Improving Intranet Workflow through Web Portal Development

Corporations witnessed their intranets grow tremendously in the past two decades and web portal development is now an integral part of a complex process of developing corporate portals, designed to improve workflow and provide advanced functionality to employees and customers. During the past years, corporate portal intranet workflow has become increasingly hard to manage, while corporate IT departments were under growing pressure to optimize corporate web portals and offer personalized tools for management of data, information, and applications utilized by users. As a result, today’s web portal development increasingly involves design and implementation of software aimed at corporate users, instead of development of classic web portals intended to serve as entry points to information available on the Internet.

Workflow management within corporations offers numerous challenges to both webmasters and IT professionals, with user-generated content growing rapidly. Therefore, software vendors offer various ready to use and custom solutions to deal with the increasing amount of data, stored in numerous file formats, that is hampering the flawless workflow of business operations. In general, an intranet portal would provide access to variety of corporate applications and information stored in company databases, while personalization offered by such gateways markedly improves the overall efficiency of the system.

The corporate workflow process can be improved by integrating various software tools with an existing enterprise portal, with most corporate portals featuring built-in email, calendar, and scheduling capabilities. Furthermore, many corporate portals, designed by reputable software developers, are highly customizable and configurable, enabling users to personalize views, take advantage of custom modules, and collaborate in a multi-user environment.

Workflow automation is considered an important tool to boost overall efficiency within an enterprise, and web portal software allows creation of personal and group alerts that are triggered if a pre-defined event occurs. In addition, corporate web portals offer virtually unlimited opportunities for creation of templates that automate workflow and do not require extensive knowledge of programming languages.

Web-based portals, as a rule, can be accessed from any location and any type of computer, thus providing improved workflow management abilities, while employees are able to access and modify corporate documents from remote locations at any time. Usually, the corporate data is stored in a centralized data repository, which allows for faster indexing and searching of information and facilitates data backup procedures within an enterprise. Those factors have indirect positive impact on business performance and help reduce the overall costs of running a business.

Some authors claim that security issues might prevent intranet portals from achieving their projected effectiveness. Nevertheless, modern intranet portals utilize web-based technology and applications that allow webmasters to apply highly centralized approach toward security, monitoring and granting/revoking access permissions within seconds. Evidently, the majority of intranet portals that allow users to connect from remote locations could become victims of a targeted computer attack but this is a relatively small price to be paid for having a modern business system.

Overall, web portal development is a growing market for developers offering services to enterprises that plan to boost efficiency through creation and maintenance of intranet portals that also facilitate collaboration within larger corporations.