What Is Intranet 2.0

Conventional information sharing within an enterprise was conducted by making use of networks whose scope and access was limited within a specific area only, referred as the Intranet. However, with changing business operations and requirements, organizations are continuously working on adding a “social” layer inside their intranets. This concept of adding social elements inside the existing enterprise network is called as Intranet 2.0.

The term social networks is often confused with this concept, however this is actually not the case. Intranet 2.0 is only a new dimension in the existing concept of intranet with an add-on of a social layer instead of defining it as a whole new concept. Few elements of a corporate network like information, people, business apps are socialized within a limit of acceptance, defined by the organization itself.

Some components of Intranet 2.0 are:

• Socializing Information: With intranet 2.0, users of the network are allowed to conduct an exchange information in the local network to/from the external/internal source. This allows users to choose the section of intranet to display it on a dedicated page and share the external content through the intranet.
  
  
• E2E approach: Hierarchical structure for information processing in intranet followed B2E i.e. business to employee approach. This presents all the official documents, directories and citations in one-to-many fashion. With the 2.0 phenomena, the approach has now been elaborated to E2E i.e. employee to employee based connections. This sets up a many-to-many relationship and supports the structured work due to effective information sharing and communication process.
  
  
• Social layer in Business tools: It helps to improve the productivity of an employee by indentifying a person of help through the business tool, if the employee is stuck with some problem. This allows people to collaboratively refine the processes and workflow in order to achieve higher efficiency.

However, this model on internal network should not be confused with the concept of social networking. Social network allows people from different geographical regions to connect using a common platform while Intranet 2.0 connects the organization and some external elements, with the interaction of users supported in order to fine tune the processes.

An intranet 2.0 concept is actually:

• User-driven
• collaborative
• social
• Activity-centered

which imparts with the benefits of easier management, improved adaptability in processes and connects people for further enhancement. It provides a better usability of the information among the users by the access to both internal and external data.