle for out of the box software that doesn’t meet your exact needs when you can have a solution the precisely meets how you work. Our consultants drive the process for capturing requirements, providing an estimate, planning, architecture & development and solution delivery.

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Data & Business Intelligence

Brainspire’s business intelligence consultants work onsite with our customers to understand exactly what questions you have and what answers you are looking for. The best and fastest way to understand your needs and provide solutions is to be “in” your business, bridging the gap between your business goals and your technical systems and raw data. Seldom does the “canned” report provide the detailed insight decision makers are looking for. Brainspire will work side by side with you to provide dashboards, reports, and analytics using the latest business intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques.

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Portals & Website Applications

A company’s website is the world’s window into an organization and should accurately represent the essence of the mission, goals, culture and operations. Not only should it be appealing from a visual standpoint, it needs to function flawlessly from a usability and performance standpoint on a desktop, tablet or mobile device. Quality sites can’t simply function as digital brochures; they must attract visitors and engage new and loyal customers. This holds true for public sites, company intranets and secure extranet portals.

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Application Integration

Brainspire develops software solutions to integrate your organization’s internal, standalone applications, and your applications with key external business partners. Growing organizations tend to rely on off-the-shelf software, software as a service (SaaS) and custom built solutions to drive their business – but rarely does the chosen, out of the box, software solution work with other systems within or outside the business. This lack of cohesive integration creates manual processes that are time consuming, error prone and expensive.

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Mobile Development

Today, more users access the web through a mobile device than from a laptop or desktop computer. For this reason, it is critical that software applications are efficiently usable from a tablet or a smart phone for today’s workforce. As a custom software development firm, Brainspire leverages a variety of tools to build highly customized applications that function on countless devices. These solutions include native, hybrid and mobile web applications that can be used either when connected or not. Each business use case is unique, and the mobile requirements, and form factors, need to be considered when creating a custom mobile solution.

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Cloud Based Software Development

Cloud environments offer the greatest opportunity for modernizing software applications while reducing costs and time to market.  Brainspire Solutions has developed and deployed web applications leveraging AWS, Azure and Google Cloud environments as well as private clouds.  The ability to quickly provision identical Development, Test, Stage and Production environments ensures projects get off to a fast start in secure and scalable environments.  Developing and promoting code within a cloud environment through continuous integration reduces development time and improves quality.

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Software Security Services

Brainspire Solutions develops all software solutions leveraging industry standard best practices. This includes proven techniques to secure all applications and data. When we engage with each client we are fully aware that their business is at stake and realize the trust and expectations that are placed on our consultants when it comes to developing secure software applications.

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